Electronic artist Blue Loop announces debut album and shares title-track 'Cycles', written during cancer treatment
Cycles is due out on November 7th
London-based electronic artist Blue Loop, the moniker of Merseyside-born producer and performer Emma Hall, announces her debut album Cycles, out November 7th. Alongside the announcement, today she is sharing the album's title track.
Crafted during the treatment for stage 3 breast cancer in summer 2023, Cycles weaves together analogue synths, layered vocals, and found sound to trace a raw, non-linear path through illness, identity and transformation.
“I originally planned to take April 2023 off to complete my second EP. As it happened, the first day of that planned time was the day I was diagnosed with cancer,” says Hall. “Faced with eight cycles of chemotherapy over five months, I wondered if I could complete one song per cycle, to give some purpose to that time other than my illness. Give or take some moments where I was simply too unwell to write, that is loosely what happened and so the EP evolved into the full album Cycles.”
The result is a rich and immersive album that moves seamlessly between sonic worlds, from ambient synthscapes to brooding trip-hop and euphoric electro-pop. Vocals take centre stage for the first time in Hall’s work, lending Cycles a new emotional immediacy. “It’s the first record I’ve sung on and my voice feels quite delicate and raw,” says Hall, making the themes much more direct.
Of her new single, Hall says:
"I began writing 'Cycles' before diagnosis, when I was already in quite an existential place, just turned 30 and grappling with the idea of getting older. I felt like I was somehow at the highest point of my life, and staring down a precipice of everything changing from there. With the opening words, “midnight, the longest day”, I’m picturing that moment in midsummer up north in Scandinavia where the light doesn’t disappear – it’s beautiful, but also bittersweet, because from then on, things slowly get darker.
When I got diagnosed, the difficult truths of this song felt all the more immediate. Yet as I worked on the song during treatment, the beauty of cyclical patterns became clearer to me, and the resulting song has a sense of balance, of the universal, before the rest of the album gets stuck into more acute moments of my lived experiences of cancer, and just of being alive..!"
Hall recorded much of the album in the weeks between finishing chemotherapy and undergoing a mastectomy. “The majority of my vocals were recorded in the fortnight leading up to my mastectomy: there is a rawness and intensity to them,” she says. Found sound is scattered throughout the record – the rhythmic whir of hospital machines, voices of doctors and nurses – collected on her iPhone while in treatment.
A sense of sensuality, vulnerability and intergenerational memory threads through key tracks. “It’s hard for me to sum up Cycles, just as the experience of cancer is hard to be neat about,” Hall reflects. “There is grief, hard-won growth, and a non-linear path towards intimacy and joy. There is beauty in the journey, and there is bare, visceral pain.”
Musical reference points for Cycles include the introspective grandeur of Jenny Hval, the atmospheric grooves of Warpaint and the immersive beats of Kelly Lee Owens and HTRK. Yet at its heart, this is a record like no other - a bold, brave offering from an artist transformed.
“I am proud to say Cycles captures a good portion of my lived experience,” says Hall, “and I hope it will resonate with anyone who has found themselves in the darkness looking for the light.”
