Led by 19-year-old Jana Bahrich, the fiery emo duo tackle big existential questions and turbulent emotions in four short songs that throw off promising sparks of brilliance.
On their meditative new EP, Wading, Francis of Delirium confronts grief, acceptance, isolation, identity, change, failure, and self actualization—all within the confines of four short songs. Frontwoman Jana Bahrich and drummer Chris Hewett cast an equally wide net last June on their first EP, All Change, but it felt more like a pilot run. Not everything landed, but they generated sparks of brilliance that catch fire on their more ambitious and cohesive follow-up.
Growing up the child of parents that taught overseas, the now-19-year-old Bahrich shuffled around as she grew up, living in Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland before anchoring in the verdant and frankly magical-looking country of Luxembourg. Its capital, Luxembourg City, is supposedly one of the top 20 “highest quality of life” places to live, so it’s comforting to know that even in a place so idyllic, the human condition remains the same.
Wading feels like a rage room, where Bahrich bounces between guitar freakouts and poised harmonies in a quiet-loud-quiet-loud formula. We get a glimpse of her internal monologue as she approaches post-adolescence. Her delivery ricochets over long-winded verses as she works herself to the point of exhaustion. Whispering, screaming, speak-singing, her voice is perpetually sparring with itself as she spins pain into anthemic and invariably catchy “sad angry” music. Whenever Bahrich isn’t center stage, Hewett delivers punchy rhythms much like The National’s Bryan Devendorf. The resulting sound is raw and effective.
Bahrich gives these songs everything, but whenever she leaves herself too unguarded, her safeguards trigger in the form of a scream or sudden change of pitch. On the standout track, “Let It All Go,” a linear story about being at a party with her partner at the relationship’s tipping point, her words begin to race, her voice hurtling towards Wading’s powerful apex. What follows is a fleeting moment of acceptance and clarity; “Let it all go, I’ll let it all go,” she echoes in a devastating refrain. The good ol’ Freudian id punches back protectively with the plaintive howl of her next line: “But aren’t you tired of being alone?”
All of the tracks deal with some sort of contemplation, whether it’s working through the end of a relationship (“Let It All Go”), wrestling with different versions of oneself (“Cause every second is a moment I’m fighting within every part of me” on “Red”) or self-gaslighting (“What if I should be losing everything? What if I’m to blame?” on “I Think I’m Losing”). As a lot of us have started to realize this past year, when you’re abruptly plucked out of your environment, it’s easy to lose sight of your own identity, overthinking how much of it was tied to friends, partners, and acquaintances to begin with. Who are we once those interactions disappear, or shift into new ones? Wading may not hold all of the answers, but it starts by asking the right questions. Running just over 14 minutes, the EP is short enough to digest during a walk around the block, but it feels like the blueprint for something grand.
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