How do we cope with the gulf between us and those we’ve lost? On The Land Beyond The Light, the debut full-length by Claire George, the Los-Angeles artist reckons with questions of addiction and death, while exploring new sonic vocabularies in which to house them. The result is an achingly human document of life; an album in turns ecstatic and elegiac.

While Claire’s first release, the 2018 EP Bodies of Water, was notable for its wide-eyed celestial synth-pop, The Land Beyond the Light, delves deeper into her dance and pop influences, especially “the organic-sounding, predominantly European electronic music that I love so much,” she says — house, downtempo, UK garage to name a few. The album also finds Claire foregrounding guitar and bass for the first time on a handful of tracks, expanding her sonic palette beyond the ethereal pop productions of her early work.

The Land Beyond The Light was initially conceived as a break-up record, largely inspired by a tough split Claire was going through in late 2019, however the tone and tenor of the writing process changed in the wake of another personal tragedy: the death of one of her close friends, an ex-boyfriend, as a result of substance abuse. When Claire returned to the songs she had written for the album, they took on a new meaning filtered through her grief. “So many of the songs, whether they were about him when I first wrote them or not, are about him now. And this record is for him.”

The spirit of Claire’s late friend was stamped indelibly onto the record, from the hushed and imagistic tribute “Northern Lights” to the desperate, searching “Pink Elephants.” These shared memories come in flashes and honor the small moments that populate a relationship: dancing with your best friend’s mom, lost and driving in a strange town, sharing the exact same dream. On “Northern Lights,” Claire plaintively sings “I’d give anything to turn back time / Begin again / before my life without you.” The track twinkles with the same soft aura its title suggests and, in many ways, captures the essence of Claire’s artistry that’s woven throughout The Land Beyond The Light: a multi-layered and lovingly human narrative about marveling at life and the beauty of the world around us, even in its most tragic moments.

Claire George is a songwriter, producer and vocalist originally from Seattle, WA. Following the release of Bodies of Water on Cascine in 2018, Claire toured the US & Canada with DRAMA, in addition to supporting Diane Coffee, The Midnight, and Kllo on shorter runs and headlining her own West Coast tours. In 2019 she released the stunning piano ballad “Alone, Together,” along with an alternate uptempo rework of the track produced by Josh Burgess of Yumi Zouma. A Yumi Zouma remix of her song “Where Do You Go?” was featured in the opening scene of the Netflix original film All The Bright Places in 2020. Most recently, she released a lowkey, bubbly cover of Donna Lewis’ 1996 classic “I Love You Always Forever.”