There’s a surprising exuberance to A Man Alive, Thao and The Get Down Stay Down’s new album. Not because the San Francisco band, fronted by Thao Nguyen, are in any way inconspicuous--their live sets are known for their raucous energy--but in the light of the painful story at its core.

This is the first time Thao has used her eclectic take on rock to look inwards and explore her relationship with her absent dad. The result is empowering in its resilience. The vulnerability of her lyrics and high pitched vocals are contrasted--elevated even--by the insistently assertive beats and bass lines. Speaking to Thao just before the release of her sixth LP, I’m reminded that emotional hardship is a nuanced experience, full of intensity.

What have you been up to today? I spent most of the day hiking and by the ocean. It was sunny and warm and almost windless, which is a rare gem of a combination for San Francisco, so everyone stays outdoors for as long as possible.

What drove you to create A Man Alive? As I began writing songs for the new record the only ones that were taking hold seemed to be about my relationship with my dad. I think they had to get out and their insistence drove the making of this record. I was reluctant at first to make something so personal. But I'd also reached a point in my life where I was ready to delve and confront in a way I hadn't been before. I started to embrace the idea of making something much more personal and direct for my own sake.

What were you inspired by at the time? I'm always most inspired by what I'm reading, and when I'm in songwriting mode I'm especially susceptible and seeking. In the beginning stages, it was Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. After one particular passage, I wept. I was struck by how much of my life and my dad I saw in one of the characters. Then I wrote Astonished Man, our most recently released single. It helped set the tone and precedent for the rest of the record.

The tension between your feelings about your dad and the forceful sound is gripping. How did you go about this theme from a songwriting perspective? The two priorities of this record were to be more emotionally and sonically forthright. I wanted this record to better capture the emotion and energy we have playing live. I believe this record does that in a way none of the others have. I've always veered toward sublimation and it was very freeing and satisfying to be honest and express grief and joy and anger and hopelessness and optimism in equal, upfront measure. I also wanted to have fun and scream and dance and communicate with the audience on a more substantive and vulnerable level every time we performed.

Your previous album We The Common was inspired by your work in a women's prison. What prompted you to write about something more directly personal for this album? My early thirties. In all seriousness, I don't think I've allowed myself to be that vulnerable in my songs or my live performance. That's changed with age and experience. Writing, recording, and touring We The Common was so rewarding and rejuvenating and it led me first to my community and my city, and then to myself. There's only so much time you can go looking outward if you still have some inside business to sort out.

You studied Sociology and Women's Studies at college. How has that affected your work as an artist? My intention in school was to go into social justice work. I found very quickly I didn't have the constitution to be on the front lines of that work, and I have so much respect and gratitude for the people who do. I believe I'm most effective using my job as a touring musician to help support the causes I love, and I promised myself I'd always keep those causes as close as I could. That allegiance gives me so much; it makes me want to make the best thing I can, and do as well as I can, that I might develop a sturdier platform and be of greater service, and it keeps me from getting carried away with myself and hopefully from becoming an asshole.

What can you tell me about your song Astonished Man? It helped set the tone for content, but it also helped set the sonic tone for the album. It was one of the first songs recorded, and we knew pretty much right away that it would be the album opener. I have a lot of affection for this song because it captures an equanimity, compassion and optimism I don't always have.

Also, making the video for Astonished Man was so fun. I had to call my mum and warn her about the - I think tasteful and nuanced - blood and gore. She did not take well to it upon first viewing, but has since warmed. It’s not a mum-friendly video.

A Man Alive is released on the 4th of March.

“I don’t like to box myself in,” says Nabihah Iqbal a few minutes into our interview, sipping instant coffee in Dalston. This turns out to be an understatement. When the producer  - also known as Throwing Shade - released her Fate Xclusive EP earlier this year, everyone agreed that her textured and soothing digital sound defied genre conventions. But Nabihah also holds a degree in History and Ethnomusicology from SOAS, which she followed up by studying African History at Cambridge. After spending six months as a human rights lawyer in South Africa, her music career began to kick off and she decided to give it a go, putting her barrister title aside.

Apart from dropping a steady flow of EPs since - the next one due in early 2016 - Nabihah DJs, hosts her own NTS radio show and once sampled porn sounds for a piece of art that was partly censored by The Tate Collective. What does 2016 hold for Throwing Shade? The answer is unequivocally; music of all kinds and forms.

What are you working on at the moment?

Apart from the EP, I'm putting together a soundtrack for a Belgian film. It's a challenge because I have to make 45 minutes worth of music, which is a lot. But basing it on the visual stimulus allows me to be more free with the music.

Have you worked with visuals before?

The most similar thing I’ve done was when I got commissioned by The Tate Collective, which is the youth branch of Tate, to do a piece of music that reflected a Turner Price artist’s [James Richard] work. It was fun, but it actually got censored. That was the idea I was trying to approach in the first place, so it was funny that it happened.

How did it get censored?

I sampled a woman receiving oral sex. It’s very intense. Listening to the sounds over and over again made me feel mental. The track divided into three parts, like three movements, and the first bit is a bit more poetic and you can’t tell what’s going on straight away, but then it gets… clearer. That was the bit I had to take out. The Tate Collective had to take into account that they're potentially catering to an underage audience. The art that I was given was so explicit, so obviously I thought I had the same freedom with the music, but I understand where they were coming from and why I had to amend it. I still have the unamended version, though.

The whole idea behind it was that pornography is such a visual thing and it's considered to be explicit because of the visual aspect, so I thought "what if you take away the visuals and just keep the sound, is it still scandalous?"

Apparently so!

Exactly. So that was the answer to my question.

What is your song Honeytrap about?

It's about a honeytrap plan gone wrong. Someone has set up a honeytrap to seduce the other person, but in the end they fall in love and go off together. That was the premise of the song. I read a dark article about a murder in South London that happened a few years ago, which was about a honeytrap gone wrong, but in a different way. The guy got killed. This one has a happy ending.

In the video, you turn the idea of the objectified female body on its head and make it from your perspective, with undressed guys rather than girls.

Both the Honeytrap and Sweettooth videos deal with that. It's done in a tongue-in-cheek way, not too serious, but I wanted it to be a little thought provoking. Also, I just wanted a video with hot guys in it. You never see that.

Although it’s so common for women.

That's something I'm really conscious of. Women in the music industry are always photographed in a sexual way or not wearing much clothes. The idea of Beyoncé wearing jeans and a t-shirt just seems scandalous because we're so used to seeing her in a bodysuit all the time. That’s weird right? I believe that everyone should be able to dress the way they want to, but at the same time those women's choices are really determined by the structure they’re operating in. They're selling big pop hits to a mass market and sex sells and everybody knows that, but I think there are other ways to go about it. I read this article about Adele on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine and how it's a seminal cover because it's the first time they have a woman on the cover who’s not naked or portrayed in a sexually provocative way and how that's a strong message. But that's not the truth. The reason they don't portray her body is because they see her as fat. So it's not an important cover for women, not at all.

How do you pick the music for your NTS radio show?

I try to play music that haven’t been heard before and that I like and want to share. A lot of it is stuff I collected from when I was studying at SOAS. They have an amazing music archive of rare recordings that you can't get anywhere else. Sometimes I will have a themed show and base the music around that, but other times I will try to play every track from a different country and vary the selection. I also do research, so that I can speak about the songs. Some of the stuff I play is so weird that you need to contextualise it.

It must be a totally different process from doing your DJ nights?

Most of the music I play on the radio wouldn't be fit for a dance floor - unless you want to kill the party! When I DJ, I just want to put on lots of good tunes that will make people dance. I also try to mix songs together, because it makes it more memorable. Recently, I did a loop of the acapella version of Destiny's Child’s Say My Name over the beginning bit of Blue Monday by New Order and it totally worked and everyone loved it.

Throwing Shade is playing Corsica Studios in London on the 19th of December.

Twin sisters Imogen and Ellie Mason have been singing together since they were kids, eagerly circling the piano with their family to the point where family friends would refer to them as the von Trapps. At six they picked up the violin and formed a string quartet with their siblings and, as teenagers, they began writing their own songs.

Teaming up with fellow singer songwriter William Stokes, Imogen and Ellie now go under the name Wovoka Gentle and make folk music draped with sparkling electronic and experimental sounds, fusing the soundtrack of their upbringing with a desire to create something new.

Today, we're premiering the London trio’s track Likeness from their new blue EP (the follow-up to their yellow EP, released earlier this year) - a song, fittingly, about family.

What have you been up to today?

Today we were celebrating our birthday, so we had a load of friends over for breakfast at our house in South East London. There were lots of flowers and bacon.

How would you describe your new EP?

It’s punchy and uncompromising and, at times, quite layered. It may take a bit of excavating, but at its core is a set of simple and approachable songs. The blue and yellow EPs are two parts of a single body of work which we made over the first three months of this year in Scotland. They were actually recorded at the same time, but because we mixed the blue EP after the yellow one with a different producer in a different studio, we feel that it still represents a progression of some kind.

You have made music together for a long time, but how did William fit into it?

We were mutual fans of each other's music for a long time, and since our individual projects began to wind down at similar times we naturally gravitated together. We were so excited by the band dynamic and the new sounds we were making that it seemed like such a natural transition to explore, turning the band into a full time project. Our first outing as Wovoka Gentle was scoring a physical theatre piece at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.

You use your instruments in an unconventional way. How did that transpire?

It started with hitting guitars with drumsticks because we liked the combination of the melodic with the percussive, and then started to consider the sonic potential in all sorts of instruments beyond the ways they are conventionally used. We like doing things like playing the tops of synthesisers with drumsticks, putting vocal mics through guitar pedals and using mobile phones as part of our live set. Maybe there is no “correct” way to play an instrument.

You have previously said you want your listeners to be part of your music's narrative. In what way?

The music we respond to the most has often been stuff that has taken multiple listens to yield its best aspects. As Wovoka Gentle, we want to create music that is accessible but also intriguing and at times challenging. We want to experiment but not in an esoteric way, so maybe that narrative is one of coming around to find meaning in something you didn’t initially think of as easy or digestible.

When did you first discover folk music and 60s psych?

We have been surrounded by traditional folk and Americana music for as long as we can remember - it was always playing in our house growing up. More psychedelic bands, like The Beach Boys and The Beatles were also a big part of our musical upbringing. Will grew up listening to people like Paul Simon and James Taylor, but really got into folk music later on through his association with the West London folk scene in 2008 and 2009.

What is Likeness about?

Likeness is a song about inheritance and taking on characteristics of your father. It’s kind of like a response piece to Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse. 

Wovoka Gentle is launching the blue EP with a headline show at London’s Elektrowerks on Monday. The record is released on the 27th of November.

Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch never intended to become a composer. Growing up in a non-musical family in sleepy Bordeaux, she tells me over tea that it happened purely ‘by accident’. Her mother blasted Bach every Sunday, but plucking strings and pressing keys were pastimes, never viable career options.

One afternoon, a ten year old Emilie discovered that she could put her own treasures together rather than just recreating other people’s music, and an unexpected infatuation planted seed in her stomach. Before she knew it she was spending pocket money on soundcards and cheap microphones, making her own mark in an industry that continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by middle-aged men.

"I surprised myself," she laughs. "It wasn’t a conscious choice. I just realised that I could create things, and was so excited about where it could lead. It happened naturally." Bored hands crafted melodies from scratch, and Emilie soon improvised her way out of France altogether.

In person, Emilie is so softly spoken that I spend the majority of the interview jiggling my knees beneath the bar, fretting about the recording when her dulcet tones keep getting drowned out by the hungry men securing business at the next table.

She’s almost swan-like in stature, but on record she’s an absolute tour-de-force; crafting complex pieces that have led to a record deal from 130701, the experimental arm of Fat Cat and the label who discovered Sigur Ros. Her work is difficult to describe. Combining electro with piano and string quartets, Like Water Through Sand is an instrumental artwork which defies classification: it is simply gorgeous to immerse oneself in.

Until now, solo-work has remained untrodden ground for Emilie. Crafting scores for budding filmmakers she met at university, personal favours for friends soon grew into a substantial, critically-acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer.

Emilie has a strong reputation in film, and I wonder how the process of going it alone differed from her usual collaborations. "It’s funny, I never dreamed I’d be a recording artist," she explains. "I was always a collaborator, and I enjoyed seeing my music as a part of something bigger, being inspired by a larger picture and making it fit. You become immersed in the director’s world, and it’s a dialogue, but it’s still kind of sad, because you rarely spend time on-set like other members of the team. You craft something together, but rarely meet, so it’s still lonely."

The album, on the other hand, has been a lesson in self-belief. "It’s a monologue - I had the complete freedom to say what I needed to say," she beams.

Having spent her masters acquiring a vast array of eccentric avant-garde influences to balance alongside a childhood love for cheesy French pop, she tells me she has since grown away from the need to innovate and shock. "I realised that my love for the process was enough, and that I didn't need some grand, innovative motive," she explains. In her pursual of simplicity and beauty instead, I get the impression she has grown tremendously as an artist, even though we have just met. Even to untrained ears, the recording processes used seem dizzyingly advanced, combining many genres and methods, but the output is soft and dreamy. It’s music to fall in love with on leafy walks home.

Here we premiere Emilie's new track Tulsi. Like Water Through Sand is out on FatCat records on 13th November 2015.

“I just wanna have a good time,” sings Julia Shapiro on the last track of Chastity Belt’s second  album, Time To Go Home. The lyric has a sad twang to it, like she’s hunched on the curb outside a bar, feeling too drunk and restless to roll back home. 

The Seattle four piece can be described as a college party band that evolved into something more sincere. If their first album No Regerts (typo intended) was all about getting wasted with your friends and shouting “giant vagina” at frat parties, Time To Go Home is the moment the lights come on and you shuffle between the kissing couples, trying to find your jacket. Even a bluntly celebratory song like Cool Slut is melodically hesitant, almost unsure of itself.

That isn’t to say the fun is totally over. As I sit down with guitarist Lydia Lund and bass player Annie Truscott in the backstage area of Dalston venue The Victoria, their tour camper van parked on the other side of the road, I get the feeling they laugh a lot. Jittery with pre-show excitement, they tell me about how growing up has changed their sound.

There’s a sadness to Time To Go Home compared to your debut. Why do you think that is?

Lydia: Maybe part of it is coming to terms with being out of the college bubble. A lot of the songs on the first album were written for college parties and an audience that just wanted to have fun. The band was a mixture between being a reaction to the party scene and also playing into it and wanting to let loose and have fun and play songs that were so simple we could be wasted. In the beginning we felt like our lyrical content had to be sarcastic to be taken seriously. We felt secure within the sarcasm. 

Annie: We didn’t take ourselves seriously, like it was all a joke anyway.

Lydia: When people started to take us seriously, we started to take ourselves more seriously and speak more frankly.

When did that happen?

Lydia: If there was a moment, it was probably when we moved to Seattle. I had never thought that being in a band was something I could seriously do after college or even not seriously do - it was just not on my radar at all. We were offered a show in Seattle and the scene was just so supportive and full of wonderful women playing music. Before that, we were in a small town called Walla Walla. We weren’t in the town scene; we were just playing college parties and the only women making music…. And then obviously, slowly growing up.

Annie: We’ve become better musicians and older humans.

Did you know each other before you started the band?

Lydia: I was mostly friends with Julia and we came up with the idea of Chastity Belt…

Annie: … At a party!

Lydia: We thought it would be so funny if we just chanted that and if we were in a punk band. It wasn’t serious, so it was okay to do it.

Annie: It was a name before a band.

Does touring still feel like a party?

Annie: It’s a balance. If we’re totally sober, the performance isn’t as good, but if we go crazy it’s also terrible.

Lydia: We get along incredibly well and everyone brings something different to the table for touring. It feels like we’re in a relationship.

Annie: It’s like a four way marriage.

Lydia: A big part of it is just about being practical about arguments and things and having fun together and loving each other.

What are you working on at the moment?

Lydia: We’ve written a few new songs. Some are more jammy. One of them came out of us just playing together, in practice.

Annie: It’s more mature than the last two albums. We’ve all gotten better as we go.

Lydia: We’re more acquainted with our instruments. Julia and I had guitar lessons in middle school, but I had never played chords, which is why I had terrible rhythm skills when we started Chastity Belt.

Annie: You would just turn your amp down!

Lydia: A lot of it had to do with confidence. It’s so cool… Chastity Belt has given me so much confidence as a musician and a human, ha!

I consider you a feminist band that don’t want to be defined by your gender identity. Do you agree?

Annie: Totally. I think people want to pigeonhole you as a feminist band if you are all women and if you write songs from a woman’s perspective, like we do. Feminism comes into it, but we don’t have a specific feminist agenda. We’re just women - it’s the way we see the world.

Chastity Belt are playing Brixton Academy on Wednesday 4th November.

“A blue and windy day a month or so ago was the last gasp of summertime this year. And now the cold has come in, it’s damp and grey again,” wrote American singer songwriter Alela Diane about a year ago at a café in Portland. Words that can now be heard (and felt) in the opening track of her latest album Cold Moon, a collaborative work with producer and guitarist Ryan Francesconi.

When Alela and Ryan ran into each other at a mutual friend’s show, they were both feeling a little bit lost, creatively. Alela had recently become a mother and didn’t know how to approach music next; Ryan, who often tours with Joanna Newsom and arranges her records, missed playing the guitar.

Soulful, touching and incredibly beautiful, their collaboration presents simple, yet eternal observations and questions about life. It’s the perfect soundtrack for the cold days to come.

It seems like your collaboration with Ryan happened in a very natural way.

It really did. One week after we talked, around September 2014, he sent me some beautiful guitar pieces. I started working on the lyrics and we would meet in person about every other week. We didn’t make any decisions, but just focused on each individual song. By January, we realised we had a collection of songs that seemed cohesive and decided to record them. There was no pressure. It was very easy, very simple to work together. We recorded the whole album at Ryan’s house and he did all of the engineering. I hope people can discover the songs as the seasons are changing, just like we did.

How did collaborating with someone differ from working on your own?

It forced me to write lyrics that were not as innately personal and to explore melody in a different way. Initially, I wrote some words that fit into a narrative and I was trying to sing them over one of his guitar pieces and it didn’t feel right. There’s so much of Ryan in these songs that I needed to tune in to what he was trying to convey. It was a different lyrical process for me and it forced me to observe things differently, from a broader angle.

Is it important not to take yourself too seriously in order to remain creative and honest in your writing?

It doesn’t sit well with me when people carry their egos around and I make every effort to not do that. I want to create work from an honest place, work that I feel good about. And not worry too much about how it’s perceived or what I’m putting out in the world. I just try to be true to myself.

How has motherhood changed the way you work?

It forces me to be very conscious about the space and time that I have to write. I didn’t have that much time to commit to the project, but I used every little moment that I had to work on it, which was interesting.

How about subjectively?

It changed me and the way I see the world. I think a lot of the lyrics are influenced by it. Having a child, I find myself thinking a lot about the life cycle and how mysterious it is. The way we come into the world, the curious way a child sees the world.

I get a sense of hope in this album. Was that something you were going for?

That’s something I’m always looking for in the world - a thread of hope, observing the beauty even in the darkest things. And as much as these songs are broader than my other work, it’s still my perspective.

Alela Diane and Ryan Francesconi are playing Komedia in Brighton on the 10th of November and Bush Hall in London on the 11th of November.

The experience of girlhood is avidly documented, fictionalised and capitalised on, yet it rarely shakes you in the way that LA duo Girlpool manages to.

Their debut album Before The World Was Big, released in June this year, questions identity, sexuality and coming of age with poetic lyrical depth and uncompromising imagery, like on the fourth track Chinatown: “Come down and visit with me / I’m lying dead on my knees / Do you feel restless when you realise you’re alive?”

Emotional honesty, intensified by their raw vocals, sung in unison, and simple two-chord melodies, is always at the core of their songs. It’s hard to imagine their music without it. Just like Girlpool breathes the artistry - and friendship - of two seemingly inseparable people, Cleo Tucker (guitar) and Harmony Tividad (bass).

Watching the band live at London’s Scala recently, the last gig of their UK tour, felt like standing beneath a wire walker you know won’t fall. Without banging drums or keys, the music becomes vulnerable, sincere, and forms a bond with the crowd. Which is why humanity felt pretty doomed to fail when, during their closing song Cherry Picking, someone shouts “You have nice tits” at the stage. The next day, Harmony tweets about the incident, calling it “isolating and awful”. The feminist poignancy of one of their earlier tracks, Slutmouth, is terribly sad, but seems all the more crucial for it: “I go to work everyday / Just to be slutshamed one day”.

I speak to Girlpool ahead of their performance at Scala. Cleo is ill and coughing and I’m told I have to keep it short. In a red coloured booth looking down at the stage, we quickly delve into the development of their creative bond, minimalism and why vulnerability is so important.

What have you been up to since your album was released?

Cleo: We’ve just been touring a bunch. Hanging out and playing shows. Since the record came out we did a tour with Frankie Cosmos and now, as we’re here, we’re going to do some stuff with Stephen Steinbrink.

What did you find in each other creatively, from the beginning, that felt right?

Harmony: We had similar intentions in terms of what we wanted to make and that was really powerful and cool to experience, so we pursued it. It was just a feeling. 

Cleo: We wanted the lyrics to be really important. We had a clear, minimalist vision of how we wanted to be as straightforward and pure with it as possible. Initially we thought about getting a drummer, but we just didn’t know who would be on the same wavelength, so we stuck with just the two of us and it has been very special.

In one of your previous interviews you talk about vulnerability as something powerful. Why are you drawn to it?

Cleo: I think vulnerability can facilitate closeness between people. It’s a pure way to be. We started the project with the intention of being as honest and forward with each other as possible. We wanted it to be as close as possible to what we felt - really concentrated music. Vulnerability is something that comes out of being honest and confronting yourself.

Have you been able to be honest with each other the whole way through?

Harmony: Yeah, I think we bring it out of each other. There just isn’t any other way to be. We are generally very straightforward and emotionally aware of ourselves and people around us, so to not bring those feelings out of each other would be impossible.

Cleo: When we first started Girlpool we grew much closer because we were spending more time together, writing and making music. When you start to get to know a person you get to know the things you have in common and the things you don’t align with. We both made conscious decisions and efforts to identify our differences and embrace them and understand them, which I feel is something I’ve rarely done before. That made us really comfortable and strengthened our writing process. We were able to accept the differences that might have scared us initially.

How would you describe your writing process?

Harmony: We’re constantly communicating about how we’re doing in our lives. Usually we start with a lyric or a melodic idea. If we talk about something, we’re like “how can we articulate this musically?” It can go in any direction within that, starting with chords or whatever. It’s about the most most natural way of getting there and feeling comfortable.

Have you had an interest in writing before or has that developed with the band?

Cleo: We’re both written on our own, but we’ve never collaborated with anybody else in this way, writing words together. It’s just an entirely different exercise. It’s about sharing an idea with another person and then exploring it with them, becoming sensitive to… it’s hard to articulate… like you become more malleable to be able to… I don’t know, how do you explain it?

Harmony: It’s like if you have a hat of ideas and words and they’re all really soft and delicate. You pick them out and see what’s yours and what isn’t yours and you have to be extra careful with those that aren’t yours.

Do you take on the other person’s emotions and experiences?

Cleo: We never try to wear each other’s feelings, but we try to…

Harmony: … find ourselves in the feeling.

Cleo: We try to understand it.

Harmony: It’s about finding words that capture two different ideas.

Are you working on anything new at the moment?

Cleo: We have written some new stuff. We’re always talking and drawing and thinking

What do you draw?

Cleo: Harmony makes cool comics. I like to doodle and draw weird things. I’m really into blank contours right now.

Does the different mediums of art you use inform each other?

Harmony: It all informs itself. It’s like a giant painting, everything that you make is part of you. It all goes back and forth. It can’t be articulated or understood entirely. Art is like empathy. It goes deep, like brainwaves, water shaking. We just want to be able to create freely and not feel confined by anything.

By pushing sonic limits on her computer, Briana Marela creates a spacious and glacial sonority. For this very reason, Iceland happened to be the perfect place to record the collection of bright reverberating melodies, wavy vocals and cinematic soundscapes of her latest album All Around Us, in collaboration with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers.

The Seattle-born musician has always lived and breathed music. Her fascination lies with digital sound manipulation while working with acoustic samples. By combining that with confessional lyrics, Briana hopes her music comes out just as healing for us as the process is to herself.

Did you end up recording this album in Iceland because of its atmospheric sound or was it a result of your time there?

I think Iceland just found me. I was already starting to record All Around Us in Washington and then I received an email from Alex Somers, saying he had heard my music and wanted to produce my new work. I guess my music already had some of that influence before I even got there – Björk is one of my musical heroes. Alex and I have a similar taste and aesthetic and his ideas definitely did have an Icelandic feel to them - very Sigur Rós-ish, which was very cool.

Is the process of making music digitally any different from playing acoustically?

I think I approach music in a different way than I did when I was starting on acoustic guitar. I have my computer and my looping software and I approach songs in a more minimalistic way, not really thinking about chords. I have a melody in mind as opposed to when you’re sitting down with an instrument and starting with chords. I like my music to have a natural and present feel to it while having a computer behind the magic, creating sounds too computerised to be human.

So what drove you creatively throughout the making of All Around Us?

Just my relationships with people make the most inspiring material when I’m writing songs. There are definitely some songs about my ex-boyfriend on the album!

How personal is your music then?

Very, very personal. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. I’ll sing a song and I feel like all my friends will know what it’s about because it’s so obvious, you know?

Isn’t that intimidating? Pouring your heart out so frankly on a song?

It is definitely hard and sometimes I am very scared to play my songs if I think people are going to be listening really hard to the lyrics. But it’s so important to be vulnerable! Instead of embarrassment and judgement, I think there’s more of an understanding between the people who listen to my music and me. And that’s powerful. Music helps us connect in a genuine way.

What does music do for you that nothing else can do?

It’s really healing. Music casts a healing spell.

All Around Us is out now.