Bonbon Noir – Lady on the Hill

There are some releases that tell you what they are straight away, and others that feel more like you’ve stumbled across them in the dark.

Bonbon Noir’s Lady on the Hill definitely belongs in that second camp.

The whole Bonbon Noir world is wonderfully strange before you’ve even pressed play. According to the artist’s own mythology, Bonbon Noir is a private club created by Anita Black, hidden away in a mansion at the top of Bull Rock, an island off the coast of Ireland. From 1936 to 1965, it supposedly played host to free spirits, artists, musicians, scientists and counter-cultural figures from across blues, jazz, swing, rock’n’roll, experimental music and trance. Then, in 1965, the manor house was demolished and the four permanent musicians disappeared.

What remains is the idea of four ghosts still mourning their stage, wandering through the storms, composing in the hope of one day seeing Anita Black and their beloved club again.

Lady on the Hill breathes this mythology. The track is calm, but never plain. It has that ghostly psychedelic quality where everything feels slightly out of reach, like you’re hearing it from the next room of a house that may or may not still exist.

There are harp-like plucks that give the song a delicate, almost fairytale quality, but they’re balanced by something much more haunted underneath. The vocals have a drifting, spectral feel, with a call-and-response quality that makes the track feel less like a conventional lead vocal and more like voices answering each other across time. Then there’s the cello, which adds a really poignant weight to the whole thing. It doesn’t overstate itself, but it gives the song an emotional centre.

For the mix and master, the main thing was to preserve that haunted, delicate atmosphere while still giving the track enough depth and shape to fully draw you in. With music like this, it’s very easy to overwork things and accidentally make the world feel smaller, so the aim was to keep the textures breathing, let the vocal interplay feel natural, and make sure the cello had the emotional weight it needed without overpowering the fragility of the arrangement.

What I really like about Lady on the Hill is that it doesn’t try to force the psychedelia. It isn’t psychedelic in a loud, colourful, look-at-me sort of way. It’s more misty and cinematic than that. It feels like folklore, séance, lullaby and dream sequence all folding into each other.

It’s a beautiful, eerie piece of music, and one that really rewards sitting with for a moment rather than just having on in the background.

Lady on the Hill by Bonbon Noir is available now: Spotify; Apple Music; YouTube