Twin voices deliver lyrics that land like a blow you didn’t see coming.
The Elidas are twin sisters Venice and Belle Herrera. They call Aberdeen home and are building a career on indie folk that leans on tight, blood-close harmonies. It’s the lyrics underneath that do the real damage. Their songs are low-key devastating, often blindsiding for how plainly they’re delivered, no metaphors to hide behind, just the thing said straight.
Their 2024 album Lucent is the clearest evidence of that. Across nine songs and a tight thirty-five minutes, two voices and acoustic guitar do most of the work, the folk and Americana influences never feeling like a deliberate splice of the two.
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Lyrically, it sits almost entirely in the aftermath of a relationship: separation, loneliness, the strange business of working out who you are once someone else has gone. Musically, they never settle for melancholy alone, though. Fiddle, banjo and double bass turn up to rough things up where the mood calls for it, an oboe drifts in to soften it elsewhere, and by the album’s end the sound has the warmth of the last good week of a Scottish summer, not happy exactly, but at peace with what’s been lost. Their cover of “Wichita Lineman” applies the same close harmony to a classic song that nobody realised was missing it.
Their latest single, Jasmine, released this May, points to a fuller, more cinematic sound: piano, strings and drums building around those same harmonies rather than leaving them exposed.
The duo’s last two years have been spent mostly on tour, including a recent run through Scotland alongside James Yorkston and Kate Stables, with steady radio support building on both sides of the Atlantic in the meantime.
The Elidas play Books and Beans in 17 July. It's an intimate Aberdeen venue built for exactly this kind of close, hushed performance. Tickets are on sale now for £11.55.
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