NEVE

Barrie, Ontario · b. 2002 · FARA Records

NEVE (Neve Lachance, b. 17 March 2002, Barrie, Ontario — an hour north of Toronto) grew up in a real city of a hundred and fifty thousand people that most of Ontario experiences as somewhere you drive past on the way to somewhere else. Everything she wanted to be near happened ninety minutes south and she watched almost all of it on a phone — not a hard-luck story, and she doesn't tell it as one; it's simply the condition, shared by an enormous number of people, of being close enough to see a scene and too far to be in it. This record is about that condition and she didn't have to research it. She found her way in through livestreams, mostly — she's watched more festival sets than she's attended by a factor of several hundred, learned toplines by singing over them alone in a bedroom, and started writing at nineteen because she'd run out of other people's songs to sing.

Soft, breathy and close, with almost no push in it — she sings a euphoric chorus at conversational volume and lets the production do the lifting, which is the current register of this genre and suits a lyric that's fundamentally uncertain. Clean tone, no runs, a slight flatness in the phrasing that reads as sincerity rather than as limitation. She writes the toplines and the words and has a very good instinct for putting the doubt in the pre-chorus rather than in the hook. Her influences run the warm, emotional end of melodic house and indie dance — the records that sound enormous and are actually quite sad — plus a decade of festival livestreams, which she counts as an influence rather than as a substitute for one. Behind that, the very specific Canadian pop tradition of writing about somewhere else.

Dry and self-aware and completely unromantic about any of it. She'll tell you exactly how many sets she's watched from a bedroom and find it funnier than you do. Live she barely moves, which is consistent — she's the person in this song and she's not going to pretend otherwise. She's watched several hundred festival sets on a livestream and been to four in person, and knows the exact numbers, offering them unprompted. She puts the doubt in the pre-chorus and never in the hook — the only rule she has, and it's a good one. Watchful, funny, unbothered.