ALEJANDRA Deheza says she’ll never forget the day she met Benjamin Curtis in 2004.
The pair went on to form School of Seven Bells and after Alejandra’s twin sister Claudia left in 2010, the band became a two-piece.
Tragically, Benjamin was diagnosed with a rare form of T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma and died in December 2013 aged just 35.
Now the final Seven Bells album – SVIIB, which was written in 2012 – has just been released. Alejandra says she never considered shelving it after her bandmate passed away.
“There was never one moment when I thought it wouldn’t come out. It was a huge priority of mine. I just had to get my s**t together first and make sure I was focussed on it.”
Alejandra posted a message on the homepage of the band’s website, ahead of the album’s release last month: “Benjamin and I wrote this record during a tour break in 2012. It was one of the most creative and inspired summers of our lives. What followed was the most tragic soul-shaking tidal wave that life could deliver, but even that wouldn’t stop the vision for this record being realized. This is a love letter from start to finish. It’s the story of us starting from that first day we met in 2004...”
Speaking now, she admits that she felt like she’d known Benjamin for a thousand years already when she met him.
“It was seriously like lightning hit me a thousand times. I know that sounds almost like a cliché, but I just knew that things were going to be different from then on and that this was somebody who was going to challenge me to be a better person. It’s one of those things that you can’t articulate when it’s happening.”
On the album opener, Ablaze, she sings, 'The day we met I was a new fire’ and she says it’s an important song for her.
“That line pretty much sums up our whole life together. I just knew when I met him that he completely changed everything for me – artistically and as a person; it was a life-changing moment.”
The blissful synth-pop of School of Seven Bells has marked them out as a phenomenal band and earned them comparisons to the Cocteau Twins, among others.
The new album is a brilliant addition to Alpinisms (2008), Disconnect From Desire (2010) and Ghostory (2012). The epic Open Your Eyes (see link, below) is perhaps the standout track on SVIIB and Alejandra says it was the first song she and Benjamin worked on back in the summer of 2012.
“I’m sure for anyone who knows the whole School of Seven Bells catalogue, that song is very different to anything we’d worked on before.”
The Kraftwerk-esque songs Signals, she adds, “was one of our favourite songs and one of our favourite recording experiences ever”.
She says it was incredibly difficult to go back to the songs following her bandmate’s tragic passing and says she has since grown even closer to her sister Claudia, who helped her finish the vocals on the track Music Takes Me.
“It was so great just to have that chemistry there again. At one point I just couldn’t write and it was very hard for me to even listen to the music, so I needed her and that support and that soul there next to me and she really helped me to get those words out.”
While all the songs were written in New York, Alejandra has since moved to Los Angeles, where she had the album produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails, M83) and mixed by Tony Hoffer (Beck, Air, Supergrass, Belle & Sebastian).
Alejandra says she has finally "got that love back for music again”.
“For a while there I couldn’t write at all but now that it’s back, that fire, I’m going with it. So of course now I’m going to keep making music; it’s who I am.”
The cinematic album closer, This Is Our Time, concludes with the fitting words `Our time is indestructible’.
“That was the last song that we wrote that summer and it’s strange to me, because it always sounded like music for the end credits in a film. It made perfect sense to end with that one.”
SVIIB is out now on Full Time Hobby (sviib.com)
