HELENA DELAND

Eternity Shrugs

Eternity Shrugs begins with an act of trespass. At a party, Helena Deland slips toward the edge of the room; no one sees her as she eyes a notebook which belongs to the party’s host. She insists she would never read it, then lets herself imagine being caught, only to learn that its owner had wanted to be discovered all along.

Deland occupies both sides of the fantasy: the person reading and the person longing to be read. The journal becomes a mirror of songwriting: private processing made public and left to the interpretations of strangers. Across eleven intimate scenes, the album traces the desire to see into another person’s inner life and to be seen in return.

Eternity Shrugs, Deland’s third solo album, follows the electronic density of Someone New (2020) and the grief-shadowed folk of Goodnight Summerland (2023). Across them, the Montreal songwriter has traced what passes, often unnoticed, between people. Here, she asks how those fleeting exchanges can become something that lasts.

Recorded in rural Quebec in bursts over four seasons, Eternity Shrugs was produced by Deland with longtime bandmates Francis Ledoux and Alexandre Larin, who also engineered and mixed it, as well as musicians Lysandre Ménard and Cedric Martel who have played with the band for years. Piano, bass, organ, Rhodes, viola, and woodwinds gather around Deland’s voice and guitar in patient arrangements anchored by finely textured percussion; the songs can feel spare one moment and subtly ornate the next.

Nearing the record’s centre, the piano-lit “Room” concerns an external voice addressing Deland in the second person, a recurring device through which the album’s characters seem to speak back to their author. Deland’s close, unhurried delivery and the song’s suspended hush faintly recall Sibylle Baier or Jessica Pratt. Denial keeps her moving while intuition gathers like a premonition. She runs toward a space where she might process what is happening, asking an imagined companion to name it.

In “Great Dreams,” over five-minutes, the album blooms around a meteor shower, an easy silence, and a body listening with all its senses. Its 1960s-era strings and bass line widen into cinema, with a glance toward Lee Hazlewood, while Montreal contemporary Cindy Lee flickers at the edge of the frame. Deland imagines the album’s palette in browns: wood, leather, smoke. Warm and inhabited, the music never entirely settles.

Throughout Eternity Shrugs, intimacy is a destination as well as a restless method of interpretation. Its narrator reads gestures, messages, works of art and silences, searching to make her own experience legible. These attempts to find meaning are also attempts to make something last. Art and romance ask Deland to place what is private in another person’s hands, even as neither can deliver permanence.

Then comes “Where I Stand,” the album’s hushed pivot and the source of its title. A band plays to no one; Deland dances alone; eternity itself appears and spins her effortlessly. When she reaches for an answer, however, eternity merely shrugs and hangs up. The infinite becomes a missed call: cosmic, funny, and painfully true.

The song took shape after Deland saw Lucinda Williams perform “Fruits of My Labor” at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in July of 2024. Williams’s song met her with tremendous clarity, making her own direction feel visible for a night. Eternity Shrugs holds on to that flash while ultimately knowing that it can’t last forever.

The final song, “Here on the Page,” returns to the album’s opening image: the furtive notebook. Deland wonders what becomes of experience if it is not set down in words. Built from piano, guitar, pads, and noise, the song moves with a dirge-like gravity, suggesting that even words committed to paper remain vulnerable to time. Deland leaves these private traces in public anyway, to hold what is passing, and to see who might meet her there.

Eternity Shrugs is out with Chivi Chivi on January 22nd, 2027.