After releasing her debut EP The Fuzz back in 2018, Ontario based artist Ellis has been steadily working on her full-length debut, which was produced by Jake Aron. “Into The Trees” is the final single taken from her debut album, born again, which also dropped today.

Stepping away from the confines of the dream-pop genre that tinged The Fuzz, “Into The Trees” displays a more nuanced edge, a calm assurance to take its time. There’s a haunting melancholic edge born from the echoing of the guitars, accompanied by yearning lyrics such as “I’m not sure I’m what you bargained for”.

This pining is also displayed in the multiple shifts in the song, this ever-changing beast that is “Into The Trees”. It’s almost as if the structure of the song itself is mirroring what the lyrics describe as trying to strike the balance between being yourself and also metamorphosing to fit in with what the other person “bargained for”.

Ellis has crafted a kind of magic. The one minute thirty mark sees a lilting guitar riff appear, the bass turns up and it becomes more reflective and less moping in tone. The change in tempo then confers the song an oddly uplifting air. Each minute of the song thereafter reveals another layer, a swirling mass that astonishingly creates movement and textures, turning the track from a straight-up emo dream-pop ballad into something living and transformative.

Then, in the final thirty seconds, the stakes are raised into an explosion of pure catharsis, offering an epiphanic ending. It’s both ecstatic and heartbreaking, it’s pure drive and anger and heartache.

“Into The Trees” is a track of pure buildup. The momentum it gathers as it progresses is just as delightful as the climax itself. Whilst it’s serpentine in its delivery and it meanders with precision, it’s not until you’re amidst the clattering drums and the shock of the heavy guitars that you realise you were floating along, completely under Ellis’s spell.

Watch the accompanying animation, courtesy of director Andrew Friesen, and get the album via Bandcamp below.

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Following up to the previously released singles “Fall Apart,” “Embarrassing,” and “March 13,” Ellis has just unveiled another song from the 10-track project. Announcing a new personal cycle, “saturn return” combines dreamy arrangements and redemptive lyrics. “Saturn Return is an astrological term for the time in your life where Saturn literally returns to the same place in it’s orbit that it was the moment you were born,” she detailed. “The first one happens in your late twenties, and it’s a time of radical transformation. I am in mine now and have been feeling it big time! I wrote this record while reflecting on all the ways my life is changing, reconciling things from the past and making space to move forward.” The track comes with a Michael Pugacewicz-directed video in which the Canadian artist faces her young self and closes this chapter like if she was… born again.

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