Cecile Believe’s upcoming EP, Tender the Spark, is a fierce statement of intent—yet she’s still trying to figure out exactly what its title means. “I misheard someone on a TV show saying ‘tinder the spark,’ and it really resonated with me,” she explains over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “There’s something soft but also hard about it—protecting a spark, but also the potential of burning yourself. Plus, the word tender has so many meanings. It can be to formalize something, like to tender your resignation. It’s a type of boat that goes between land and a larger ship. And then there’s the word tenderize—to beat something to a pulp, the way you do meat.” At this, Believe’s eyes light up beneath her bangs, and she breaks into a mischievous smile. “I really liked that. I think that there’s something about hardship that gives you endurance. As long as you can survive it, which not everybody does.”
Believe’s fascination with how meaning mutates—and her willingness to wallow joyfully in contradiction—is something of a throughline across her work, not least on Tender the Spark, which arrives August 8. The EP’s thunderous lead single, “Blink Twice,” sees her slip into the guise of a nocturnal siren, over swirling synths and a whip-cracking beat: “If you’re sick of being dried up, I’ll water your sippy cup,” she sings. It’s spine-tingling, seductive, and the right amount of silly. “I think those are my favorite flavor combinations,” she says. “When music is too serious, I find it really flat. If there isn’t a certain cartoonish element to it, I’m a little bit confused, to be honest.”
On the other hand, the latest single, “Ponytail,” is forthright in a very different way. An ecstatic ode to the rush of first love—“whipping my ponytail out the window of your daddy’s Benz,” she sings on the anthemic chorus—it comes with a self-directed video of Believe whizzing through the streets of Los Angeles as day fades into night. If it feels like a dramatic pivot from the glitchy, gloomy world of “Blink Twice,” though, you need to listen a little closer: its lyrics tell a sadder tale of longing for a closed-off past, sprinkled with references to the end of the world. Where does Believe’s interest in those dramatic pendulum swings—often within the space of a single track—come from? “I really like to present a structure and then kind of toy with it a bit,” she says, before adding: “I think I’m always looking for whatever’s behind the facade—in life and in music.”
Believe’s ability to take these radically different elements—or “flavors,” as she likes to call them—and shape them into something cohesive is in part thanks to her experience. Born and raised in Vancouver Island, Believe moved to Montreal in the late 2000s, where she quickly found herself immersed in the city’s then-thriving indie scene, playing in a handful of bands at DIY warehouse gigs alongside Grimes and Mac DeMarco. “It was dirt cheap back then, which is important,” she says. “There were good studios, and we made our own spaces to put on shows. I was in paradise.” Frustrated with having to explain the sounds she wanted to achieve to her bandmates, she decided to strike out on her own. “I’m kind of a control freak by nature, so I just taught myself to use Ableton and went from there.”
Under the moniker Mozart’s Sister, she began releasing EPs with the British indie label Merok Records; soon afterward, a then-unknown SOPHIE stumbled upon her music. After their paths crossed at SXSW in 2013, a fertile and long-running creative partnership began, with Believe co-writing (and providing vocals for) a significant portion of SOPHIE’s 2018 debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides—a groundbreaking pop masterpiece that became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records and earned a Grammy nomination. (Around the same time, Mozart’s Sister became Cecile Believe, and she moved to Los Angeles, where she began collaborating with a network of pop renegades including Caroline Polachek, Shygirl, and A.G. Cook.)
Then came the pandemic, which prompted Believe to move back to Montreal. Soon after, in January 2021, SOPHIE died following a sudden accident in Athens. One of Tender the Spark’s standout moments is the breathtakingly beautiful “The Pearl”: over a delicate, folksy melody and twinkling acoustic guitars, Believe sings of rebuilding herself creatively after a profound loss. (“You tried to build a boat out of solid gold, but it wouldn’t float / And I am in my rickety vessel, trying to live a life after,” she sings, her voice raw.)
Merely listening to the song feels like intruding on an intimate relationship, and I hesitate to ask whether the song is indeed a tribute to her late friend. “Yeah, it’s about SOPHIE,” Believe says. “It was something I wrote in the weeks after she passed. I was working as a nanny, and there were curfews at night during lockdown, and it was the dead of winter in Montreal—snow up to your knees and pitch dark. I just sat in my apartment and wrote on the acoustic guitar because it was the only tool I had there. I’d never recorded anything like that before, in just one take. There are no overdubs, no click tracks, no headphones, and I thought it was going to be a lot of work to process it and make it sound good, but actually, I barely did anything to it. It had a natural quality to it that I really loved.” It’s also proof that, even without Believe’s extraordinary production work surging around it, her voice still shines.
Today, Believe has moved back to Los Angeles, armed with a few lessons from her first stint in the city. “I think L.A. has taught me a lot about being pushed in the wrong direction, and choosing to go not there,” she says of brushing up against the more commercial end of the pop machine, citing the pressure of being set up on collaborative sessions to write hits for bigger artists. “People are hustling really hard, and I think there is a certain industry thing that can permeate the creative process. But at the end of the day, your own personal creative choices are going to be the thing that sets you apart, and sets the whole thing on fire. Your soul has to kind of burn for it.”
Most of the songs on Tender the Spark were written during the lockdown period, and part of the delay in releasing them, she explains, was finding the right label partner. (She eventually found a home for it with Ambient Tweets, the imprint recently established by the equally maverick electronic musician Sega Bodega, who is very much part of Believe’s network of bleeding-edge pop artists.) This time around, Believe also knew she wanted to place herself front and center of her own project. “I think it was just time,” she says, noting that she’d grown tired of people describing her as somehow mysterious. “I would hear these comments that I was this sort of perpetually unsung, in the shadows sort of artist, and I was like, I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be that anymore. I want to be visible, and for people to know my name and my face.”
Hence the more fully realized visual world around the EP, which Believe developed in collaboration with photographer Richie Talboy—as well as her more defined vision of how fashion can serve her vision as an artist and performer. “I think it’s a fun way of expressing the exact type of girl you want to see in the world,” she says. “My style inspiration was really just the look Kylie Minogue wore in the ‘Come Into My World’ video: just a pink polo and gray slacks.” True to form, when we speak, she’s wearing a jazzy, multi-colored striped polo; meanwhile, on the promotional images accompanying the EP, you’ll find the same exercises in contrasts you do in her music, whether boxing shorts paired with ballerina slippers, or schoolgirl knee-high socks with scuffed-up sneakers. “That’s my most comfortable form in life, and I think it’s different from the kind of femininity you usually see,” she says, firmly. After a few years out of the spotlight, Believe is back—and her spark has never been brighter.