Ghent-based singer-songwriter and composer Nele De Gussem (Uma Chine) has announced her debut solo album The Loom Of Longing, out February 7 2025 on Viernulvier Records.

De Gussem has delivered a sensational album of mystic pop, psychedelic ambiance and pulsating electronica. To shape her divine harmonic universe, she has a preoccupation with soundscaping that involves using her sensual voice and electronic/analog instruments as a sort of palette of rich textures where she’s the auteur, as opposed to the cog in a bigger machine as she’s been with her band, Uma Chine.

The cracking first single from the album - ‘Wonder’ - is also released today and comes with an eye-popping music video by hotly-tipped Belgian visual artist Victor Verhelst (STROOM). Verhelst crafts a unique collage of 90s computer game-inspired motion graphics, which has an otherworldly appeal and highly symbiotic relationship with the music. Rarely do the marriage of visual and musical arts come together so invitingly.

Of the single’s feel, Nele De Gussem says: “‘Wonder’ is about the paradoxical situation of being at a party and finding stillness within. Introspection amid exuberance; tranquillity amid joy. It’s like being swept away by a rush of light - feeling our head in the clouds - but feeling equal magic in the corporeal self.”

‘Sheer otherworldly beauty’: about the album…

‘Wonder’ - and the single’s exploration of holistic consciousness - fits within The Loom of Longing album’s broader theme of desire. De Gussem says she has been acting on her desires more brazenly than ever whilst writing the album, resulting in her most unfiltered emotional expression to-date.

“I think that with a lot of decisions in life you come to a point where you have to choose between fear - or courage and desire,” says the artist. “It’s a harder, more courageous and brutal path to take because of the time spent in hope and longing, but surrendering to its magnetic pull yields rewards. This album celebrates having found desire as a compass and as a medicine to quell fear, holding back and keeping silent. When I was younger, I found it difficult to speak, express myself or even recognize what I wanted.”

Fortunately, for us listeners, De Gussem is able to transpose this dopamine hit we all feel in surrendering to our desire - and the peaks and troughs that come with the territory - and express it with immense fluency musically. Subsequently, The Loom of Longing is as compelling and as atmospheric as left field pop/electronica gets in the 2020’s. It’s an album that can be filed alongside the likes of Julia Holter, Cosmo Sheldrake and Thom Yorke in terms of sheer otherworldly beauty.

De Gussem’s gear of choice as a solo artist consists of a slew of analog and digital electronic music gear that can be packed down to a couple of suitcases, but it sounds like she’s pulling from an infinite universe. By layering rhythms, textures, pitches, and varying tempos and lengths - and through the use of unconventional recording techniques such as tape, cassettes, and manually piecing together recordings and samples - she stitches a multitude of motifs, inviting the listener to perceive them in ever-shifting ways.