22-year old Bel Cardin is an emerging, Raleigh-born and-based singer/songwriter. Coming from a family of music lovers, the young North Carolinian can trace the origins of their music career to when they picked up the guitar at 13. Raised on Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead and Elliott Smith, Cardin later fell in love with a collection of artists that emerged in the 2010s, drawing from those artists’ penchant for melodic and crisp guitar, slightly ambiguous song structures and meticulous lyrical imagery. 

Cardin’s debut, 2023’s 10-song Petrify was a melancholy, guitar-driven batch of songs recorded at their college campus’ music studio. 

The North Carolina-based artist’s latest single “Decoy” is a bit of a lo-fi and grungier take on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era PJ Harvey anchored around a classic grunge song structure — alternating quiet verses and loud, rousingly anthemic, power chord-driven choruses — paired with earnest, seemingly lived-in lyrics.

Cardin explains that “Decoy” is “about a sense of self that is defined solely by the relationships in your life. When those are fleeting, so is one’s self worth. But it also can create a lot of gratification all at once when those relationships are at their best, which is why it’s so hard to chance when you get into that cycle. This song explores the dimensions of that experience, specifically through the lens of grief. I wrote the lyrics a couple years ago and it’s been interesting creating the rest of the composition and reflecting on how I’ve changed since then when it comes to this way of living. I really enjoyed working on it and I’m super happy with how it turned out.”