“Who is The Keeper?” The question comes from Amelia Wellers, visionary artist behind Aerhart. “And what are they keeping?” Painted as a playful form of Eros on the cover of the album, a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, she beckons us to consider. Mysticism, mythologies and a cryptic whimsy adorn the music of Aerhart, a project that metamorphs Wellers’ decades of choral, classical, and operatic training into vibrant electronic indie pop.
Wellers created her first album in partnership with Brooklyn-based producer Kyle Joseph. Aptly titled WALLFLOWER, she released it in 2021, finally ready to invite the interaction with an external world that could consecrate the abstract of her imagination. Performing as Aerhart, Wellers grew as a songwriter, but also as a person. “I was finding myself and my artist through the project. Or maybe more accurately, I was choosing who I wanted to be.”
If WALLFLOWER, was about building a vessel and filling it, Wellers’ upcoming follow-up The Keeper (due out May 30th) is about moving it forward. Each song is its own conversation with self, another confrontation with a fork in the road, a decision about which way to go.
Aerhart’s sound invokes cinematic melancholy and lush and expansive experimentation, calling comparisons from Enya to Lana Del Rey, Weyes Blood to Caroline Polachek. Wellers’ technical background informs her approach—not in rigidity but in an attention to texture, time, and movement. In school, Wellers developed the curriculum and taught an undergraduate course called “Music and Architecture: Sound and the Built Environment,” where she examined physical spaces as conduits for sound, learning to calculate reverb by hand and analyzed soundscapes. That deep, nuanced knowledge shines through The Keeper, as does Wellers’ fascination with contrasts—intimate and vast, delicate and forceful, organic and electronic, refined and raw.
The album is full of counterparts. Birth and death. Secrets and honesty. Loving and letting go. “Sometimes peace comes from accepting the cycle of things,” Wellers says. “But sometimes it comes from choosing which parts to not accept quietly.”
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the standout track “Kingdom Come,” a moody, beat-driven work of art-pop that showcases Wellers’ soulful, airy vocals. Backed by a soundtrack that borders on chillwave and EDM with slick beats and synths, Wellers lays out an impressive vocal performance that is dynamic and compelling.
Wellers describes the inspiration behind the tune:
When love is abandoned, we regain our footing, then rebuild the foundation of what we need to feel loved. But we can’t keep building castles to find out they’re made of sand. We need a sign that this love is worth building a kingdom for, and that this lover will strengthen its foundation. I’m yours if you let me in.
I have a few songs that uncannily play themselves out in my life soon after I’ve written them. I’m acutely in a rebuilding phase these days; the recognition of an absence, thumping trepidation of hope, and acknowledgement of its potential downfall are really hitting home. The love is clear, we ask for the sign, and the answer hangs in the air.
LISTEN:
