GFTF (real name Megan Helbig) is a Pittsburgh electro-pop artist who released her debut album, A Call To Innocence, last week.
The music of A Call To Innocence exists in a dimly lit room whose walls are adorned with day-glo paint and geometric shapes made of neon tubing. Colored lights blink and strobe on the ceiling. It’s always 3 AM, and people are dancing in slow motion. “Heavy” is the best example of the GFTF sound; downtempo synths pulse and flicker in step with a choppy beat, while Helbig’s pellucid voice takes center stage, coiling itself, siren-like, around the song’s central melody. Her vocals are strikingly pure, to the point where they sound almost new-age, like if Enya had decided to become a synthster. Helbig tags her music as dream pop, and I can definitely hear in her voice shades of Bel Canto‘s Anneli Drecker, another genre frontwoman whose voice was situated as the music’s central feature rather than as a blurry accent piece. Helbig, standing in a corner of her neon room, sings to someone’s silhouette, “Watching you move across the room/I see you watching me […] “Slowly we’re drawn close together/Our touch is electric.” Lots of gazing into eyes and meaningful silences ensue, but Helbig hints that they may be “ill-fated lovers.” “Heavy” perfectly captures that infinite moment of first contact, when anything is possible and nothing is likely.
Check out the rest of A Call To Innocence and follow GFTF on social media
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