When the world fractures, we return to rituals
I don’t know exactly why, but when I first saw the cover of Eleri Ward’s debut album “Internal Rituals”, I was reminded of a scene from Barbie Mariposa. The 2007 film imagines a pastel world called Flutterfield, where the sky glows with bulbs that never fade and fairies drift through the light. Yet its beauty does not last. Darkness spreads, poisoning the air until the world collapses into endless night, curable only by a rare elixir hidden in another dimension. On the surface, it is just another fairy tale from a pink-hued franchise, but timing changes the meaning. Released between the shock of 9/11 and the turmoil of the financial crash, it offered children an escape at the very moment adults were learning that stability could disappear overnight.
Ward’s album carries that same sense of fracture into the present. Where Barbie’s fairies hunted for an antidote to save their world, she turns inward to face fragility, doubt and renewal. Her songs trace the feeling of inner light beginning to falter, the scaffolding of life no longer holding. Rather than meeting collapse with outrage, she leans into ritual and spirituality, drawing on otherworldly images to suggest that repair may require something beyond the ordinary. This is not escapism for its own sake, but an attempt to weave new mythologies in order to endure. Listeners step into her music much as children once stepped into animated dreamscapes, seeking temporary refuge from fracture.
That desire for refuge defines our cultural mood today. The acceleration of globalisation, the churn of technology and the saturation of communication have left many people with the sense that something has cracked. Old frameworks no longer suffice. The response has not been simple rebellion, but a turn towards the spiritual and the imaginative: the creation of personal rituals, small mythologies, and intimate voyages into the self. In this light, Ward’s record feels less like a debut than a ceremony. Tracks such as “People Pleaser” and “Medusa” push through confrontation before the closing song “Venusian Light” offers a glimpse of renewal. The pattern matters more than the details; each stage is a step in the process of transforming despair into light.
The sound itself reinforces this atmosphere. Shimmering textures and layered vocals create the sensation of drifting through a dream that slowly guides you back to yourself. The effect is not entertainment in a straightforward sense but a space to inhabit, a parallel dimension where the listener can rehearse their own rituals of repair. And when the final track fades, what lingers is not only Ward’s voice but the suggestion of our own capacity to heal. Like Flutterfield, our world hovers between collapse and renewal. We wonder whether the cure lies somewhere else, hidden far away. Ward’s reminder is that it may not. The antidote is fragile, but it already lives within us, waiting for the ritual that will bring it back to light.