Camille Delean sketches midsummer discomfort with anxious new single “Fault Line (Late July)”

Montreal-based singer-songwriter Camille Delean today introduces her new album Cold House Burning with its first single “Fault Line (Late July)”. From its opening instrumental the track is immediately intriguing, the rhythm section a distinctly Western-flavoured pulse furnished with sparse piano and a lap steel’s quiet howl.

“Fault Line (Late July)” is flushed with midsummer heat - the oppressive kind - its movements drowsy and unhurried under the weighty shimmer of Delean’s voice. Her vocal melodies are enchanting, more so when underpinned by a low, unobtrusive harmony as the song swells into a subtle chorus.

The track’s lyrics sketch an anxious balancing act, the discomfort of an unsteady mental state. “Don’t let me freeze on a fault line,” she sings; “I don’t trust the ground”. And then a warning, likely to herself: “Watch your footing on the lines or you’re going down”. But in each chorus she notes the presence of the sun; perhaps in all its July strength it sheds light on treacherous ground, a steady and certain beacon, some small relief.

Delean describes the track as “a hyper-anxious way of moving through the world. Full of warnings, as if being alive meant getting away with something. A snapshot of a state of mind: a good place to visit, but not to linger.”