Enfnts Terribles

Congrats on your first album, The Golden Ass. Was releasing your first album how you imagined it to be?

Thank you! Once the album was basically done, there was a strange moment when I was like, “This is it.” It wasn’t at all how I expected it to be, and I’d been imagining what my debut album would be like for many years. Together, the tracks had an effect that was much darker than anything I’d set out to do. This quality may not be apparent on first listen, but to me, it’s quite a melancholic album, not bleak or somber by any means, but mysterious and a little introspective, like the smudgy halo of light around the moon or an expanse of the sea glimpsed from the deck of a ferry just before the sun comes up. Jam City, who worked with me on the album, was the first to say, “It’s perfect for you.”

You released four EPs before the album. Did that experience help you construct the album?

The album feels like more of a definitive statement than anything I’ve done in the past. Only in a long-form record did I have the space fully to relax in the music-making process. With my EPs, I felt that I had to make each song this autonomous, concentrated, punchy track. I think each of the songs on The Golden Ass work on their own, even the interludes “Grape and Grain” and “Cinnamon”, but they’re also part of a system. Whereas with my EPs, the challenge had been making the songs speak to one another, as they all tended to be starkly different. On my second record, Lashes in a Landfill, for example, each song was a dizzyingly different genre. I personally think they worked great together, but back then, I was still figuring out how to reconcile and integrate all of my many musical influences. Since then, I’ve also learned a lot as I’ve gone on about production, vocal production, and improved with my instruments.

Was there anything specific you really wanted to include on your first album?

One thing I had wanted to do was include some kind of monologue that would weave in and out of the tracks from start to finish. Journeys are a recurring theme in my life and my work; the spoken word parts on the record were a chance for me to include some of the memories and reflections I have of places I’ve found myself in, fragments of things I remember, like a verbal collage. When, at the end of “Lonely”, I say that I saw a sign that says “honey and ice”; this is a memory of something I saw while waiting in a car in Greece about ten years ago. I liked the combination of words. On “Cinnamon” I describe a building in the distance; this captures a feeling I had while trying to find a forest on the outskirts of Naples. I was living in the city at the time and desperate for some greenery/nature, as there are not a lot of parks in the central part. I took the metro out to the peripheries and tried to find some woods I had heard about but ended up walking on the side of a road for a while, searching. Such experiences and many more were poured into the monologue and song lyrics.

Which sentiment do you want to bring across with the music videos?

Making music videos is so fun for me, but it’s also more challenging than any other aspect of releasing music. I tend to have visual images in my mind when I’m writing a song: just a faint impression of the location where the song is set. The difficult part of that is then distilling that vision into a project that involves collaborators who have their own vision and ideas and trying to please them while also staying true to the sense of the song that I have in my heart and mind. I’m getting better at having faith in my own ideas, but I also have a tendency to want to make other people happy, so it’s a balancing act. With the video for “Mystery”, the scenes with the mask on the beach and in the sea were shot with my best friend in Naples, at a beach called La Gaiola. She had never filmed anything like a music video before so it was a gamble, but one that paid off, as I got exactly what I was looking for.

It was quite a journey before you even released music in 2018. How do you look back at that time?

They say you have your whole life to create your first album, which can mean making follow-up records is tricky because you have to start from scratch. In my case, I wouldn’t say that I was able to put into this record everything I’ve been through and all of the things I want to say. I still have a lot of ideas and material saved up and bursting to come out through my music. Rather than looking back to a time before I realized my first EP Toxic Femininity, it’s more productive for me to look forward and think about what’s next. The vision of what’s to come is already coalescing, which is exciting.

How did your childhood affect the outcome of The Golden Ass?

Growing up, my family was very musical. Music was on all the time in our house, and my parents prioritized going out to hear music. Compared to me, my brother was always the better musician from a technical-theory perspective. I was more caught up in the social whirlwind that came with moving between countries and found it hard to isolate myself in the way that he was able to, and in the way that it is essential to reach a certain level of skill. Now, I lead a fairly isolated life where I spend a lot of time practicing my instruments, feeling like I’m making up for lost time, and overcoming a sense of shame that I didn’t become, like my brother, a virtuosic player when I was younger. My brother and I have played together a few times, and the lovely thing about the album is that it’s his fretless bass playing on “Lonely”. I sent him the demo and asked him to send some bass ideas, and he wrote back saying, “I chose to play fretless because I know you love that sound.” It’s really special to bond over music.

Pictures by Sylwia Wozniak.