Some artists build songs like houses. L’ESPIRAL builds entire dreamscapes. With their latest release, ‘Mr. Babylon’, the duo offers a cinematic descent into memory, grief, and the strange afterlife of desire.
This isn’t breakup music in the typical sense. Instead of fixating on the crash, ‘Mr. Babylon’ walks slowly through the garden growing in its aftermath. You can hear it in every detail: the hushed ache in Zoë Bleu’s vocal delivery, the slow-burn pulse of Reggie Debris’ instrumental world-building- a fusion of spectral pop and moody atmospherics that unfolds like a half-forgotten dream.
What sets this apart is the lyricism. Her words feel conjured from somewhere just beneath the surface of consciousness, drifting between poetic clarity and mythic abstraction. It’s a voice that pulls you into the story and dares you to sit with its silence.
Musically, ‘Mr. Babylon’ leans into the gothic shimmer of Cocteau Twins and the emotional density of PJ Harvey, but the result is fully their own. It’s soft and sharp all at once- velvet and blade. The production leaves room for stillness, for atmosphere to breathe. Every note feels deliberate, and every pause, devastating.
This single continues a thread that’s been developing since their striking cover of ‘Troy’- a reinterpretation that didn’t merely honour its source, but stood toe-to-toe with it in intensity and reverence. If that cover was an invocation, ‘Mr. Babylon’ is a slow ritual of release.
What’s most powerful is how unafraid L’ESPIRAL is to dwell in the spaces most artists rush past- memory, regret, the soft places where pain lives but also transforms. There’s no desperate resolution here. Just a quiet truth: that even in loss, there’s something blooming.
With a full-length album on the horizon, ‘Mr. Babylon’ makes one thing clear- L’ESPIRAL are building a mythology of feeling, track by track, with aching precision.