Shaylee - Short-Sighted Security - album out now
Elle Archer’s project Shaylee is the result of great persistence and triumph. Trans-excellence to its core – a musical reckoning that nonetheless dips its toe into pools of swirling darkness as it fights to see the light. Forthcoming album Short-Sighted Security is most often Archer’s way of hugging her knees to her chest as she processes all the months previous have wrought: COVID isolation; addiction; a lost job; a failed polyamorous relationship and its aftermath; the search for physical connection; aging, trauma, and the dissolution of mental health.
The interplay of silence and noise on Short-Sighted Security is tonally massive, and Archer uses it to Shaylee’s advantage, stringing together a self-aware, paranoid entity that’s darker than anything she’s released in the past. 2020 was set to be Shaylee’s big, breakout year, and the immediate and conclusive cancellation of any immediate success led Archer down a different path than expected – a path that forced her to relive buried trauma and attempt to come to terms with herself through a period of intense difficulty.