Aerhart ‘The Keeper’

To Be Released May 30th, 2025

 

“Who is The Keeper?” The question comes from Amelia Wellers, visionary artist behind Aerhart. “And what are they keeping?” Painted as a playful form of Eros on the cover of the album, a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, she beckons us to consider. Mysticism, mythologies and a cryptic whimsy adorn the music of Aerhart, a project that metamorphs Wellers’ decades of choral, classical, and operatic training into vibrant electronic indie pop.

 

Wellers took her first piano lesson at age four. In elementary school, when her teacher handed out recommendations to select students to audition for choir, Wellers didn’t receive one. “It wasn’t surprising,” Wellers says. ‘I did things quietly then. I still do.” She tried out anyway, made the cut, participated in choirs for the next sixteen years of her life, and majored in Music at Tufts University. “It was hard to reconcile the practical concerns with the creative, but I always knew I had to keep the music going,” she shares. “It was what mattered to me the most.”

 

But soon after graduation, a relationship ended, Wellers’ sense of personal direction blurred, and music came to a full stop for the first time in her life. “I had been singing and playing since before I could remember. I was kind of paralyzed, disassociating. I had never felt like that before.” The pain was jarring for Wellers, but also illuminating. In its stark absence, she recognized just how much of her person was reliant upon music, and with an intensified clarity, committed to making it.  

 

She created Aerhart as a path forward. “The project was about finding agency, and the confidence to know what to do with that agency.” Wellers dug into the digital side of music—recording, engineering, and producing– by building a low-budget music production space in her Brooklyn basement during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to the meticulous structures of her musical education, she was able to break rules and bust open the expected shapes of sound. “I realized that art doesn’t have to fit into a box. In fact, it shouldn’t.” Aerhart was a kind of reincarnation for Wellers—a healing renewal through the radiant freedom of solo expression.

 

Wellers created her first album in partnership with Brooklyn-based producer Kyle Joseph. Aptly titled ‘WALLFLOWER,’ she released it in 2021, finally ready to invite the interaction with an external world that could consecrate the abstract of her imagination. Performing as Aerhart, Wellers grew as a songwriter, but also as a person. “I was finding myself and my artist through the project. Or maybe more accurately, I was choosing who I wanted to be.” 

 

If ‘WALLFLOWER,’ was about building a vessel and filling it, Wellers’ upcoming follow-up ‘The Keeper’ is about moving it forward. Each song is its own conversation with self, another confrontation with a fork in the road, a decision about which way to go. 

 

Lead single “I Didn’t Know (Crystallized)” is a realization made in real time. “I was writing an album of frustrations about my failed relationship, and in the process, discovering why it failed,” says Wellers. “I didn’t know how much of myself I had given up until I started getting it all back.” In a lustrous, multi-layered, and dramatically building ode to liberation, Wellers honors the gravity and agony of choosing to leave a detrimental love. She shines a bold spotlight on her loss of self and embraces the opportunity to learn from it: Thought I was made for pleasing / Turns out it's all a show / And I tried to cool your anger / But you only froze me in / Now I'm thawing and I'm shattered / But I'm better than I've ever been. The song is a sparkling testament to agency’s complex requisites: you have to know yourself truly before you can pick yourself up and set yourself free.

 

The title track takes on its own reckonings. “The song’s about imbalance—of power and of expectation,” Wellers says. “The keeper of life, of cycles, of secrets—she’s often a woman.” Her impassioned observations on the female experience are both mesmerizing and biting: I've been a grassblade / I've been an arrow / Long lean and waiting / I have the power / Of a double edged kingdom / A principled prison. The song opens with a wash of ethereal electronics, consuming listeners into the epic of Aerhart’s protagonist—the woman inherently burdened with more than her fair share of the world’s weight. Poetically enough, it is the first song Wellers produced by herself.

 

Aerhart’s sound invokes cinematic melancholy and lush and expansive experimentation, calling comparisons from Enya to Lana Del Rey, Weyes Blood to Caroline Polachek. Wellers’ technical background informs her approach—not in rigidity but in an attention to texture, time, and movement. In school, Wellers developed the curriculum and taught an undergraduate course called “Music and Architecture: Sound and the Built Environment,” where she examined physical spaces as conduits for sound, learning to calculate reverb by hand and analyzed soundscapes. That deep, nuanced knowledge shines through ‘The Keeper,’ as does Wellers’ fascination with contrasts—intimate and vast, delicate and forceful, organic and electronic, refined and raw.  

 

The album is full of counterparts. Birth and death. Secrets and honesty. Loving and letting go. “Sometimes peace comes from accepting the cycle of things,” Wellers says. “But sometimes it comes from choosing which parts to not accept quietly.” 

 

I cannot be The Keeper / But I must be a woman.