'I'm Already Over It': Spellling on Restless Creativity, 'Portrait of My Heart' and a First UK Tour
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
Written by Matt Mills
Photo: Stephanie Pia
Spellling’s passion for making music is literally a part of her. When Chrystia Cabral video calls me from her living room in Oakland, the singer-songwriter’s piano is in the background to her left. Inside of it is an engraving of a flower. She doesn’t know who left it there but, after years of playing the instrument, she got the symbol tattooed on her throat — as close to her vocal cords as she could. “My poor mom was like, ‘What are you doing?’” she says with a laugh. “But it felt like a sigil: a way to honour and solidify the path I set for myself. I feel like I found my voice and found a lot of freedom through having this thing to dedicate my life to.”
Cabral has been operating under the Spellling pseudonym since 2015, and during that time her love of creating has already yielded five studio albums. Almost all of them are wildly different. Her newest, this year’s ‘Portrait of My Heart’, is a love letter to tight-knit ‘90s grunge and indie, with the influence of Alice in Chains, R.E.M. and No Doubt audible across its 11 tracks. It’s a stark departure from her previous offering of original material, 2021’s ‘The Turning Wheel’, which was a free-flowing conglomeration of neo-soul, psychedelia, classical and more that earned critical acclaim and made her a cult star.
I ask Cabral if, given her genre-hopping ways and prolific recording schedule, she’s the kind of person who easily gets bored. “It’s interesting that you say that,” she responds. “I was an only child. I grew up spending a lot of time alone and can easily entertain myself. But, when it comes to the music that I make, I do feel a sense of restlessness. Once I’m done with something, I’m already over it. I’m onto the next thing.”
Cabral was raised to the north in Sacramento. Her dad “was curious about not just mainstream music, but whatever he could find around him”. Her mother, meanwhile, played R&B, soul and Barry White in the house. She says she was a “distractible” child who felt the urge to be an artist from an early age but kept it repressed. “I just saw it as something very far away,” she explains. “Something on TV.”
That changed at the age of 19. Cabral moved to the Bay Area to go to community college, where she saw many experimental grassroots artists in local venues. “I was like, ‘Oh, I have free will!’” she says. “In Oakland, in particular, our music scene is very observant. There’s so much genre-bending. The starting point for me as an artist was seeing everybody around me totally disregard parameters. I could just make the things I thought sounded good and not worry about fitting in.”
While starting her music career, Cabral studied and worked as a substitute art teacher at an elementary school. She describes it as a “safety net” that supported her true passion but admits that, ever the musician, she got a kick out of the performative aspects of engaging an audience of young children. “It felt very much like ‘The Tia Show’ when it was time to teach,” she giggles. “Of course, there’s a curriculum and things to absorb but, at that age, so much of it is about, like, ‘How do we relate to each other?’ The basics, the fundamentals: sharing, storytelling. Teaching at that age is about creating a world.”
Cabral could have easily stayed in that safe position while pursuing music on the side. However, her need to make stuff was amplified further in 2013, when her close friend and college roommate suddenly passed away. “It shook up my whole life,” she remembers. “He was an artist. He made clothes and had this really beautiful, flamboyant personality, and he pursued his art like, ‘No one’s gonna tell me not to do what I’m doing!’”
The early death of such a determined person inspired Cabral “not to take the wrong risk” and she fully dedicated herself to her craft. Within a week, she had abandoned teaching and moved back in with her parents. She branded herself as Spellling due to a mix of disliking her birth name and a feeling the word sounded quasi-mystical.
Spellling’s debut, the slow-paced synth outing ‘Pantheon of Me’, was self-released in 2017. Two years later, Cabral signed with Sacred Bones and put out the similarly lo-fi follow-up ‘Mazy Fly’. Her big break didn’t come until ‘The Turning Wheel’. The album was plucked from relative obscurity by famed YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano, who reviewed it and gave it an extremely rare 10-out-of-10 score. “It was like day and night,” Cabral says of her life before and after Fantano’s video, which boasts 680,000 views at time of writing. “Right after that review came out, there was a massive following — all of this online attention that I had never had before.”
The demand led to Cabral corralling a live band and, in a career first, touring to promote a release. After playing in mainland Europe and across North America for a year, the lineup entered the studio to make ‘Spellling and the Mystery School’: an album that featured re-recordings of Cabral’s prior works in bolder rock ‘n’ roll forms.
Though the songs on ‘Portrait…’ may seem like something of a continuation of ‘Mystery School’, this album is a diverse affair that turns 90s influences into something new. The title track is a no-nonsense pop-rocker that would have topped charts if we lived in a just world, whereas Drain features Braxton Marcellous of recently disbanded hardcore band Zulu, who plays a shockingly hard sludge metal riff.
I begin to ask whether the immediate songwriting on ‘Portrait…’ is a deliberate “response” to the dreamier atmosphere of ‘The Turning Wheel’, but I haven’t even finished when Cabral shakes her head. “There was a point in the process of the record where I noticed that it could be cool to make the songs lean more towards rock,” she says. “But, if I were to show you the demos in their original state, they exist in this non-definitive sort of genre. [The title track] was the first song and I wrote it on piano.”
‘Portrait…’ came out in late March and, as we talk in early April, Cabral is preparing to tour off the back of it. The run of shows will include her first performances in the UK in June, beginning in Bristol before swinging through Manchester, London and Brighton. “I really should have come over for ‘The Turning Wheel’,” she admits. “I wanted to make that happen. But there were just too many factors, including COVID and not anticipating the momentum that the album would have.”
“I feel like I’ve evolved a lot and I feel like I can handle all the unpredictable factors of touring in a different place now,” she adds. “I needed to get some touring under my belt here in the States to understand where my strengths are.”
Live shows aren’t the only thing on Cabral’s mind right now. Again proving her status as a restless creative, she reveals that she’s already thinking about her next album, just days after her current one came out. “I really want to be recording, I really want to be writing new material,” she states. “I don’t know what I have to say, but I know I can feel it. It’s really hard to put into words where the motivation comes from.”
It almost doesn’t matter. More significant is that, in Spellling, the world has a tour-de-force who can’t stop experimenting. Before signing off from our call, Cabral says: “What I admire most in music is when it makes you go, ‘This is something that could never be done by someone else.’” That’s exactly what she does.
Spellling Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Mon June 09 2025 - BRISTOL Exchange
Tue June 10 2025 - MANCHESTER YES (The Pink Room)
Wed June 11 2025 - LONDON Village Underground
Thu June 12 2025 - BRIGHTON DUST
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