INTERVIEW: Poesie
A space for nature in pop? Music as a sanctuary for vanishing ideals? With her debut EP ready to launch, this London-based pop artist shares her vision...
Poesie is an up-and-coming pop artist, whose debut singles this year have struck a chord with their blend of uplifting synthpop, effervescent choral flourishes and zest for an enduring hook. She grapples with the dissociation of the modern world, using her music to craft an empowering foil to dispiriting subject matter, all the while channelling an inclusive, communal focus that is closely informed by her decorated background as a theatre director.
She recently found the time to sit down with Gatekeep!’s Hugh Puddle, and the resulting conversation is a fascinating insight into her process, perspective and plans for future projects…
Hugh Puddle: So I’m here today with Poesie in the yard of the Angel pub in London’s West End. So, hello!
Poesie: Hello!
H.P.: How are you doing today?
Poesie: I’m doing well, thanks. I’m also glad that we’re in the Angel because it feels quite connected to me as an artist.
H.P.: Great, care to expand on why?
Poesie: I feel like the process of composition for me, well, maybe generally for musicians, is very much like calling down ideas from some sort of aether, like from a netherspace that I see as higher up. But also, I think in my work, less in this EP, but in the next one, I am grappling with, like, faith and ideas of what is beyond our reality, whilst also really discussing what I see in our reality, which I think is inextricable from questioning you know, where does everything go? Why are we here and asking those kinds of questions? So I feel like the Angel is perfect, perfect for that!
H.P.: The Angel is perfect, and I’m so glad to hear you say all of that right off the bat, because it loosely ties into a lot of things I was hoping to ask you about. But before we get there, you’ve got your first EP coming through! So you’re two singles in — “Hunter-Gatherer”, the first single came out, what, two months ago?
Poesie: Yeah, the end of July.
H.P.: And “Lost Romantic” came out…
Poesie: …the twelfth of September, a couple of weeks ago.
H.P.: And the Lost Romantic EP, which will be your first, is coming out not too far off?
Poesie: So I think the whole thing will be out by my birthday, which is Halloween.
H.P.: And when you say the whole thing, you’re releasing it one step at a time?
Poesie: Yeah, because it’s only three tracks and a little overture. So you know, it’s a slim creature, even though the tracks are quite full. So I thought I’d release them all as singles. To be honest, I’ll probably do that with the next one as well. I think it’s a nice way to make sure people engage with each track in its own right, you know?
H.P.: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, before you tell us about the next single, tell us about your sound.
Poesie: I’d say my sound is a fusion of lots of things I like about modern, computerised music. So, I love synths, I love sub bass, I love all the things you can do with technology. But I also love beautiful harmonies and the myriad of things that the voice can do, and I have a choral background, so I think I’m always drawing on harmonies and a range that I developed through singing in choirs. And then, I think you can hear all my influences in the EP, so Kate Bush, Robyn, Björk – that’s the main kind of vocalist – but then, CHVRCHES, Chappell Roan, those synthy sounds. Yeah, I felt Lost Romantic is a really good way to show that I’m making dance music and I’m making indie pop, and then some ballads down the line as well.
H.P.: One of the bits I wanted to quiz you on was the coda of “Lost Romantic”, where you have that refrain, killing all our dreams, that line that plays over again. That’s such a kind of caustic soundbyte-esque, like, modern pop-line, but behind it, there’s this wonderful, resplendent vocal thing. I thought of Kate Bush, Julia Holter came to mind, all these abstract vocal sounds. It felt like you’ve got this quite cynical material reality in the song, this idea of romance becoming this lost ideal, this dead dream, set against this ineffable… dream-voice for want of a better word.
Poesie: Totally, that’s really well put. I think you’ve really also summarised what the song is, which is like believing in romance as an ideal — an ideal that shouldn’t be distant for anyone. I think everyone is a romantic creature just by living and breathing the world that we live in. But I think that romance, and, you know, finding romance in the everyday, is tested by how distracted we are, by how our attention is so divided and sunk into so many things that actually don’t mean that much to us if we zoom out. So yeah, cynicism and positivity, sort of fused, holding hands.
H.P.: One of the things I like about the track is that you have that kind of lower-case ‘r’ romance, the dating-, attraction- romance, but it feels very much like you understand that in the context of capital-R, like, Enlightenment-era Romanticism, in that philosophy and connection with nature.
Poesie: A hundred percent, absolutely. I actually had a massive moment when I was in Germany earlier this year. I went to Berlin, but I was in Hamburg along the way, which I’d never been to, and I had a couple of hours, which wasn’t enough time, but I wanted to go to an exhibition. There was a Romanticism exhibition at this gallery, and there’s one painting by Dorothea Tanning, which has always really inspired me, called the Birthday.
I’ve never seen it in real life, but it kind of captures a lot to me, of what Romanticism is, which is this, like, connection with nature—she’s kind of got loads of vines snaking over her—but it’s also very much about the self, like, how does the self sit within that? And in the painting, there’s loads of doors in the background that are opening to lots of different places, which, for me, also represents, like, the manifold ideas of romanticism, the questioning of the self in context with nature as like an animal, basically, but at the same time having to live in the reality that we do. Yeah, I think Romanticism—capital-R!—definitely is what “Lost Romantic” is.
While I was in the exhibition, I realised that the first EP is Romanticism and the second one is Surrealism, so that was, like, a very profound moment for me as well! And also, yeah, this idea of like, what were the Romantics doing? What were they trying to say when they looked at landscapes, which I feel like I’m really trying to engage with in the first EP, and then Surrealism is like things going wrong or becoming strange or, you know, getting more tricksy, which is definitely what the second one is like.
H.P.: I want to hear more about the second EP! But before we get there, can you talk a little bit about “Hunter-Gatherer“?
Poesie: Yeah, absolutely.
H.P.: I tracked down a Substack post you wrote about its origin story, and I guess your origin story is a musical artist — one of the bits that stood out to me there was this idea of rewilding ourselves, “Hunter-Gatherer” being, if I’ve if I parsed it correctly, this idea of a lost connection to nature and addressing some kind of part of yourself that you feel hasn’t always been there, or has maybe slipped, that would reconnect you with it. Like, where are you, come save me…
Poesie: Definitely, definitely.
H.P.: What does rewilding mean and look like for you?
Poesie: Yeah, I think I’m someone that definitely is in my head a lot, and I think that is probably the blessing and the curse of where we are at in evolution, in some ways, but also someone that is a very like sensory person. And I feel like that sensory nature, which often has the most wisdom, for me, is like a wild essence, and letting that speak or lead me leads to quite exciting, creative results. But I think the rewilding thing is something I really kind of struggle with, because I want to sing about it and talk about it, but every time I, you know, feel myself expanding on it or getting to something, I’m confronted with the persistent contradiction of the lifestyle I actually have in a city and the lifestyle that we, you know, just take on autopilot because it’s convenient, if we’re living in, you know, somewhere like London, for example.
But I think parallel with that is the fact that there are so many beautiful green spaces, especially in London. And I feel like certainly in some of those like Hampstead Heath, you can reconnect with what ‘wildness’ means, which for me is just about being more sensory and being more in tune with what your senses are saying, and not imposing yourself on nature, but working in collaboration with it. So I think, yeah, that’s what I mean by rewilding, at least in my own life, although I always feel like I could be doing more… like, my off-grid days are not imminent, but I hope there’ll be a time when I can live a bit more like that. That would be a really nice dream.
H.P.: So it feels like there’s these two layers, this very introspective sense of how can I change my life? and then this more kind of intuitive, gut-response, sensory side, which is not so long-sighted, but more what can I be doing right now?
Poesie: Yeah, to feel more in touch with nature, to feel less governed by capitalism and its rhythms, which often feel just like very out of step of what we should actually be doing with our bodies a lot of the time.
H.P.: And yet so inescapable.
Poesie: Exactly.
H.P.: I feel like, with both those tracks, the subject matter risks being so cynical, but they’re both so upbeat, so driving, so danceable, and if you listened without knowing a single word in the English language, you’d probably infer that they were deeply optimistic. But they’re both about things that people I think tend to more often like, tend to sit on their hands and doom-spiral about — how and why do you turn that into something so empowering?
Poesie: That was definitely intentional. I made a decision that I wanted this project, and actually most of my early work, to be upbeat — because, first of all, I feel like upbeat music is easier to connect with, for want of a better word. You know, you’ll hear it, and it will move something inside you, and you’ll want to move with it, and you’ll enjoy it, and the first thing you’ll get is a strong endorphin response — and I feel like pop does that so well. So I definitely chose, despite but also because of their subject matter, to create these joyful things.
But I also think that we shouldn’t see dwelling on these subjects and maybe their slight demise as inherently full of doom, because I just think, where does that lead us? It leads us into solipsism, further disconnection and actually a hopelessness that we can’t really afford at this moment. So even though, you know, “Lost Romantic”: the word lost implies disconnection, I think it’s more, like, wayward but not completely forsaken. And also with “Hunter-Gatherer”: save me, like I’m calling on this almost like force or Mother Nature to save me in the song. It’s not ‘calling because I don’t feel a response’. And I think both those songs then end up having something in them that’s very joyful and hopeful, and ultimately quite playful.
H.P.: Drawing on that, and I guess the discussion of rewilding just now, in your Substack post about “Hunter-Gatherer”, you had that fixation on Covid-era Venice, and how, being a glorified swamp town, it did essentially rewild itself, fish-wise, bird-wise, and with that wonderful thing about duck eggs. Did you see the exhibition on bird life at the Natural History Museum last year?
Poesie: No, I can’t believe I missed that — I feel really sad!
H.P.: It was cool in a miscellaneous-bird way, but they had this part at the end that really stuck with me: this ambient lighting and projection showcase with a cycle of imaginary cityscapes from about 30 years in the future, where suburban parts of cities had been purposefully rewilded, where you could see buildings covered with ivy, these canals with their embankments covered with birds...
Poesie: That does spark something though, which is David Attenborough’s latest film The Sea. It’s all about how the sea recovers when human beings make a clear decision to not fish intensively for a bit in an area, when they basically decide to protect somewhere from themselves. And what is amazing is that within less than 10 years, these underwater rainforests grow back. And I think the hope of nature taking over is something that we can’t really forget either. Nature has this incredible capacity to heal itself.
I think what’s more concerning is like, will we let it heal itself while we’re here, and then, can we really be here to enjoy it and each other? I don’t know what the answer to that is. I think we’re at a really critical time of making that decision. I recently saw that the Labour government had decided not to stop bottom trawling, which is like the single most destructive thing happening in the sea — I see things like that, and these decisions that put short-term profit over long-term, actual communion with nature and working with nature just fill me with despair.
H.P.: I don’t want to go on about Covid too much, but having seen nature given a chance to catch up on itself, not just in cities, having seen what it’s like living in a world with no planes in the skies has given us all a really rare chance to really focus on that sense of healing. In a similar way, I feel a lot of the lost or vanishing ideals that you’re essentially singing testimonials to are something that we as well as late-stage Millennials are probably uniquely well-placed to appreciate as disappearing presences.
How… imagine you’re 10 years down the line, and you’ve made it; you’re an established presence in pop. How do you present those ideals to a generation who have grown up in an environment where they have more or less vanished to begin with?
Poesie: That’s such a good question. I think it comes back to the idea of ‘wild’, I think that we’ll never not have that hunger inside us. And I think that with so much of what’s been dislodged through the dominance of technology, which the generation below us have always lived with, they’re kind of, you know, without it being named as oh, this is to do with our disconnection from nature, they’re kind of realising that something really isn’t right. There’s a lot of importance to some of the outcomes of the mental health crisis, actually, from Covid onwards, and there being increasing terminology around talking about mental health and support for it, although that’s still obviously lacking. But I do think that sometimes the solution is right in front of us, which is all about reconnecting with each other, and therefore with nature, and with our nature, and what that means. So I think, you know, if in 10 years time, my music did have more of a stage, I would still be singing about these things, and I would still be singing about them with hope. I don’t think that the message would ever be not – I hate using this word, but – relatable to an audience who haven’t experienced nature and its resplendentness like we have.
H.P.: So you put some measure of faith in human nature?
Poesie: I think you have to! Looking at how people are responding to the crazy and depressing things that are happening on the world stage, and how many communities throughout the world are being pillaged and starved, I think you have to look at how the public feels about that, and the response by and large is this isn’t right. And I think that feeling is also about how it’s not right on a natural level, which I think has a lot to do with morality... to come back to angels!
H.P.: Coming back to angels! And moving ahead with angels! Let’s talk about that second EP and surrealism. I haven’t seen any announcements, any publicity, any thoughts, any musings…
Poesie: No…
H.P.: So I guess this is a… do we call it a scoop?
Poesie: I think it is! Yeah, I haven’t spoken about it at length, but it’s a really strong and exciting project. It’s called Curious Eve, and the first track is about Eve kind of victoriously bemoaning being exiled from the Garden of Eden. With that, I was trying to speak to a lot of the shame that women deal with about things they haven’t caused, which I see as a lot to do with, you know, the way that men tear up the world, through war, through vying for territory. I think that women often get a lot of shame secondhand that actually doesn’t belong to us.
So that’s like a feminist manifesto – which I feel has been cheapened as a phrase, but I really do feel that it is – and I think that we’re so distracted by capitalism, by the things that you ‘should’ be interested in as women, like, God forbid you age, God forbid you don’t think about what you look like when you leave the house.
I think all of that is fed as a distraction from things we should actually engage with, which is, you know, not only giving ourselves a voice as women in the West, like I am, but also speaking and elevating the voices of women in other parts of the world who are much more overshadowed than we are. So I feel the surrealness comes from what I’m trying to get at in the image, but also perhaps from the unease that I think is at the core of that movement, which is actually very sinister: that these things still continue across generations. You know, despite suffragettes fighting for us to be able to vote, I still feel like we’re missing the point of what it is to be a woman who’s alive and can actually speak on these things that are huge, in my opinion.
H.P.: So the surrealism is less about warping reality as we know it, and more about looking at these mutually contradictory modes of being that are forced on you — and reality itself is warped?
Poesie: Yeah, and saying that there’s something really inherently contradictory with so many ways that we live, and some of those ways, those contradictions, are in capitalism and nature like we discussed, but then other ones to do with gender and treatment of each other that feel like so trapping, even at this point. So I guess I’m trying to engage with that, but I’ve also returned to my themes of being in the city, and also dance and club culture, which I think can offer, like, a sanctuary to the confusion sometimes. So, yeah, I’m really excited. It’s five tracks, and it’s pretty huge — it’s gonna be great!
H.P.: Tell us some more! How does all that sit aesthetically?
Poesie: So it’s a little bit more indie in some places, a bit more rocky. So Curious Eve is very guitar-led, which isn’t something the Lost Romantic EP is, and that was fun to experiment with because I think that sound was brought more by my producer because growing up, I think I lean more towards piano led things.
So that’s an exciting part of the sound, but another big part of it anchoring it is two other instruments: there’s the organ, which is potentially coming more into pop in general with some people, like Anna Lapwood, who has popularised it for women playing as well. It’s still a weird instrument that’s confined by its very architecture to places of religion, but I think it can be really exciting and rousing, so it’s got some organ.
But then also, when I was writing it, I thought of the clarinet as having to be in it. So I’m trying to bring more things into the world of pop: my third track on Lost Romantic, “Cry, Baby”, has violins in it, which is exciting. But yeah, I’m excited to take instruments which you can recognise more as being embodied – obviously organ really involves the body, and so does clarinet – and fuse them with the sounds that I love: the synths, the heavy beats and lots of drum business as well.
H.P.: So it’s going to be clubby with guitars, organs and chamber arrangements?
Poesie: Yes, but don’t worry — not normally in one track at once! There’s a lot of variation on the EP. Like, “Curious Eve” is very rocky and organ-y, and then the final track, “Nature, Mother”, which is like an answer to “Curious Eve”, is basically big Madonna pop kind of vibes.
H.P.: How is this going to translate live? What does the Poesie live show look and feel like at the moment?
Poesie: Exciting question! Actually, I’ve just built a band which is amazing, and we’re having our first rehearsals in October for October gigs, which is quite skin of the teeth, but they’re great musicians and I’m sure it will come off really well. I’m going from a slim outfit of bass, drums, a backing track and me, like Billie Eilish-style, and then building up to a whole five-piece band for a November gig, which is really thrilling. I have done a few things alone or just with a pianist, and I do really like that, but I’m very excited to bounce off the musicians onstage. I’m really excited for people to bring their own ideas into the tracks, to make the live experiences unique.
H.P.: Great, that’s really exciting to hear you’re already looking forward to reimagining your tracks live. Again, just drawing back to how Poesie started — if I read correctly, it started because your background was in theatre and directing, then Covid hit, and you couldn’t do that anymore, and so you looked for a fresh outlet. Is that more or less fair to say?
Poesie: Yeah, I have always written songs, and I still have loads of like, wispy voice notes floating around in various devices and like, chord sheets and stuff from the past which for whatever reason didn’t make it onto my first EP. And I think that is because without realising it, I needed to be making other forms of art in my 20s, to be rehearsing what I cared about. If that makes sense, like the shows that I made as a director are also responding to a lot of these themes, and that’s not an accident. So in that way I feel really, really glad that I had that entrance into a different form and getting really good at it. It also means that now I’m writing as a musician, I’m thinking about the live show so much, and I’m thinking about engaging the audience, and how you pace things when you’re on stage.
But I think the thing about Covid was that it removed ways that I could make live work, and it just meant that I was bold and trusted myself with, you know, getting Ableton and experimenting, and I really had time to do that, which is also a luxury that I feel like I swam around in… and then “Hunter-Gatherer” was first written in Covid, which obviously was years ago, but it was really exciting to come back to it.
H.P.: Just from talking to you now, with that long-term sense of here’s my first EP about to launch, and then straight away here’s my second EP ready to go, it feels like this has been a while in the works. It’s really exciting to hear all that momentum coming through in your answers!
As we were saying earlier, all the music I’ve heard from you very much feels like you’ve taken this huge, very deliberately positive manifestation of dreams or ideals — what do you look for in other people’s music? Whose music do you find best to pin those feelings on or to draw them from? Who inspires you and why?
Poesie: I am massively inspired by what CMAT‘s doing, because I think she is speaking truth to power, and she’s doing it in that slightly tricksy way, which is through euphoria and through being an incredibly intoxicating, magnetic presence onstage. And, you know, on her new album she has obviously some more inherently sombre tracks, but I can almost feel that as an artist, she’s like, working against that within herself and she’s deliberately being like, I’m gonna make joyful music that is also critical. So even though we sit in different genres, I think that her songwriting is incredible, and she’s also very earworm-y — I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing a hook!
H.P.: Yes! Viva the hook!
Poesie: Hooks are just so animal, actually, because we want to sing them again. There’s something about the way that they lodge in you: if you’re interested in the hook, you’re likely to look up the lyrics and learn more about the song, and I think, yeah, CMAT’s doing what I hope to do down the line.
H.P.: That’s such a good way to put it — and while you were saying all that, I think at least five CMAT hooks just cycled through my head within the last minute. She has such a knack for great, offbeat did she just say that? Did she just sing that? lines.
Poesie: Yeah, she plays with rhythm really interestingly. That’s something that I definitely want to try more on the album, like experimenting with form and structure, which I also think she does really well. But I think that’s also all about the longevity of her collaboration with her producer, who she’s worked with for years and years and years. My kind of relationship is very fresh with my current producer, and I think you just learn more about each other, don’t you? And then that kind of grows as breathability in the project.
H.P.: Could you tell us more about you and your producer?
Poesie: So he’s called Fionn Connolly. He actually has a band called Forever Forever, who are excellent. He is an absolute whiz. He’s like a multi-instrumentalist, very incisive musical mind. One thing I really like about working with him is that I think when I bring, like, kernels of things to him, or particular lines that he sees merit in, it really feels like we’re creating magic, like it actually does feel like that. I think that feels so good because songwriting begins for me as such a private thing, and then it always feels vulnerable to share it. But we’ve become so fluid in how we’re working that I feel like, when we’re in the studio, there’s no ceiling on an idea and how that might change.
I also think one thing that we both have that’s very good is that he’s very direct with feedback — and I love direct feedback. I hate when people tiptoe around things, because in my mind, you’re, you know, you’re commenting on something artistic that I’m offering you. It’s not like a personal insult. Maybe I’ll feel differently when my songs are more personal, I don’t know, because at the moment, they’re less biographical and more observational. But I think that way of working really works for me, and actually, as a director, I’ve always found that really, you know, that’s a way I’ve always worked where I do manage to keep myself separate from what I’m making, to a degree, which is nice.
H.P.: It’s funny to hear you describe your writing style that way because, like, if I think about what I’ve heard in that context, it makes perfect sense, but your music also has so much… animal resonance? Human resonance? I think it has so much human connection that I wouldn’t intuit any personal distance unless you specifically viewed it that way?
Poesie: No, that’s interesting. I guess, yeah, the things I’m writing about definitely are things other people feel. And in terms of my writing, I feel really, I guess proud – again, a very loaded word – that I’m being like, how are people feeling around me? Like, I think that’s something I care about capturing at the moment, more than how am I feeling?, because that’s interwoven with how everyone else is feeling. You know, the self is an illusion. Like, if I’m feeling disconnected in my dating life, then so are loads of people, and I think that’s why I don’t go too journalistic in my writing. I feel like the album potentially will be more like that, but that I might lean more into metaphor, all those kinds of things might come into play. So yeah, that’s an interesting question, about biography and observation and how different and distant they really are….
Before we move on, I just want to shout out to Ollie Turvey, who’s the producer who helped me to create “Lost Romantic”. That song was the birth track of this whole project, and it was created slowly and experimentally over a year with him. We set out to make a song together, and it was on the bike ride between my flat in Hackney and his studio in Camberwell that the first verse and chorus for Lost Romantic emerged. He is an incredible artist and producer – he’s in Midlight and also works extensively with Hilary Woods, among having many other strings to his proverbial bow (he also plays the viola!) – and we previously collaborated on a film project together. Without him, there definitely wouldn’t be an EP, and I wouldn’t have had that first spark of confidence to make Poesie a reality.
H.P.: That sounds like a lovely way to find your feet, and yeah, thank goodness you had that support early on. We’ve got time for just one more, open question, so if there’s anything else you want to plug, any shout outs, what have you been listening to, reading, watching, whatever? What’s feeding in?
Poesie: Oh my gosh...
H.P.: Give us some recs!
Poesie: Okay, let me think about my recs. So I feel like I should always recommend my favourite artist of all time, because not many people know him, although he does have a loyal fan base: Patrick Wolf. So I first heard him when I was 12 on Magic FM, his song “The Magic Position“. It was honestly like a spark was lit inside my head. I was like, gosh, I didn’t know you could make music like this. He is very folky, actually, especially his current stuff, but his earlier work is much more about this dance of, like, pop that’s also been critical of the world. He has a song called “Vulture”, which is basically all about how our cities are really compelling, but also kind of horrifying.
So Patrick Wolf is one to listen to definitely, and then in terms of what I’m reading, I actually just started reading The Women in Black again, because I am trying to externalise my inner Gothic this autumn. I want to get through as much Gothic literature as I can, and I’m really interested in the fact that it’s an 80s novel, but it’s using this style and time period that’s much older, which, again, I think is really how things cycle, and then I’m also interested in how, to what extent is it a pastiche? To what extent is it serious? So I’m enjoying that a lot. And then, as always, I will plug John Keats, because he’s, like, my main inspiration, and I was born on his birthday. So, you know, Halloween and Keats are to blame for what I’ve become!
H.P.: Haha, so with what you were saying earlier, if I’m having trouble dating, that means everyone is: if they’re to blame for what you’ve become, then we all have a bit of Keats and Halloween in ourselves?
Poesie: Exactly!
H.P.: Awesome! Poesie, thank you so much for taking the time to chat — best of luck on your EP release!
Poesie: Thank you so much.
Poesie’s debut EP Lost Romantic will be released in its entirety on October 31st.
She will be playing the following shows in London this year:
14th October at The Gladstone Arms
27th November at The Finsbury
13th December at Dash the Henge