Frankie Rose has announced her new album, HILA, and unveiled its first single, “Cant Be Wrong.” The 10-track record arrives on September 18 via Born Losers Records worldwide outside the UK and Europe, with Night School Records handling the UK and European release. Self-produced by Rose, the album follows 2023’s Love As Projection and carries her gleaming synth-pop into a darker interior shaped by grief, altered perception, and the unstable boundary between presence and absence.
Rose describes HILA as a record about loss and what might persist beyond the range of ordinary perception—the place mourning repeatedly returns to, suspended somewhere between transcendence and doubt. If Love As Projection reached outward toward the world, its follow-up turns that same melodic instinct inward, bringing the dark cosmos into a more intimate space.
Recorded following extensive touring with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Swervedriver, HILA was made primarily in Rose’s home studio, with additional recording at Treuhand Brooklyn. The sessions feature drummer Justin Welch of Elastica and Lush, alongside guitarists Ian Campbell and Chris Rager, bassist Jake Vest, and saxophonists Jeff Tobias and Matthew Friedlander. Additional production comes from Brandt Gassman, with Trey Frye mixing and Josh Bonati mastering.
As the album’s opening transmission, “Cant Be Wrong” serves as a bridge from the brighter electronic pop of Rose’s previous record into HILA’s more goth-laced dreampop atmosphere. A thumping ’80s funk-pop rhythm supports crystalline guitar, vaporous synthesizers, and Rose’s layered voice, which hovers above the track with a cool, aching clarity. The chorus rises into one of her characteristic soaring melodies, but the wings that carry it forward cannot conceal the wound beneath it.
The song is a love letter to someone no longer in this realm—an act of accepting that person completely, exactly as they were, only after their absence has become permanent. Its emotional tension comes from the part of grief that understands the fact of death while continuing to reject its finality.
The accompanying black-and-white video gives that suspended grief a landscape. A woman in a sleeveless dark dress walks across an immense, bleached salt basin ringed by serrated mountains. She is rarely alone for long: translucent doubles follow behind her, drift beside her, and disappear into the glare, turning a solitary figure into a procession of unfinished memories.
The landscape repeatedly folds over itself through multiple exposures, split screens, hard black bars, and the scratches of damaged film. Close-ups of Frankie Rose wearing oversized sunglasses are transformed into stark, hand-drawn portraits, repeated in triptychs and grids before being inverted into ghostly negatives. Grainy footage of two horses briefly breaks through the salt-flat imagery, adding another fragment of motion that feels recovered from some private archive.
As the edit becomes increasingly unstable, faces multiply, mountains slide out of alignment, and bodies appear several times within the same moment. The clip treats grief like a strip of film caught in a malfunctioning projector: replayed, duplicated, partially erased, and returned to the screen before it can fully disappear.
Watch the video for “Cant Be Wrong” below:
HILA is set for release on September 18 through Born Losers Records and Night School Records. You can pre-order the album here. It will be available on clear vinyl with a green center, black vinyl, CD, and digital formats. The limited clear-and-green edition can be ordered here.
HILA Tracklist
“Olo”
“Cant Be Wrong”
“Return To Dust”
“Shadow Twin”
“Rainman”
“Hila”
“Manifest”
“Best Of Times”
“TV Star”
“Velvet Refrain”
Follow Frankie Rose:
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Bandcamp
Spotify
Apple Music
Merch
The post Frankie Rose Channels Grief into a Love Song in Video for Melancholic Synthpop Single “Cant Be Wrong” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.