Those brighter moments tend to come in flashes: the unicorn, the rug, the ‘pink era’ you’ve teased on your socials…
“Essentially, you watch me as I am, in reality. Then you’re gonna watch me stuck in between reality, stuck between the dream, and then you’re finally gonna get to watch me become the person that I’ve always dreamed of. In the beginning, when you’re in this dark, liminal space, you’re blinded by your own wallowing sadness. There are moments where there’s tinges of positivity, and pink is such a healing colour.
“A lot of girls hate pink when they’re younger and end up liking it when they’re older. That’s why I picked it, because it’s such a feminine colour, and I was able to accept the fact that I don’t have to have this harsh exterior all the time. I would be a little bit standoff-ish, shy or introverted, but the people that really know me know I’m super light-hearted. I wanted to show that in my visuals, because all my other visuals are very dark and cater to the genre. I want to embrace that during this era, which is why it comes up in flashes to begin with.”
The album title crops up in Erase Me: ‘Tell me it was only a dream / It felt so real to me’. How did that help capture the album, as you move between dreams and reality?
“I was in Poland last year. I literally woke up in the middle of the night – shot out of bed – and was like, ‘It was only a dream.’ It literally came to me in a dream. We’re moving through different parts of a dream, but I’ve had sleep issues for the past couple of years too, due to stress and the demands of being an artist, and that really impacted my mental health. When you’re sleep-deprived, you can’t really function. ‘What happens when you’re not getting enough sleep, or in a really good dream, or in a really bad dream?’ It was so close to home.”
There’s a lot of suffocating language, and lyrics that seem to be about feeling trapped, through most of the first 10 tracks. Why was that throughline so prolonged?
“I wrote every song with my friend Fia [Sophia Brenan], and I think a lot of artists will admit that not everything is about them. Sometimes you’ll hear your friend going through something, and you’ll want to write about it. That’s also a really loaded thing to live with, because every word that comes out of your mouth, people think it’s what you’ve experienced. To an extent, it is true, but a lot of it could be fictional.
“I was going through something in my personal life, I was pretty depressed. I’m such an all-or-nothing person, so it was either ‘love-love’ or ‘hate-hate’. We were putting on old Twilight and [town] Forks, Washington videos, setting the mood and thinking about what I wanted to say. It could be things I felt now or four years ago. It’s what felt right in the moment. There’s this cosmic feeling, where it feels like you’re being taken over, and the words just come out.”