Running, Slowly with Francis of Delirium
- Cheryl Ong
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Francis of Delirium's Jana Bahrich is not where you'd expect to find her. She's based in Luxembourg, but when I get her on a call, she's in Helsinki, visiting her girlfriend — not on tour, where she's spent most of this year. It feels fitting for an artist who has always sounded like she's writing from somewhere.
Bahrich started out the way a lot of young people did on the internet: making YouTube covers simply because she liked music and wanted to have a go at it herself. At 13, she was recording songs in her bedroom, learning the rudiments of engineering along the way. By the time she began putting out her own material in 2019 and 2020, she had accumulated a loose, self-taught understanding of how to record and make music. Looking back, she can hear just how far she has come. “I notice how young my voice sounds, how rough the production is. It's charming, though. For a while I was pretty embarrassed by those early songs and wanted to take them down or rerecord them — now I think it's pretty cool.”
In those early days, it was just Bahrich and longtime collaborator Chris Hewett, working small partly because, as she puts it, the world had made itself small too. “That was also kind of a byproduct of COVID,” she says, “because you just couldn't actually go and see people. So it was sort of necessary that it had to be that way.” Six years and one acclaimed debut album later, 2024’s Lighthouse marked a shift. What began as a small, largely self-made project had become bigger, more collaborative and assured. Bahrich has since signed to Dalliance Recordings, toured behind bands like Bôa and Blondshell, and now, at 25, has released her second full-length, Run, Run Pure Beauty, produced with Hewettt. "I can hear such an obvious evolution from EP to EP to album," she says, "just in terms of technical proficiency", and though she doesn't say it outright, in confidence, in scale, in the sheer number of people she now trusts enough to let into the process.
Sonically, the record sits at the intersection of two decades that should not fit together as neatly as they do. There's the '90s college-rock backbone of crunchy, quiet-loud dynamics and the odd flash of grunge that is filtered through something warmer and more orchestral, closer to Laurel Canyon folk-rock than anything strictly indie. Aliens opens the record on a cinematic horn fanfare before collapsing into propulsive guitars, a fitting start for an album that also plays like a love letter to 2010s indie rock, before it goes into Little Black Dress' all sun-bleached riffs and anthemic hooks.
She recovered from vocal cord surgery mid-album, went into weekly speech therapy, and used the recovery not just to get her voice back, but to push her range further than she'd ever taken it. In Requiem for a Dying Day, it takes four and a half minutes to reach its peak, with Bahrich gradually pushing her voice towards the very top of its range. “By the end I'm right at the top of what I can do,” she says. It is as demanding to perform as it sounds: “I'm always exhausted after playing it live.” On Out Tonight she reaches for something different but equally expansive, aiming for "something almost operatic" which is an approach she learned in speech therapy to release tension, open up, and push beyond what felt comfortable. The result is a song that shows off just how far her range can stretch, with a build that keeps gathering momentum without losing its shape. The song is tender, with the classical instruments running underneath while Bahrich sings about longing for someone.
And for someone who came of age making things quickly, resourcefully, and out of necessity, Run, Run Pure Beauty is a record built almost entirely against speed.
There is a moment about halfway through our conversation where she describes choosing claymation for the Requiem for a Dying Day video. "It's such kind of a, like, a fuck you," she says. "I'm gonna do this the most painstaking way I possibly can, and you cannot speed me up, because I have a thousand more pictures to take, and that just will take, like, a few more days."
It may be seen as a counterintuitive instinct in an industry built around keeping things moving: new music every few weeks, constant output and very little downtime. Bahrich is unmistakably a product of the Gen Zs who are extremely online, extremely aware of it, and visibly wrestling with what that awareness costs her. But this album was made almost entirely in defiance of the clock anyway.
"Everybody wants something new all the time," she says. "It feels like I just put on an album two months ago, and it feels like: when is the next thing ready? I don't know when it's ready. It will just have to be there when it is." She's careful to separate the pressure she puts on herself from the pressure that comes simply from watching. "It's not helpful. Sometimes it can be motivating, but most of the time it just kind of makes you feel like shit."
She knows that working slowly comes with its own doubts. “There’s still, like, a 10% in me that always feels like I could have done more,” she admits. But eventually, she has to let it go. “You have to jump off the cliff at some point and be like, this is what I’m mostly proud of.” It’s not a grand moment of certainty, but that eventually you have to let the work exist on its own.
When I ask her, towards the end, what it means to run towards beauty, she answers with what sounds like a belief she has learned to live by. "It's, like, a running towards slowness," she says. Then, almost to herself, "We're all in such a rush. I know. For what? I don't know. I ask myself that every day."
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