This piece was first published in issue twenty-nine. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

“I’m trying to get out, find a subtle way out, not just cross myself out, not just disappear,” Elena Tonra sings on New Ways, the opening track of Daughter’s new album, Not to Disappear. The first song she and guitarist Igor Haefeli wrote for the album, it is full of the desire to escape loneliness, to assert one’s presence and find new ways of beginning. She didn’t so much write this song; the way she tells it, it arrived fully formed. “The lyrics for New Ways were a stream of consciousness from one phrase: ‘I need new ways to waste my time.’ Everything else was purely pressing record.”

When we meet, Elena is wrapped up in her grey coat with a bob of thick, dark hair. Our conversation turns to relationships and we talk about the simultaneous need to be alone and with somebody else, and how hard it can be to balance the two.
It is in this balance between solitude and company that her new album rests.

Daughter’s first album, If You Leave, was released in 2013 to huge critical acclaim. Its dark intensity and emotional heft coupled with Elena’s poignant vocals have paved the way for Not to Disappear. The band wrote independently of each other after their first tour, experimenting with conversely aggressive and delicate sounds—and the follow-up is a clear product of this. New Ways is full of soft echoes and reverberating guitar parts; the track Fossa is majestic in its rising drums and euphoric crescendos. The album is a confident and aggressive discourse on loneliness and sadness, shot through with a determination to resist invisibility.

Elena describes touring for two years after If You Leave as a strange period. “I was having a wonderful time, but there were also times when I didn’t know why I felt so isolated in a room full of people.” She pauses and laughs. “I thought: I’m an empty shell of a human! It’s a very strange thing to wake up in the morning and feel like not all of you is awake, or that you’re living in a cloud. I was trying to find a way out of that.”

The new album title’s understated survival mission comes down to this: learning to be happy within yourself. “It’s hard to find that sometimes. I spent a lot of time trying to just love my own company, to love the person that I am before I focus my mind on being in love with someone else.” Elena’s lyrics are assertive: they demand privacy and company simultaneously. Not to Disappear has an overwhelming sense of solitude that is as meditative as it is powerful.

This power is woven through Elena’s introspective lyrics with newly-found candour: “Lyrically, I think this album is less hiding away in poetry and metaphor. I feel a little bit more like I can say whatever comes to my mind.” No Care in particular strikes me as the epitome of this. “There has only been one time where we fucked and I felt like a bad memory.” The lyrics are an almost spoken-word account of the painful solitude found in a relationship. Elena remarks that she often feels like she’s telling the audience her secrets on stage, and this is how the album sounds: a dark, hazy dream in which you’re seeing secrets unfold. It is intimate, honest and beautiful.

Fossa, the penultimate song on the album, immediately captivates with its otherworldly, frenzied sonic landscape; it stands as a beacon of the power that can be found in solitude. “How it ends and how it builds is something I’m really proud of: that mad beautiful ending with the gliding bass and guitars.” In fact, many of the songs on the record feel like endings, the exorcism of something—while the beginning is left unsaid. Elena explains, “I do feel like with every record I’ve tried to expel something and move on. The first record was analysing all the ways in which my relationships have broken down. This is analysing all the different ways in which I feel on my own and unhappy.” Is there a feeling of catharsis in that? “There’s a certain strength in writing sadness. That’s the criticism I’ve had as a writer, that I’m always talking about sad things. But I think there’s something really beautiful in sad things.”

Not to Disappear is out now. Elena’s hair and make up was by Alice Oliver using Bobbi Brown. First published in Oh Comely Issue Twenty-Nine.

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