Singer-songwriter Victoria Canal today announces details of her new EP ‘WELL WELL’, due for release on Friday 18th August via Parlophone Records.
“Company” is a warm, heartfelt ode to friendship, and explores the liminal space that exists between platonic and queer love, landing ultimately on the fact that wanting someone around matters more than any definitions: “Honestly, I love your company”.
Of the track Canal adds “I wrote “Company” about that completely calm, settled feeling around someone… not having any expectations of what the relationship means, but just appreciating any chance to share space together. A simple, wholesome love song for the gays :)”
Victoria Canal’s new EP ‘WELL WELL’ follows 2022’s ‘Elegy’ EP, a bittersweet collection of tracks created as a way to process grief. After experiencing creative and emotional catharsis, Canal is turning the lens back on herself to look inwards: grown from heartache and made with unabashed honesty, ‘WELL WELL’ finds the artist at her most vulnerable—and her most courageous.
Recent singles “Shape” and “She Walks In” were the first time she’d shared on the themes of body image and body dysmorphia, pertaining in part to her limb difference. ‘WELL WELL’ embraces the discomfort of self-analysis: “These days I’m writing mostly to confront things about myself in order to gain more of an understanding and acceptance of them,” she shares. “The phrase ‘WELL WELL’ struck me as a natural follow up to ‘Elegy’. I’ve grieved this person and now I’m dealing with what’s left,” Canal resolves, “I needed to stare myself in the face and realize that this is it. It’s a wounded rebirth.”
This EP marks an expansion for Canal, not just thematically, but also with regard to collaborators. Working with the likes of Sean Carey (Bon Iver), Grammy winners Madison Cunningham and Jacob Collier and Tony Berg helped push the musician creatively in a way she’s never experienced before. “In past projects I’ve been on my own or working with my buddies, which is amazing,” she remarks, “But this time I got to work with some of my heroes while also holding my own in the studio.” The artist attributes ‘WELL WELL’’s cohesive sound to her clear vision and the fact that everything was mixed at Sound City by veteran engineer Joseph Lorge (Blake Mills, Perfume Genius, Jon Batiste).
24 year-old singer, songwriter, producer and activist Victoria Canal makes soul-stirring, emotive pop music. Born in Munich, Spanish-American Canal says her international upbringing fostered her love for a nomadic life in music. A proud “third culture kid,” she lived everywhere from Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, and Dubai to Atlanta, New York, and Forth Worth, and is proud of her identity as a queer, disabled, mixed-heritage woman, which fuels much of her activism.
Last year Canal released her EP Elegy, which delicately dealt with themes of grief and death, and featured the single ‘swan song’, which Chris Martin of Coldplay hailed as ‘one of the best songs ever written’. She performed ‘swan song‘ on the recent series of Later… with Jools Holland, appearing alongside the likes of Self Esteem and The 1975.
Canal also made her television acting debut in acclaimed Apple TV+ anthology series Little America, starring in the season’s moving episode The Indoor Arm as a Spanish-speaking Salvadorian refugee in the 80s who comes to America to live with her sister. She also wrote ‘Bring It On’, the theme song for Apple TV+ series Best Foot Forward, based on the book by Paralympic skier Josh Sundquist.
You can see her live at Manchester’s Deaf Institute on 5th Sept
