Elle Belle’s Sommerville Girls takes on a familiar predicament: caring about someone while having absolutely no idea how to bridge the distance between you. Released October 6 through Little Record Company, the new single introduces another chapter for Christopher Pappas’ Los Angeles-based project. My interest starts with that tension between having an enormous feeling and trying to find a manageable sentence for it.
I have a soft spot for a love song that leaves the nerves in. The pause before replying. The tight chest. The perfectly reasonable message that somehow requires seventeen drafts. Romantic confidence gets plenty of screen time. The person standing in the kitchen, phone in hand, trying to sound like a functioning adult deserves a chorus, too.
According to the release materials, “Sommerville Girls” pairs bright guitars and layered vocals with romantic anxiety, tenderness and self-deprecating humor. Its narrator is trying to reach someone who seems to inhabit a different world. The stated destination is disarmingly plain: “I love you.”
That premise gives me something more interesting to consider than whether a new single will fit neatly into a playlist. What happens when a songwriter with a taste for complexity decides to let affection be obvious?
The songwriter behind the uncertainty
Pappas grew up in rural New Hampshire and formed The Everyday Visuals before moving through Boston’s music scene and eventually relocating to Los Angeles in 2010. His history with Little Record Company predates Elle Belle: he released music as Miracle Parade through the label before developing this project. Elle Belle’s debut, WAKO GUMBO, arrived in 2016.
That history matters because this isn’t a songwriter suddenly discovering that feelings can get complicated. His catalog has already made room for alienation, political disappointment and the effort of finding hope. The label describes 2018’s No Signal as a breakup with America.
In his 2025 interview with Mundane, Pappas explained that Boston strengthened his songwriting craft while Los Angeles helped sharpen his artistic point of view. He also offered a useful explanation for the project’s stylistic restlessness. Genre can carry both an aesthetic and a culture, he said, and he tries to approach those traditions as a visitor willing to learn.
I appreciate that distinction. A musician can be curious without treating every sound as something he has invented. The question becomes what those borrowed musical languages allow him to express.
For this single, the release description suggests an answer rooted in tenderness. After songs that wrestle with belonging on a much larger scale, the distance between two people can provide its own substantial subject.
What How Do I Feel? brings to the conversation
The album to revisit alongside this release is How Do I Feel?, which came out September 1, 2023. Its ten tracks were co-produced by Pappas and Pierre de Reeder at 64 Sound in Highland Park. The album’s official notes describe an exploration of emotional uncertainty and the gap between expectations and lived experience.
Even its title resists a tidy answer. I find that appealing. Some days, the most accurate response to that question requires sitting down before speaking.
The existing criticism gives the album useful context. In his October 5, 2023 review for mxdwn, Cristian Garcia described a move toward dream pop, soft rock and bedroom pop. He praised the record’s polish and emotional approach while criticizing repetition in “The Low Descent” and “Let Go.” He singled out “007” as a welcome change of pace.
Peter Jesperson was more enthusiastic in his “Best Of 2023” selection on the Twin/Tone website, placing How Do I Feel? at No. 13 and praising the band’s range and songwriting.
Those responses leave room for an actual conversation about craft. Warmth can invite a listener in. Familiar arrangements can also become too familiar. Emotional sincerity earns attention, but the songs still have to sustain it.
That is a useful standard to carry into “Sommerville Girls.” Its premise is promising. The question for a listener is whether the arrangement gives those anxious verses and that plain confession enough movement to make the arrival feel earned.
A love song can stop performing indifference
The cultural thread that interests me here is our attachment to the person who cares less. In romantic stories, a withheld answer or carefully rationed affection can create suspense. I understand the storytelling mechanism. I also get tired of watching emotional evasiveness collect points for being mysterious.
A love song has another option. It can let someone be awkward, funny and unmistakably invested.
Pappas has spoken about putting melody at the center of his work. In a Fifteen Questions interview, he described music as a place for identity and emotional release, and said he wanted to separate artistic success from commercial success.
That gives this single’s premise a useful frame. A clear melody and a clear feeling can be deliberate artistic choices. Complexity can live in the route to a confession, even when the confession itself takes only three words.
I don’t need a romantic narrator to solve the whole relationship before the song ends. I do want the other person to remain a person, with a world and a perspective of their own. Reaching across a difference is interesting precisely because affection doesn’t erase it.
Leave room for the plain sentence
Ahead of How Do I Feel?, Pappas said he might move toward releasing individual songs because that approach better suited how he wrote and the emotions that prompted him. The label subsequently promoted a series of singles.
Seen in that context, “Sommerville Girls” offers a chance to follow one feeling without requiring it to explain an entire era of someone’s life.
That is the possibility I like most. There is room in pop music for the tangled thought, the nervous joke and the sentence we have been editing around. There is also room to put the phone down, exhale and admit what we mean.
An unguarded love song gives the person doing all that caring a turn at the microphone. I’m interested in what happens when we let them finish.
Explore Elle Belle’s music and How Do I Feel? on Bandcamp.
