Skullcrusher: “There is something transcendent about music. You can feel close to a person without ever meeting them.”

The music of Helen Ballentine feels like the calm before a storm that never quite arrives. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that in her songs the calm and the storm are one and the same, her gossamer melodies folded over eddies of trauma and dread.

Hence “Skullcrusher”, a name which conjures with heavy metal motifs and Dungeons & Dragons lore.

“The idea behind Skullcrusher is I wanted to contextualise this project with something darker,” says Ballentine, over Zoom from Los Angeles. “It’s easy to look at someone or hear something which sounds pretty and sort of brush aside the more difficult aspects of it. For me, Skullcrusher puts that first. It sort of creates a barrier: it’s not necessarily an easy project to approach because there’s this weird name.”

It’s worth persevering. On her sublime new EP, Storm In Summer, Ballentine weaves terrifying acoustic madrigals. The milieu is tiptoeing folk-pop. Into this she has layered a Wicker Man sense of the uncanny. Imagine if Phoebe Bridgers or Julien Baker were really, really into a board game such as Kingdom Death: Monster or the mangaBerserk and that this massively informed their music. That would be Skullcrusher.

Or at least it would be in the same general neighbourhood. While always tempting, and yes, hugely lazy, to make comparisons (in the case of female artists especially), the truth is that both on Storm In Summer and last year’s Skullcusher EP, Ballentine’s writing is singular. Her voice is sweet but with a hint of a crack; her lyrics live somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Lewis Carroll.

To lose yourself in her songs is to vanish down a rabbit hole and then discover you’re not sure which way is up and which down.

“I’ve always wanted to create my own world,” she says. “That’s what this project is for me: a place to explore and deal with things in my life.”

Another reason for the grimdark name is she wanted to speak to the fact loud, angsty music isn’t always as dark as it may appear on the surface. And that, to follow the same logic, mellow, acoustic material can contain lifetimes of pain. The big idea is to never judge a book by the cover – or song by its aesthetics.

“With a genre like metal, there are so many different feelings and emotions that go into it. Even music that sounds scary and loud, a lot of the time is talking about a relationship. And sometimes my music comes off softer, but I’m talking about something which made me angry at the time.”

Skullcrusher was initially just for Ballentine, who turned to songwriting after quitting her job in an LA gallery and taking a job as a nanny. So she was shocked when a demo made its way to Secret Canadian last year and she was signed immediately. And no less surprised when July 2020’s Skullcrusher EP won resounding acclaim.

“It’s weird, having my audience grow,” she says. “And having my music out there – but there being no physical connection [because of Covid]. So my feeling is I’m still in that first EP headspace, feeling I was alone and not having any expectation anyone would listen to the music. And yet, at the same time, knowing there were a lot more people engaging with the work.”

As Ballentine describes her childhood as one spent living in her own head, I ask if she read a lot of fantasy such as Harry Potter and the works of CS Lewis. At mention of the boy wizard, her eyes widen.

“Harry Potter is definitely a big one for me,” she says. “And honestly it still is important. My brother and I would play games and come up with magical powers. There was a lot of that as a kid.”

She grew up 40 minutes from Manhattan, in Tarrytown, Westchester County – a town of 11,000 whose most famous former resident was JD Salinger. Later, she attended an exclusive East Coast prep-school which, in its promotional materials, looks a lot like Upstate New York’s answer to Hogwarts.

Upon graduation, Ballentine crossed coasts to the University of Southern California, from which she graduated with a degree in graphic design in 2017. In 2019, while nannying in New York, she wrote her first song as Skullcrusher. It was called ‘Places/Plans’. With gorgeously eerie melodies and diaristic lyrics – “Come in / The window’s open and I’m lying alone / Let’s sit / Cause I don’t have any plans for tomorrow” –  it established her as a talent to watch.

On the new EP one of the most intriguing tracks is ‘Song For Nick Drake’. It’s an imagined dialogue between Ballentine and the ’70s troubadour, who passed away long before she was born but whom, through his music, she came to feel she knew intimately.

“It’s about how cool and brilliant it can be to put something out there and have other people relate to it,” she says. “And also how weird it is that I was so connected to someone where our lifetimes don’t even come close to overlapping. There is something transcendent about music. You can feel close to a person without ever meeting them.”

Among her favourite contemporary artists, one new discovery is Wicklow bard Fionn Regan. She recently included his End Of History on a playlist and becomes visibly enthused when his name comes up.

“His music is super-intellectual to me,” she says. “When it comes down to it, I love folk music and pretty guitars. He has such visual lyrics, such visual descriptions. You get transported somewhere with his songs.”

An entire generation of artists is reckoning with the consequences of lockdown and how it has stymied their momentum. Ballentine has no such concerns. By the time her first EP came out the world had already fallen into a creepy hush. And, having spent her childhood exploring her own imagination, she has not found this strange frozen moment especially traumatising.

“It’s funny. That EP was about me being someone who has spent a lot of time alone – sort of dwelling on that, thinking about how that can be valuable. To be forced back into that dynamic –  it wasn’t weird for me at all.”

•Storm In Summer is out now, and Skullcrusher plays The Workman's Club on 14th September 2021