Believe It and It’s True: Eleri Ward Turns Affirmation Into Practice

There are songs that ask to be heard and songs that ask to be repeated. BELIEVE IT AND IT’S TRUE, released on 12 August to coincide with the new moon solar eclipse, belongs without hesitation to the second category. Eleri Ward builds it as a formula to be spoken rather than a track to be consumed, and in doing so she moves her work outside the perimeter of confessional songwriting toward something closer to a technology of attention.

The premise is declared in the opening line. I’m the woman of my dreams, my word, my law, my creed: not an observation but a claim of authority. Ward does not narrate a path toward healing, she places it in the listener’s mouth. The parenthetical voices answering the main lines, as within so without, you are god, be devout, work as a second chorus that confirms and insists, shifting the structure of the piece from confession to liturgy. It is a device Ward knows well from her work on theatrical repertoire, where the answering voice is almost always the character’s conscience.

The writing deliberately treats repetition as a structural principle rather than a limitation. The chorus repeats the same proposition until it is emptied of semantic meaning and filled with physical function: believe it and it’s true, believe it and it’s you. This is where the track reveals its intelligence, because the repetition is not compositional laziness but the method of the piece itself. Ward wants the phrase to stop being a phrase and become a bodily gesture, and to achieve that she has to wear it down.

The production, credited to Ward alongside Allen Tate, who was already behind Friction and Keep a Tender Distance, works through controlled subtraction. The vocal layers accumulate without ever reaching for the dynamic peak that affirmation pop normally demands. There is no drop, no moment where the production opens up to confirm that the affirmation has worked. The track remains instead in suspended tension, which is the most coherent choice available: a practice has no climax, it has duration. Tate’s mix keeps the voices close and slightly dry, so that the repetition reads as present rather than ambient, while Tyler McDiarmid’s mastering preserves the dynamic space the layering needs in order not to become a wall.

At the centre of the piece Ward places four lines in Latin: tu es speculum et imago, tu es velum et proiectio, es quod accipis, es quod loqueris. You are mirror and image, you are veil and projection, you are what you receive, you are what you speak. It is the riskiest passage and also the most successful, because it shifts the register from contemporary affirmation to incantation, invoking a tradition the rest of the track keeps implicit. The dead language serves exactly this purpose: to withdraw the phrase from immediate comprehension and return it as sound to be pronounced, which is the operative definition of a mantra.

Not everything convinces equally. The central section, I erased me of my past, rewrote myself to last, presents the rewriting of the self as a completed and definitive act, and in doing so it loses the nuance that made Internal Rituals memorable, where daily ceremonies were observed with the ambivalence of someone who performs them knowing they do not always work. Here the certainty is total, by choice, but certainty is also the terrain where affirmation pop slides most easily into the motivational genre. Ward saves herself through timbral control, never emphatic, and through an arrangement that refuses to celebrate what the lyrics declare. It is a productive tension between word and sound, but it remains a tension rather than a resolution.

The visualizer extends the intent beyond the musical surface. Directed and edited by Ward herself, it accompanies the track with a sequence of EFT tapping, the somatic technique that alternates pressure on body points with verbal repetition, incorporating references to ritual practice and tarot. The choice is coherent and revealing: the video does not illustrate the song, it instructs it. The viewer does not witness an interpretation, they perform a procedure. Few recent pop releases have asked the listener for such explicitly active involvement, and that demand is the most radical part of the entire operation.

Placed within Ward’s trajectory, the single follows an evident logic. The Stephen Sondheim reinterpretations that brought her to international attention were exercises in translation, an attempt to transfer theatrical repertoire into the vocabulary of indie folk. Internal Rituals, her original debut from September 2025, turned its gaze on the ceremonies that organise daily life. BELIEVE IT AND IT’S TRUE takes the next and sharpest step: it no longer describes the ritual, it hands it over. The song stops being an object that speaks about practice and becomes the practice itself, with everything that choice entails in terms of abandoning narrative.

The risk is clear. A track conceived as an instrument accepts being judged on its efficacy, a criterion music criticism is not equipped to measure, and exposes itself to the charge of being more interesting as a project than as a listen. Ward appears to have anticipated this, and answers with the only thing that can work: a voice that never stiffens under repetition. Across the three minutes and forty-seven seconds of the piece the same phrase returns dozens of times, and each time the timbre shifts almost imperceptibly, like someone repeating a formula long enough to begin believing it. In that minimal margin of variation lies the value of the single, and the reason it is worth returning to.