In March we included Brooklyn folk-rock performer Thelma in our best records of the month. Her stunning self-titled debut is a sleek seven-song collection that establishes her as one of the best emerging voices in 2017, dismantling expectations about what a girl alone with a guitar might sound like.
The songs on Thelma are spare and wiry enough that they possess all the intimacy of folk music, but she turns them into writhing, electric masses that couldn’t pass for acoustic if they tried. One of the standouts is “White Couches,” which the UK music site Gold Flake Paint premiered the video for yesterday. In the clip, Natasha Jacobs bathes in a tub full of milk and plays with talismanic little toy animals — mostly hippos — before the shots flash to miniature homes, furniture, and rooms decked out in the cloying all-white that she skewers in the song.
It’s a simmering video for a song that seems to prod at the perfect facades that American culture so often thrusts in our faces via the specter of capitalism. Jacobs confronts all those trappings in the clip by eventually projecting images of her own video onto the all-white models of houses, displacing their perfection with her own weird, singular vision. There’s a bit of a Sylvia Plath vibe here, the way she gets into the tub fully clothed in lace and pearls, but luckily, her existentialism isn’t veering into despair. Watch it above and stream her debut below in case you missed it last month.
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Thelma is out now via Tiny Engines. Get it here.
