We first wrote of self-described “spook-folk sweetheart” Greta O’Leary back in 2022 with ‘Body, Now‘, a single which saw the Aotearoa songwriter place the body within the context of the environment to chart “its subtle changes in the face of grief in the manner one might watch the seasons pass across a landscape.” But for all of its exposed emotion and stark weight, the song came to serve something of a balm. “A return to the self as not only a mode of protection,” as we put it, “but a way in which to reconnect with the most fundamental of things.”
With a new collection on the way, Greta O’Leary has now returned with ‘Baptised at the Desktop Computer’, a new single which offers an altogether more domestic scene but sacrifices none of the invention or evocative imagery. Described as a song ” touching on childhood religious experiences and growing up playing The Sims,” the single offers a surreal picture which feels very much of those years around the millennium. A time in which the promise of a digital future collided with darker eschatological prophecies, as though at the precipice of great change a certain dread bubbles to the surface.
O’Leary confronts such strange forces with all the absurdity they deserve, the song rising from a simple folk number into something more urgent as tales of possession and exorcism are detailed, the chugging beat and drum machine supported by Cass Basil, whose bass growls like some unnatural voice of its own.
Sitting at the family computer
He walks in clutching a paper bag
Plastic bottle of holy water
come forth now it’s timeTip your head child, you’re being baptised
At the desktop computer by your dad
The song comes complete with a video directed by O’Leary along with Adam Rohe. Watch below:
‘Baptised at the Desktop Computer’ is out now and available from the Greta O’Leary Bandcamp page.