Gazelle Twin: ‘Our brains are these strange labyrinths. They store stuff and it waits to spring out on us later in life’

Childhood was a strange and sometimes terrifying time for Gazelle Twin’s Elizabeth Bernholz. Until she was six, she and her family lived in a converted farmhouse in Kent, in southeast England. Outwardly, all appeared bucolic. She, however, felt the ill wind of darker forces: growing up, she experienced the recurring vision of a ghostly presence, peering through the windows, crouching on the wardrobe. It was a “black dog” that now returns to breathe down the nape of the acclaimed experimental composer via her extraordinary new album of the same name.

“It’s funny: some of us are more sensitive to our environment,” says Bernholz, whose admirers include Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Scott Gimple, showrunner on The Walking Dead and its spin-offs. “Some of us grow up in emotional families; some of us grow up in quite sort of reserved families. My family was a mixture.”

For decades she suppressed her recollections of the demon dog that lay in wait for her as a child. But then, when she least expected, back it came. “You find yourself growing up with the experience of things that aren’t actually that ordinary. And then one day maybe you’re having a conversation with someone and suddenly you get around to a memory. And you think, ‘Well, actually ... that wasn’t that normal.’ What was that? For me, I’m a bit obsessed with my childhood home in lots of different ways. I still feel connected to it in a complicated way.”

With Gazelle Twin, Bernholz has established herself as a singular chronicler of the dark and the ominous. Reznor called to ask her to remix a song by the pop artist Halsey, whom he was producing. She has composed the soundtracks for the horror movie The Power and the Sky Max mini-series And Then You Run. Gimple commissioned her to cover Brian Wilson’s Love and Mercy for The Walking Dead. She took Wilson’s haunting sweetness and turned it into something mysterious and sinister.

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Black Dog may be her most striking work yet. It’s not always a pleasant listen. “In the dark, dark room was a dark, dark dog,” she intones on the title track while synths screech and clatter. Just as disconcerting is the horror-show ballad Fear Keeps Us Alive, which is about how women feel unsafe at night. She chants: “Trying to find my way home/ Pretending I’m on the phone/ Thinking of a reason/ To turn back the way I came.” The sensation evoked is of being trapped in a nightmare: you feel walls closing in from all around.

That there is a place in music for distressing, abrasive and disturbing sounds is a central idea for Bernholz; there’s a long tradition in visual art of work that takes you out of your comfort zone – Francis Bacon’s tortured paintings are a discernible influence on Gazelle Twin, for example. The tradition also exists in cinema: there are undoubtedly parallels between Gazelle Twin and the new wave of British horror filmmakers, such as Rose Glass, director of Saint Maud, and Mark Jenkin, who made Enys Men.

“I’m not interested in creating a predictable or reliable, comforting sound all of the time,” says Bernholz from the spare bedroom of her home in Leicestershire. This isn’t to say that she feels music should always be a challenge: Black Dog ends hopefully, with the Kate Bush-esque piano ballad A Door Opens. After the nightmares that precede it, the tune glimmers like a tea light in fog, guiding you out of the darkness.

“Obviously people have things they need to take from music – and from the entertainment industry,” she says. “I understand that completely. The music I listen to at home is not harrowing, terrifying, screechy music. I like music that keeps me calm, that keeps my pulse rate steady. That makes me feel inspired and is a nice background for me and my family to exist in. What comes out of me is quite the opposite. Often, it’s quite raw stuff that’s flying out.”

For Bernholz, a guiding force on Black Dog was her experience of post-partum depression. Parenthood made her reflect on her childhood – the memories buried deep in the psychological clay. “I probably went into [parenthood], like a lot of people, thinking how brilliant my childhood was on the whole, and thinking what kind of parent I would be – and without any realisation of being thrown into the darkest moments. The instinctive, trigger stuff that took me by surprise. It was not a voluntary thing.”

All those old memories of the farmhouse and the black dog came rushing in. “When you’re dealing with a toddler and stuff, it’s coupled with other stresses and other elements. It definitely propelled me back into this head space I couldn’t fathom and I couldn’t control for a while. Our brains are these strange labyrinths. They store stuff and it waits to spring out on us later in life.”

Bernholz has turned to the demons within after confronting the restless spirits that have stalked her native England since the Brexit vote. She caricatured English nationalism as a deranged jester on her 2018 album, Pastoral; on its 2021 follow-up, Deep England, she pivoted from doomy folk to a yammering techno that sounds like the Prodigy playing for Nigel Farage’s birthday. Two years on, has the Brexit fever broken?

“It’s like the funeral is happening now. People are suddenly realising the loss,” she says. “It’s coming into focus how much we’ve lost and how long it’s going to be before anything feels normal again. It’s as terrible, messy, frustrating and sad as it must look from Ireland. I would say the majority of people, even if they had voted Brexit – and a few of my family did – are absolutely so regretful and angry. Hopefully that is going to be the turning point for the next election. And it will hopefully reverse [Brexit]. It’s going to take a long time. And that’s also sad. That even if we do change, it will still take decades to repair all the damage.”

Gazelle’s Twin’s music is singular. But it can also be seen as part of a broader revival in the culture of the folk horror genre – whether in films such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar, in video games such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice or via bands such as Heilung or the Dublin “mutant-folk” four-piece Lankum. None of this is by coincidence, Berhnolz believes. Something is stirring. It’s in the air, the water, all around.

“We’re poetic creatures. We make creative expressions that are based on our inner torment and this sense of the world changing. And of panic, really. The climate crisis comes into it massively. I don’t think we’ve even seen the full force of that hit us yet, in terms of how it filters through. But it’s going to be interesting, isn’t it?”

Black Dog is released on Invada Records on Friday, October 27th