A voice soars through the speakers from somewhere in the past: 2012, and a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “How could I have known,” it goes, synthesisers shimmering gorgeously, “the god of my youth would come crashing down on my heart?” The song, Ablaze, continues more joyously: it is a fabulous pop song about love and how it can create “a new fire” in your heart. That sadder line from the first verse sticks in the mind, though, given all that followed for School of Seven Bells.
This celebratory opening track, and much of their new, fourth album, SVIIB, was written the summer before one half of the duo, Benjamin Curtis, was diagnosed with a rare form of T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma,. Curtis’s diagnosis came in the autumn of 2012; he died on 29 December 2013. He was 35. His best friend, ex-girlfriend and surviving band member, Alejandra Deheza, who is singing the words they recorded, was left with an album they couldn’t finish together. A year later, she began completing it for the two of them.
Deheza – known as Alley to her friends – is speaking to me from her new home in Los Angeles. Born in Guatemala City in 1978, and brought up in Florida and Washington DC, she moved to New York at 21 to make music. “It’s where we [Seven Bells] did everything…but I’m here [in LA] now, I like it here. And I had to be here.” She speaks slowly, plainly and measuredly, as well as anyone could whose job at the moment is to revisit the death of their “best friend and soulmate”, as she describes Curtis in SVIIB’s touching liner notes. “Here’s to our next 1,000 years,” her words glow, pink on white. “Love and gratitude for ever.”
SVIIB arrives in the second month of what has already been quite a year for records about death. David Bowie’s Blackstar seemed to be the definitive statement on the end of life in art, by a man knowing his time had come, and peppering his work with its shadows and signs as a consequence. SVIIB is a very different prospect. When the bulk of it was recorded, both its makers were young and well; Deheza’s job was to remember that after Curtis was gone. Essentially, it is a record that makes life out of death.
“It was an amazing summer,” says Deheza, obviously warm with the memory of those months in 2012 in which they got to work. “We’d reached a point where we absolutely knew what the other wanted to do with our music. We were spending hours on this really inspired wavelength, working side by side. We also had this perfect peace, as best friends.” They were making music at a rate of knots, too. Their third album, Ghostory, had come out in February 2012, and a live EP, Put Your Sad Down, was scheduled for the autumn. If things hadn’t gone the way they did, Deheza believes, SVIIB would have been their third release in 12 months.
The blissful atmosphere was a miracle after two significant breakups for the band in 2010: Deheza’s twin sister Claudia, School of Seven Bells’ keyboardist, leaving the band during a tour, then Alley and Curtis severing their five-year romantic involvement. Deheza doesn’t deny that was difficult. “It was. Very trying at times. But we stayed very close, as crazy as that sounds. Even in the way we’d got together, there wasn’t a separation between us and the music, so when the romantic relationship ended, we couldn’t be separated. It never occurred to us to stop.”
Deheza met Curtis in 2005 when both of them were supporting Interpol in the US (Curtis was in the acclaimed space-rock trio Secret Machines with his older brother, Brandon, while the Deheza sisters had an experimental dream-pop band, On!Air!Library!). They ignited straight away, on many levels. “I felt I had known him forever. I couldn’t imagine not being with him.” Curtis left his band, the sisters split theirs, and School of Seven Bells formed in 2007, named after a mythical South American pickpocketing academy. In the autumn of 2008 they released Alpinisms, a mesmerising debut of woozy, droney loveliness with a clear handle on pop melody, somewhere between 80s synth-pop and Cocteau Twins and something much more rhythmic and modern; 2010’s Disconnect from Desire and 2012’s Ghostory arrived even brighter and bolder.
The separation of the couple during the making of the third album didn’t harm their work, Deheza insists. If anything, it did the opposite. “You know, having to do something together, knowing what got you together in the first place, having to stay immersed in that world ... our creativity was helped along by those intense feelings.” After they had worked out a new, happy friendship, Deheza started to write lyrics about a subject she didn’t divulge to her ex, for obvious reasons: the great span of their relationship. “I couldn’t have written these songs or recorded them in front of him, if I’d have told him – I would have felt too exposed.” She never divulged this to Curtis. It’s a secret that gives SVIIB’s ebb and flow an even greater power – although Deheza thinks Curtis probably knew. “We both wanted to protect the moment we were in.”
Every song on SVIIB tells a part of their story. Signals tracks desire (“Until I have you/ Until I’ve felt your hands on my skin/ I’ve felt nothing”); Elias looks at a relationship’s early days (“Do you remember when/ In the morning hours/ How we would watch the stars play their songs?”); On My Heart tackles jealousy (“You don’t need to worry/ On my heart/ Is written one name”). A few other tracks say things they didn’t mean to initially. On A Thousand Times More, Deheza sings, “If I could go through this for you/ I would/ I know I’d suffer through the same for you/ I could”, while closing track This Is Our Time feels like a wail of defiance against darker gods today. “We own the night and when we come together/ We shake up the ground underneath our feet.”
One track, however, was written after Curtis’s diagnosis. Confusion begins with a hazy, sleepily slow organ line, and Deheza speaks over the top of it, of clouds coming in, of shadows heaving over dreamy heads. Its chorus runs: “I understand none of these changes.” It also includes the most affecting lines on the record: “We spent so long/ Facing the days together/ That I forgot/ How to be different from us.”
“That was in the middle of Ben’s treatment,” Deheza confirms. The thing that hurt Curtis the most about having to be kept in hospital, she explains, was not being able to be in the studio. “He always wanted to see if he could leave. He just wanted to do things – he was unstoppable in that way.” His cancer was aggressive, but he fought it aggressively: one day when he wasn’t allowed out, as promised, for a studio session, he got so angry he was taken to the psychiatric ward to be calmed down.
“But the one day he was allowed …” Deheza’s voice drifts off. “We only had a few hours, but I sang Confusion on the spot; we did the vocals, the synths, everything. And Benjamin was so happy, because he was creating.” Hearing Curtis’s sleepily slow organ line after his death was very hard, she says. “Knowing that was the last thing he played on it, every time I played the mix.” They made one more piece of music together before he died: a cover of Joey Ramone’s late punk song, I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up), a song that Ramone had written while suffering the same kind of lymphoma. Amazingly, it was produced from Curtis’s hospital bed, Deheza recording her vocals alongside Curtis’s brother Brandon in the studio, while Curtis spoke to them both down a FaceTime connection. He was, Deheza says softly, “a producer till the end”.
By August 2013, Curtis’s lymphoma was joined by leukaemia (“two cancers for the price of one, I guess,” he said on a rare post on the band’s Facebook page). A benefit concert was held in New York’s Bowery hotel that month to raise money for his treatment, Radiohead and Coldplay donating signed guitars and records for the auction, Devendra Banhart and Alexa Chung DJing, and members of the Strokes and Interpol playing.
Curtis died four days after Christmas. “I was so used to being immersed in music, and suddenly I couldn’t listen to it. I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t even move to it. I knew I had a record I had to finish, but I couldn’t do anything about it.” She went off in another direction as a consequence. “I became pretty self-destructive. I mean …” She sighs. “If I’d stayed in New York, it wouldn’t have ended very well.”
The following June, however, things started to change. Deheza went to California with directors Toby Halbrooks and Alan Del Rio Ortiz, travelling around the Indio and Joshua Tree areas of California, to make a video to accompany the group’s Joey Ramone cover. Something clicked while she was out there. “Here I felt peace. I could suddenly breathe. I’d never vibed on this part of the world before, but I suddenly realised I had to have a complete change of context to carry on.” By October 2014, she had moved lock, stock and barrel to LA. In 2015, she opened Curtis’s laptop full of demos and archives, and started doing what she had to do.
SVIIB is here less than a year later. Beautiful, confident and loud, it’s the band’s only self-titled release, which speaks volumes. Deheza completed it with Justin Meldal-Johnsen, who for years has been Beck’s musical director on tour, and produces electronic band M83. “I couldn’t have done it myself, and Justin was amazing in that way, treating everything with such love, care and respect,” she says. “I mean, knowing that this record was all about this vision of Ben’s, how he’d finally felt that every influence he’d had was coming together on this record. That he finally felt …” Deheza takes a moment, and exhales. “That he’d finally done it.”
It’s this feeling of celebration and achievement that has powered Deheza on, even when she knew how hard it would be to do interviews for this album, to sign off School of Seven Bells for good, to say goodbye. Although she’s not saying goodbye, really. “Ben feels part of everything now. He’s everywhere. I feel it so strongly everywhere I go. I want people to hear our music. I want people to know how far he had come.” She’s ablaze now. “How far we had come.”
School of Seven Bells’ SVIIB is released on Friday by Full Time Hobby in Europe and Vagrant Records in the US
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