The definition of petrichor is “a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period.” 070 Shake spells her own meaning of Petrichor with her most recent album: She bathes in the lush bass tones of a new kind of rain, a new day after a long night out.
Following her 2022 sophomore album You Can’t Kill Me, Petrichor takes a daunting yet
rejuvenating new look at what love is. Many of the songs in the collection emerge from the witching hours, where 070 Shake thrives in concocting reflective spells. On “Sin,” the opening track, smooth, layered vocals give way to the spacy outro: “chasing after waters, chase the moonlight.” Listeners are sure to be reminded of the 2019 track “Under The Moon” featured on her debut album Modus Vivendi; as long she’s been performing as 070 Shake, Danielle Balbuena has been a creature of the night.
As this is the first album Balbuena has released since the beginning of her celebrity relationship with Lily-Rose Depp, Petrichor’s elusive, supernatural takes on love are fitting. In “Pieces of You,” Balbuena infuses misery and wonder within the discovery of another. She uses juxtaposition between the chorus’ harmony and the beginning beat bred out of the depth of evening to empower the song’s entrancing opening. “First time I ever heard you say my name / Your skin pierced, it could make me bleed / All night long, I’ve been daydreaming,” she sings, comparing her lover to herself, a mirror. On “Vagabond,” Balbuena chronicles love as physical movement, launching into a chorus with the power of a gun being fired; bass dominance reminiscent of her prior sound oozes into “you gave into the consequence of letting me in / I’ll give into the consequence of letting you in.”
The power of love takes her over in a pertinent lyric on “In Your Garden,” during JT’s snappy feature, when she definitively raps, “good things come to an end, so let’s be great baby,” channeling the invincibility in feeling immense love. A pleasant surprise in covering Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” Balbuena adds her own depth to the ocean of sound beyond the deceased legend’s standalone guitar and in Courtney Love’s voice. These two songs featuring other artists call on the tradition of love’s image as a garden or a siren, mystical imaginings going back to Eden and Greek mythology. Whatever journey love has taken Balbuena and Depp on, it has forced the former to explore how love may be explained.
In “Blood On Your Hands,” Balbuena fires off in frenzy about how to manage the entanglement of love, and more specifically, the consequential intertwining of the body and the mind. These wonderings find a perplexing resolution, pounded by thick bass and electronic fire bursts: “If I die / I want you to be the one to kill me / I want your blood on my hands.” Balbuena drones this final phrase ten more times to drive the point, maybe the numbness felt from the elation of her love. The song ends in an outro, a 45-second shattering monologue from Lily-Rose Depp herself.
When I went to 070 Shake’s website to check for tour dates, I was met with a torrential moving image of rain that she tried to “carry” on “Pieces of You.” She is tuned into the movements of the universe, within a single person, and expanding out into the breadth of the earth. The power of her sentiment is most palpable on the final track, “Love,” which intensified the pressure in my entire body the first time I heard it.
Shimmering tremors of the echoes of her guitar forebode the expressive zenith of the song’s climactic tremolo strum, proclaiming, “love exists.” A bass drum and a snare clap rival each other, slowing the pace, as if to save time and space for her blurred words, vocals up to the max. She propounds, “Reach inside my mind and tell me where you wanna go.” Glass shatters in the inexpressibility of her opening heart, the complication of incapability of words to make it make sense — instead, raw power in sound.
Aidan Goldberg is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].