Discover Biweekly: Inside the ethereal oasis of Quelle Rox
In her column, “Discover Biweekly,” Helena Getahun-Hawkins ’25 introduces readers to her favorite emerging artists. Behold, a playlist full of this week’s artist’s best songs.
I don’t know why squirming and cringing and withering away in one’s skin is relegated to a middle school experience. No one talks about how much of adulthood is spent trudging through the sticky goop of self-loathing and insecurity.
Quelle Rox, for one, understands this truth.
She makes the type of music for after you’ve cried and screamed into the void enough to be left with deflated emptiness, the mere byproduct of sadness. With each song she surrenders to the universe. It’s as if she’s saying: you’ve won. Now leave me alone.
My introduction to the Brooklyn-based bedroom pop artist was through her 2019 song, “Cosmic Gloom.”
She begins with a drum sequence fairly similar to Mac DeMarco’s “Chamber of Reflection,” after which she plunges into an equally psychedelic soundscape. There are interstellar synths and funky baselines. Her voice floats and warbles above, gauzy and sweet.
“I sit on the stoop, smoke my cigarette / Reminisce about the first day we met / I guess it was all in my head,” she laments.
“My loneliness is more comforting than your cold / It’s getting old, it’s getting old,” she sighs.
Her lyrics are an open acceptance of what it means to share your body with the kind of delusion that threatens to eat away at the rest of you. She gives you permission to feel hurt but to pleasantly wallow in your own loneliness.
Layering soft vocals atop bass guitar and fluttering saxophone in “mas bonita,” she is open about her desperate willingness to change herself for the one she loves. She makes herself more beautiful, more happy, to no avail.
“I tried everything, but you don’t care,” she sings in Spanish (Rox, who has Puerto Rican and Cuban roots, often sings in Spanish).
“How much do I have to do / for you to see / see me loving you?” she pleads in English.
I love how dramatic and cinematic Rox is. In her world, the lighting is always soft, filtered through purples and blues. Her songs themselves have this theater-like surround sound quality to them.
On “MARGARITA,” for example, she lets chords reverberate and synths, 80s-like in their melodrama, twinkle. You can almost imagine a singular tear rolling down her cheek before the credits of a silent movie roll.
It’s not all melancholy for Rox though. She transports her listeners to other dimensions, ones free from heavy introspection.
“WHIPPED CREAM DREAM,” with its crackly radio static intro and dreamy kalimba-like flourishes, carries you to a land of billowy clouds and butterflies and soft pink skies. Rox is grounded to reality when you need her to be but also obsessed with escaping, to space, to dreamlike states, to anywhere that is not earth.
I’m honestly baffled that Quelle Rox hasn’t had her big break yet. Not only is she incredibly talented, but she is part of this wave of Latin indie and bedroom pop artists, like The Marías, Cuco and maye, that is driving indie music forward.
She embodies the etherealness of Kali Uchis with the raw vulnerability of older iterations of SZA, back when she was the type of strange, shy Black girl I could relate to.
She’s a compassionate companion, walking each of us through the pain of growing older.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
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