We have been following heka’s music since her tentative beginnings in 2021, and over the past five years, the young artist has grown and increasingly refined her emotive, elegant musical style. heka is the project of Florence-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, songwriter and producer Francesca Brierley. Working across music, visual art, creative computing and live performance, she makes intimate, shape-shifting songs somewhere between folk, ambient, electronic music and 70s-infused rock. Her work is rooted in collage, combining acoustic and electronic textures, field recordings, loops, fragments of speech and found sounds with songwriting that moves between the personal and the abstract. In 2020, heka released the self-produced digital track redwoods (a few interesting facts about sequoias), followed in 2021 by the EP (a). In late 2021, she released no one through Fire Talk’s Open Tab imprint, followed in 2022 by High Tide, a collaboration with GG Skips released through Slow Dance Recordings. That year she made her first European festival appearance at Sonic City in Belgium, selected by Black Country, New Road. In 2023, heka signed with Practise Music and released swan songs, a six-track EP, followed, in 2024, by In Your Garden // Swallow, a limited 7-inch collaboration with Saint Jude through Slow Dance Recordings, creating the artwork herself. In 2025, Brierley formed Dorothy with Marco Pini and Jude Woodhead. Their debut EP Sea Songs was released through Angel Tapes, Fire Talk’s emerging-artists imprint. Alongside this, heka began exploring her Italian and English identities more directly through Cantavi d’amore // Each Spring and in July 2026 she released her second double single in Italian, Tutto l’amore che ho dato ti ha cercato // M’hai parlato tante volte così . Today, Francesca releases the first installment from her debut album, Pure Music.

What She Says: “The title track is sort of the album’s manifesto. It was the last song I wrote for it and it had the effect of somehow finally contextualising the rest of the project for me. It’s a song about everything. Memory, dissolution, inspiration The idyl of the garden, childhood, Eden, Nature as Music, Music as underground river, The transmutation of life into song, Writers block, The sentence as anchor, as prism, scattering reflections of possibility in all directions. The text is a collage of found word objects. Bits of dialogue and ideas from a John Maus interview, a Philip Glass documentary, this tape cassette of Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood, an episode of The Darling Buds of May, Steinbeck’s East of Eden… hah idk it was the dead of winter and I’d been consuming a lot of different media that week… I felt receptive. Whenever I heard something I liked I wrote it down, and I’d collected a few little scraps of things. I was at my desk one night and it was really quite late and I was absentmindedly strumming the guitar while watching a movie and started to find my way to a melody, so I pulled out my notes and tried to connect the dots between several entries, like working on a puzzle or a collage (which is really just a puzzle that you make up yourself). Anyway suddenly it all clicked and for the first time – I usually don’t have this experience when I write – but for the first time I could hear exactly how the song was supposed to sound, I heard the swooping orchestral opening and the janky electric guitar and the laid back drums, it was suddenly there fully formed in my mind. Unfortunately it was 2am and with the rest of the house asleep the best I could do was record a whispered demo of it on my phone and listen to it obsessively until I dozed off, filling in the blanks of the arrangement with my imagination. Not long after, I was able to go down to Seaford to record the song at my drummer Toma’s place. We tracked the drums, percussion, electric guitar, and about a million takes of 12 string guitar and weird sounds. After sifting through all our experiments I added Evie’s strings and Nathan’s clarinet parts and finally pure music was fully formed, better and weirder than I’d imagined.“

“This is an instrumental outro to pure music, a nod to Philip Glass. Aria traditionally stands for a solo vocal piece. Naming the first instrumental interlude this way is a conceptual choice, that points to the instrument essentially taking the role of the voice, singing without words. Aria also means Air in Italian, it felt evocative of the airy quality of the piece.“

“In the period I spent bed-bound with a fractured foot, I used my time carelessly, making little effort to transform those days into anything fruitful, and instead turning my brain into a pulp by watching bad tv shows throughout the day and night until the first light of the morning spread across the sky outside my window. In a semi delirious state I would watch the dawn break as if from nothing, as if for the first time; and I got into the habit of doing so, of waiting for dawn to go to sleep, because it was so wonderful to long for it throughout the night, and then sink comforted into golden oblivion once it had come, as the room warmed. And the reward of sleep followed the knowledge that I’d made it through another night. I developed this habit in the second week of my confinement; after a first few days of feeling quite sad and dejected, I’d somehow found some solace in this bizarre ritual, a routine that made me feel sane. In the pre-dawn I would start to write, documenting what I felt at the birth of the new day and doing so felt like tracing a path back to myself with pen and paper. I’ve often used journaling as a conduit for songwriting. So many of my lyrics are lifted from or modelled on notes and diary entries, and this song was no exception. It’s quite funny to try to describe the meaning behind a song that deals with the concept of meaning itself but then again, I live for a good paradox. I often ascribe meaning to my songs after I’ve written them. I enjoy the intuitive nature of this type of songwriting. I sit down to play and let the songs tell me what I’m feeling or thinking. They always unearth things best when I let them come out unchecked and speak their mind. Afterwards, like a sleuth with a puzzle, I decode them.
The song observes the dichotomy between human perception (feeling) and meaning (the ‘Will’ behind the ‘Veil’, the ‘true essence of reality’). There is a long philosophical tradition of separating the two but I don’t care to participate in it. This is what the song is about. Though at the time of writing the song, none of the philosophical references that I later ascribed to it were clouding my view. At that time all I thought was how remarkable it was that each morning I could smell dawn coming before I could see it. A change in the air so subtle and yet so unmistakeable, so impossible to describe and yet so real I truly could taste it. All I thought was that when I’d lifted my eyes to the sky that morning, I’d followed a plane fly across the window, trailing a thin white line in complete silence, and how odd it felt that something so huge was happening without any sound at all. And I imagined the hum of the plane, and remembered the smell of dawn, and saw how the flush of song spread across someone’s face was in truth the same, and wrote all of that down in a poem. I recorded it with my drummer Toma, in the cabin at the bottom of his mum’s garden, on a fresh spring day. We layered vocals, nylon string, oud and 12 string guitar, and then later that night fed the whole mix through an analog modular synth, playing around with the textures of the sound. It was one of my favourite recording experiences – such a great, intuitive, experimental session – and I think that shines through in the recording.“

Across her work, Brierley’s instinct is one of fragmentation and recombination: voices, guitars, synthesizers, field recordings, loops, fragments of language and half-remembered places treated as material to be cut apart and reassembled. Moving between English and Italian, the organic and the electronic, the handmade and the digital, heka’s work remains intimate without being confessional and experimental without abandoning the architecture of the song.
Pure Music is a dreamy, lulling track with a sweeping scope, defined by gentle yet compelling orchestral arrangements. It serves as a true hymn to the purity of music (“pure music/ everything solid melts into air“) and to its intangible, airy, yet real and immediate essence. This represents the compositional peak reached by heka thus far; accompanied by the exquisite instrumental coda Aria —yet another reference to the essence of music—and the brief, dreamy Picture, it serves as a compelling and moving calling card for the Anglo-Italian artist’s full-length debut. We are certain that what follows will be just as, if not more, overwhelming—but for now, let us enjoy these splendid fragments of pure music and learn to soar along with them.

Pure Music (I) is out now via Softer Days Recordings. Look HERE for more information on heka.