Back in 2020, UK songwriter Celeste Madden released That’s Just Extraordinary, an EP which introduced her idiosyncratic bedroom pop style. Having now signed with Sad Club Records, Madden has released ‘Joan of Arc’, her first single in over two years. A picture of the aftermath of a maiden break-up in all of its turbulent uncertainty, the song typifies the raw and often unconventional style of the Celeste Madden sound. Emotions delivered in all of their immediacy and strangeness. “I had all these really fresh painful feelings but I was having trouble translating them into words,” Madden explains of the track. “I remember shutting myself away for a bit during that summer, mostly because I just couldn’t communicate properly or accurately enough to any of my friends the depth of what I was going through.”
The song comes to represent the antithesis of this period. A lesson in unguarded feelings which isn’t afraid to risk overstatement in trying to explain the sensation of the moment. “‘Joan of Arc’ is a very melodramatic song—I think partly because I was younger, and partly because it’s impossible to think the world isn’t ending when you love someone and it doesn’t work out,” Madden continues. “There’s a lot of religious imagery in the song, which I always love using because it was the background of my early childhood, but also because my relationship felt like my religion, and having it taken away made a real empty space in me.”