Elea Calvet - Filthy Lucre EP (2025) Hi-Res

Most artists, the good ones at least, have a signature sound. Some, the better ones, have a style that is unique and exclusive to them and them only. But a few rare talents manage to create whole sonic worlds for their music to inhabit, which only they seem to have access to, and through their songs, they allow us a fleeting glimpse, too.

Elea Calvet is undoubtedly one of those rare music makers that falls into that last category. Hers is a world that seems to only thinly border ours via her music’s dark theatrics and literary references, gothic romance and existentialist thinking; it is a liminal realm where all manner of terrors and mythologies, real and imagined, lurk just beyond our senses. It is a world conjured into being by music which is fantastic, in every sense of the word.

It is also a world where music works differently—where music is often less merely entertainment and more likely a stark warning. “Filthy Lucre” takes the tragic narrative found in Albert Camus’s “The Misunderstanding” and turns it into a bleak and black musical theatre. The song is woven from stark beats and pleading vocals, wonderfully and wilfully off-kilter grooves and gnarly guitars, all washed over by the voices that come courtesy of choirs of fallen angels.

“Filthy Lucre” comes from a literary place but avoids the pretentiousness that often goes with such a realm, and Elea Calvet makes music that seems otherworldly yet accessible enough that it pulls you along and into its danse macabre and dirge-infused deliciousness.