Sick With Love

The Holy Circle is a dreampop band (in the most strict shoegaze tradition) whose latest album is pretty much Brontë-related:

The Holy Circle
Sick With Love

While sacrilege may be the cooler way to rock, The Holy Circle’s angelic approach always lives up to their name. The profane scurries for the shadows on ‘Sick With Love’ as The Holy Circle draw upon the power of all theories of ballad. Yes, shoegaze and drone are checked off, but it is their mastery of sounds reminiscent of Belinda Carlisle, Bonnie Raitt, and Divinyls that truly set them apart. There is nothing unholy here. These are the sacred sounds of revisionist mom rock history. You know, mom rock for goths.

Treble explains the Brontë connection:

Released earlier this month via Deathbomb Arc, Sick With Love has hints of the sonic chaos of Hannum’s other band, but every noise-ridden texture and effect is packaged into a listening experience that’s intended to be more sensorially indulgent. A word that comes up often about the band’s music is “romantic,” which the trio freely embrace. But much of that sense of poetic, gothic romance is drawn from literary inspirations as much as musical ones, as Burgner-Hannum says when describing how she began writing “Lovely One.”
“I had been thinking about the metaphor that Mr. Rochester drew in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, comparing his connection to Jane to a string tied between his ribcage and her own,” says Burgner-Hannum. “The novel became the source material for the subsequent songs. I wrote lyrics from the perspective of both Jane and Bertha, taking a revisionist view of her story as someone not initially mad but driven to madness by neglect. (....)
Treble: Given that the album is written with heavy inspiration from Jane Eyre, but not a “synth-pop opera” as you called it, would you call this a concept record?

Erica Burgner-Hannum: I suppose it became a concept album in the end, but wasn’t our intention when we recorded. We were just trying to put a demo together of our new music since our self-titled LP. As we were listening to the recordings and deciding what worked and what didn’t, it became more apparent that the songs we were keeping followed a common narrative from my Brontë-inspired lyrics but, at the same time, were sonically diverse. We wrote “Mooreland Loneliness” and “Midnight Hush” in studio and wanted to repeat the concepts in those two songs in more interludes throughout a larger record but decided to stop writing. The end result was concise but felt right. (...)
Treble: The feel of the album has a particular mood and kind of attractive gloom about it. Does it help to have certain surroundings or environment when writing? Or does what comes out just come out?

EBH: I’m in my head a lot when I’m in writing mode and need a lot of solitude but that could be on my long commute to work or late nights in my living room. There is a lot of autobiography in my lyrics and I spent time connecting to past experiences and emotions as I wrote and connected that to the mood and aesthetic of Jane Eyre. I will often write and record sound samples to listen back to while in an inspiring environment which was the case with Sick With Love. (Jeff Terich)