In the months leading up to "Unbloom", Gretel’s Instagram posts functioned as subtle Easter eggs—a dark violet tulip, her copper-red head submerged in a pink rose beneath the caption “I’m unblooming tonight”, and withered flowers decorating announcements for her London shows. She also shared handwritten fragments of the lyrics, scattered like clues. Gretel knew how to let anticipation bloom—and decay—at its own pace.

“I wrote a song about the beauty of being alone and letting yourself come undone”, she said in a video shared on Instagram about "Unbloom". In it, we see the Londoner wearing a comfy top and trousers as she sings and plays a black guitar—perfectly aligned with her gothic style—from the intimacy of her bed. A messy look, however, does not equal mediocrity. Gretel’s immaculate voice still haunts lines like “I can hear you / I can hear… / I just don’t wanna see you tonight”, followed by “petal-pulling in my mind”, which opens the door to the song’s unblooming pinnacle.

Gretel also shared on social media that the song “first came together in my bedroom when it was particularly messy and I was trying to convince myself that it was somehow beautiful and divinely feminine, rather than just getting my shit together and tidying it up”. This approach, along with the guitar work and gloomy, intimate vocals, recalls her earlier album Slugeye (2022), her first full-length offering, while clearly distancing itself from "Far Out (2024), a single that introduced a more polished, "disco-leaning Gretel dancing in gothic attire.

Rather than rehashing what has already been done, "Unbloom" feels like a synthesis of her style, her poetic worldview, and her understanding of growth as a non-linear process. The artist invites us into her unblooming, untidy garden to embrace our flaws and our nature: to love lazy days, unclean looks, and sleepless nights. As a woman, this stance remains particularly striking. Historically, society has imposed narrow expectations of femininity on girls, and Gretel shows no fear in questioning—and breaking—them.

What makes "Unbloom" continue to resonate is how naturally it connects with the songs that followed. Maybelline and Darkness, be my friend expand this emotional landscape, each offering a different shade of vulnerability while remaining rooted in the same intimate universe. Also, all three tracks exist in live versions as well—raw, close, and unfiltered—reinforcing the sense that Gretel’s music is meant to be lived in, not perfected. Together, these songs confirm that Unbloom wasn’t a moment, but the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

Photography by Ignacio Isaac Soto // Dev/Scan at Dichroic Film Lab

Cecilia Gabriela Velázquez

Journalist and writer from Querétaro. I walk with coffee and my heart burning hot. I put into words my love for alternative music, romance, darkness, and nostalgia.

www.instagram.com/ceciliagabrrriela/

La entrada Unbloom: el regreso de Gretel Hänlyn a la escena musical se publicó primero en ERRR MAGAZINE.

In a living Stations of the Cross, I walk.
I carry the cross of my decisions:
for choosing to live life like a Shakespearean play,
for choosing to render it into poetry on this page.
Sentenced to death for rescuing
a heart in flames.
They do not know that:
if I do not put into words the blood that poisons me,
my body will become a home to necrosis.

A crown of thorns upon my waves:
a scarlet cascade bathes my brow, my cheeks.
I stick out my tongue to taste my poison:
the sweetness of madness, love, and nostalgia
flow into a red sea at my feet.
Each lash life deals me
is another elegy, another romance.

If three times I fell with my cross,
three thousand times I turned it upside down
with rituals of rhyme and allegory.
Until it cracked against my back
and I was condemned to the stake.

My trust, my hopes, lacerated
by lukewarm, tasteless-blooded Pharisees;
incapable of savoring the wine
distilled by my words, my heart:
“Take and drink from it, all of you, for this is the chalice of my blood,
the blood of the new and eternal covenant,
which will be poured out for you and for many
for the forgiveness of sins.”
The blood was poured out,
but not down their throats.

It was me, my death sentence at dawn,
and the chalice of my blood spilled across these pages.
Redeemed by my own venom,
forgiven for the sin of loving the damn neighbor:
the traitorous Judas who kissed me, my loves Annas and Caiaphas;
those bastards, never again.
The new and eternal covenant is with myself.
Do this in memory of me.

Crucified upon my tombstone, in my poems,
my pyre blazes and bursts into flames;
my voice reincarnated in free verse;
my life’s contradictions in oxymoron;
and my way of loving, in a blood-soaked hyperbole.

My flesh reduced to ashes, but never my soul.
Dead — but not to save my executioners;
rather to save myself.
To save my word from death
and resurrect it with me, every dusk.

On the night of Easter Sunday,
my body levitates and dances with death.
Nights are for poetry to become archaism:
to revive my throbbing catharsis;
to revive the achrony of a kiss to my faithful, departed love.
Nights are for stepping out of my coffin
and becoming free verse in the air.

Photography by Eliza Trejo // Dev/Scan at Fotograma Film Lab

Cecilia Gabriela Velázquez

Journalist and writer from Querétaro. I walk with coffee and my heart burning hot. I put into words my love for alternative music, romance, darkness, and nostalgia.

www.instagram.com/ceciliagabrrriela/

La entrada Resurrección se publicó primero en ERRR MAGAZINE.

It was around two in the afternoon when, just as I was about to cross Rodríguez Familiar Street, near the café I once stormed out of without paying, a lady hurried toward me. “Would you buy a calla lily, miss?” she said. My eyes fell on the little basket brimming with slender white flowers, gathered into a lovely bouquet, and a bitter smile gave me away.

“Oh! No, thank you,” I replied before crossing the street and making sure no car would crash my heart into my hands. It wasn’t an “Oh!” of annoyance, but an “Oh!” of pity, of nostalgia, of longing, of pain.

My legs rushed me toward the park and, one last time, I looked back toward the lady with the calla lilies. “Calla lilies for you, who are everywhere except where I most want you to be,” I murmured, lowering my gaze to my left hand. I imagined you holding it, like other afternoons when I walked along Calzada de Los Arcos accompanied by your ghost. “Calla lilies for you, my love, my ghost, since they are your favorite flowers,” the thought swam through my mind. Restless waters that, from ghostly drifting, turned into waves and then a tidal wave on my pillow.

What is your obsession with mocking me, life?

What is your purpose in rubbing this man, this namesake of mine, in my already sleepless face?

As I crossed the park toward Bosques del Acueducto, my stupid, naive mind thought about going back to find the lady with the calla lilies, asking her for a small bouquet and buying it for you. Keeping it in clean water, in a beautiful crystal vase, and giving it to you at the airport when you arrived in Querétaro. I imagined your beautiful smile unfolding at my gift, your dimple appearing with joy, while I reminded you that girls in love do give flowers.

I shouldn’t write these fictional stories or turn them into movies in my mind, drunk on high cortisol. My hormones are fed up with you. All of me is fed up with these days that feel like an endless Sunday of nostalgia. I wake up shaken by the nightmare where you prove my hypothesis right, where you hurt me more than you ever have in reality; I snooze the damn alarm once, twice, five times, and once again I’m late as hell for work. I think of you, I postpone my quota of five journalistic notes for one, two, four hours, and I’m late again. I write the daily piece begrudgingly because all I want is to vomit onto processed cellulose how badly thinking of you affects me, how much I miss your scent, which I’ve almost forgotten, how badly I want to be your blanket at night and hold your soul. How much I wish I could run back to the lady with the calla lilies, stop her, and buy a bouquet for the day you arrive in my conservative, Catholic Querétaro.

I think about writing to you, kindly, a message to accompany the calla lilies and remind you, in a nauseatingly poetic way, that I love you and that I still believe you are the love of my life. Writing you chronicles of everything, starting with the one at the beach, where you found me asleep on the lounge chair and I caught your attention. Writing reviews of your music, even though I’m not that close to rap, just to shout to the world about your art and your aggressive, critical rhymes. Writing to you about how fascinating it is to catch your enchanted gaze when I burst into scandalous laughter, blushing in front of you, only to break the nervous laughter with a kiss.

I wish I could write my poems only for you, that all my honey would taste of you and of calla lily notes. I wish I could write to you and love you, because that’s what I do best in this life. I wish I could give you the best of me along with a bouquet of calla lilies.

But you don’t deserve it.

Photography by Ana Valentina Palacio.

Cecilia Gabriela Velázquez

Journalist and writer from Querétaro. I walk with coffee and my heart burning hot. I put into words my love for alternative music, romance, darkness, and nostalgia.

www.instagram.com/ceciliagabrrriela/

La entrada Alcatraces para ti se publicó primero en ERRR MAGAZINE.