Her secret lies behind his broken eyes.
You carry her all alone inside of you.
And you’re still searching for some validation.
Why only find frustration? Well, I don’t know.
Sometimes the body gets treated like evidence. People inspect it, name it, assign meaning to it, and then act surprised when the person living inside has a different account of who they are. When a person spends enough years absorbing that scrutiny, it can become difficult to tell where somebody else’s judgment ends and their own voice begins. That confusion can be especially brutal for a trans person, because acceptance may require untangling identity from shame that was handed to them before they had the language to reject it.
Novelí’s debut single, Mind or Body, begins from inside that argument. The longtime underground DJ, who describes her hybrid of darkwave, synthpop, old-school EBM, Latin freestyle, and related electronic strains as “Maximal Wave,” builds the track from stern machine rhythms, synthetic bass pressure, and melodies that carry the extravagant romanticism of early electronic pop. You can hear traces of Dead or Alive and Depeche Mode in its architecture, alongside the severe physicality of Anhalt EBM and the strange emotional immediacy of a forgotten 1990s game soundtrack playing through cheap speakers in an empty room.
Then Novelí opens her mouth. Her register brings Andrew Eldritch and Peter Murphy immediately to mind, though the visual contradiction is part of the pleasure. Novelí embraces femme-fatale glamour while singing in a bass voice she once regarded as incompatible with womanhood. Her own explanation says everything: “I used to think my voice was too deep for a woman, but I’ve grown to think there’s something kind of sickening about being a bass singer who looks like a femme fatale,”
Mind or Body gets its emotional voltage through lyrics that move through secrecy, frustration, loneliness, scrutiny, and the weary confusion that comes from being forced to interrogate your own existence over and over. The physical body and social expectation become tangled until even the source of pain becomes hard to locate. Novelí leaves room for uncertainty, but she also introduces a far more dangerous possibility: what if the part of yourself you were taught to hate could become beloved?
“Not everyone can relate to the trans experience, but I think almost everyone can relate to feeling like something about you is socially unacceptable, so you feel like you have to carry it alone,” she says. “And ideally, you eventually figure out how to live with it and even embrace it. It’s about entertaining even the tiniest possibility that you can fall in love with the parts of yourself you’ve been hating for a long time.”
Daniel Foerste’s accompanying video pushes that idea into religious horror. Novelí appears as a sacrificial figure who eventually becomes a living altar, drawing on Bauhaus, Siouxsie Sioux, Sopor Aeternus, Giallo, Butoh, religious imagery, and vaporwave unreality. “Society sees trans bodies as something horrific, and I wanted to capture that. We’re so often scapegoated, but I also wanted to show that there can be something divine in us, something sacred.”
Watch the video for Mind or Body below:
Released on the Autumn Equinox and destined for the forthcoming album Transfigure, “Mind or Body” makes transformation feel messy, theatrical, frightening, sensual, and spiritually charged. Novelí has begun her recording career by turning the courtroom inside her head into a nightclub, then placing the accused behind the microphone.
Novelí says the sales will support her gender-affirming care and sustain her artistic practice. Listen to Mind or Body below and order the single here.
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The post “You Carry Her All Alone” — Novelí Turns Self-Discovery Into Darkwave Devotion in Video for Trans Anthem “Mind or Body” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
