Spellling’s pop ballads embrace rock’s most decadent side

Tia Cabral is in her ballad era. The Oakland-based artist, who makes music as Spellling, began experimenting with songwriting in 2016, after a friend brought her a MicroKORG synth to fiddle with. An English-lit major with a poet’s soul, she started by making song fragments and vocal loops (which she described as “sound poems” in a 2023 interview with the Synth History blog) and quickly learned to transform them into entire pieces without the help of a band. 

By 2019, Cabral had self-released an entire record made with a MicroKORG. The curious textural experiments on Pantheon of Me established her as a promising new talent in art-pop, unconstrained by strict songwriting or genre conventions. Each of the four albums she’s released since has ventured into new territory, showcasing her love of genres as diverse as neosoul and classic postpunk while retaining some of the instinctual wonder that made Pantheon of Me so distinctive. 

On her latest full-length, last month’s Portrait of My Heart (Sacred Bones), Cabral puts her own spin on Meat Loaf–style decadence, though it’s not apparent right away. Opener “Portrait of My Heart” is a reliable alt-rock tune about alienation, but by track three (“Alibi”) the pop-punk riffs and rage are flowing. “Destiny Arrives” sounds like it could’ve been the coolest theme song for an animated 90s Disney movie, and “Ammunition,” which hits at the record’s midway point, goes all in on the clean-piano-plus-blistering-guitar-solo formula that made “November Rain” so lethal. 

While plenty of music critics have made appropriate fanfare for the 90s rock nods on Portrait, its moments influenced by 90s R&B—especially in Cabral’s vocals—often go overlooked, despite giving the record a lot of its dimension. Cabral proudly wears her inspirations on her sleeve, but she can cut up and repurpose her reference materials to keep herself sounding fresh. More than anything, Portrait of My Heart reveals Cabral’s deep, abiding love for music.

Spellling Smut open. Tue 5/13, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $30, $25 in advance, 18+