Belfast’s Alana Henderson shares her new single Appetite today, June 12th, with a video directed and edited by Greta Baltic premiering on KLOF Mag.
Henderson has spent more than a decade building her own corner of contemporary folk, from her debut EP Wax & Wane (2013) and several years touring as a multi-instrumentalist with Hozier through to Museum (2019), the 2025 single Once in a House on Fire, and collaborations with Joshua Burnside as well as her brother, Jarlath Henderson – she delivered those “perfectly matched, and truly beautiful, harmonies” we praised in our review of his 2016 album Hearts Broken, Heads Turned. Working as a self-represented independent, she has gathered over 16 million streams in the process.
Appetite marks a shift in approach: Henderson sets aside her signature cello for tenor guitar and turns inward. The song sits with the confusion of misreading your own appetite — chasing the wrong thing, building a life around what you think you ought to want, then recognising the gap between outside expectation and inner truth. There’s a restlessness to the writing, which moves between wit and self-reproach: “I can’t get enough / Of what I don’t want / Honestly.” A faint country inflection and a shimmer of pedal steel give it a bittersweet lift.
Baltic’s video matches the mood — a silent-movie-inspired black-and-white film with a Wes-Anderson-gone-goth sensibility, catching the strange feeling of moving towards a life that looks right from the outside while quietly unravelling within.
Henderson explains where the song came from:
‘I wrote “Appetite” after spending too long stuck in my own head – either avoiding creating altogether or making things in private, only to dismantle them before they had the chance to exist. I’d write, sometimes even record, but never actually share or perform. I’d already decided it wasn’t good enough.
But perfectionism isn’t discipline, it’s delay. And if you let it, it starves your art and leaves you with a low, constant hunger for something you can’t quite name.
Appetite was the first song I recorded with producer George Sloan at Half Bap studios in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. We’ve worked closely together to co-produce the album and he has really helped to usher me back to enjoying the process of making music and resisting that kind of self-sabotage.
I wanted the video to feel like a quiet, self-contained world – slightly surreal, a little untouchable. Something with a silent film sensibility, holding that tension between craving and completion; appetite and denial.
I met director Greta Baltic after a small, sober show I played with Regard Belfast and I felt straight away that we understood each other creatively. She listened, really listened, and helped translate my idea into something that feels exactly like it did in my head.
The roses and the cake in the video are the things I want. And in the end, I finally let myself have them.’
Appetite arrives ahead of a forthcoming album (details to follow) and is out now.
Follow & More: https://linktr.ee/AlanaHenderson
Also watch: Once in a House on Fire (Official Video)