It is more classically melancholic rather than dreamlike. I would say it’s tethering to a nightmare rather than striving for a dream.

When I was doing the tracklist, I felt just like how you would show works at a gallery. As you walk into the room, there’s an introductory atmosphere that sets the tone and then you dive deeper and deeper into the maze that is the artist’s mind. I felt like “Tequila Coma” was a perfect way to open up the album because it was fun and sexy. It also was one of the more downtempo, dark tracks with really a minimal and simplistic guitar tone layering with two guitar solos in it. One was played by Alex [Crossan, aka Mura Masa], and then the second part was played by me. It’s like a conversation between two people through music. That was a great track to set the tone.

Then it goes into some of the lower energy but still pop sounding, ‘90s-inspired tracks like “1967” and “The Girl Who Sold Her Face.” I was doing a lot of these early 2000’s vocal styles and guitar patching. It was very throwback, but also I was trying to mix in a new electronica taste on it so it sounded more modern. Then, it goes into the more sweet tracks like “VV,” and then it slowly builds into a crescendo. When I tracklist an album, I usually treat it like a journey or a story. Almost like going through stages of grief or going through an emotional spiral towards something. It’s about creating tension and then releasing that tension. Breathability, I feel, is really important for my records.

Without oversharing too much, I’m a very sensual and emotional person. I’ve always been that way. That’s why I feel a lot when I listen to music. So I feel a lot when I invest emotionally in a person. Throughout the years, I’ve been through many relationships, tumultuous, beautiful, violent, ethereal, everything in-between.

But I have come to understand that I can never, ever receive the same amount of love that I give because I just have so much love to give. After years of therapy and getting sober I’ve realized that I have to rework a lot of my ways of thinking about relationships and people. We as human beings are social creatures. I feel like a partner—whether they are your partner or your best friend or someone who’s very important in your life—they are crucial to your identity and crucial to the way you operate.

I no longer wanted to allow myself to get pulled into a direction where I lost my sense of self. So there were times when I would pull away from things or start to isolate myself from a loving relationship or a loving friendship, so that I could work on myself and fill up the empty gaps of the void that are me. I used to be the type of person where, without another person, I would feel there was nothing. So I needed to sit with myself alone. And I feel like this record is very solitary and my journey being solitary while also loving something from afar without getting my fingerprints all over them. Because I feel like it is possible to love something without stifling it.

There was a lot of obsession and desire and unrequited feelings. These [songs] were all processing trauma. Writing music is a very beautiful way to process thoughts and experiences that are very emotionally unbearable in the service of the same emotional truth. There are very unhealthy ways to deal with emotional distress. I never learned how to deal with emotions probably until I was like in my mid-twenties. I’m learning that now, and there were a lot of times where my world was shattered because of it. I never want to sugarcoat any stories in my writing. The songwriting is very brutally honest, and some people might not like it but some people might find it relatable.

I was actually just talking about this with my friend. Do we have to be tortured in order to write good music? And the answer is actually no. I’ve been sober for almost six months now.

I actually hit 200 days on June 4. I’m really excited to be on the way to my sobriety. Solidifying is great. I feel way less unstable and like there’s a lot more love I can give. When I was younger, I would put myself in these situations just so that I would have a story to tell. I would sit in the outcome of a terrible situation, and then I would look at myself in the mirror and say, “This hurts so good, and you’re gonna write an incredible album about this.”

This was not the right way to go about creating. You can write about it, but how do you process it? The instrumentality of the music processes it for you, so you don’t necessarily have to tell the story, but you can play through it—arranging it in a melodic way or with noise. This is what the inside of my head sounds like.

I don’t think there is any true answer. Are we torturing ourselves on purpose to strive for great art? I don’t know how to answer that, but I do know that, sometimes, life is just utterly grim and full of death and sorrow and loss and grief, and there’s only the human experience that can be shared. That’s why a lot of music touches very deeply: it’s because it’s a very human experience. And it’s okay to make mistakes and have a flawed worldview because that is living, and I feel like that’s why melancholic artistry is very compelling.

There’s one song I struggle to play live sometimes when I’m touring. It’s from [softscars]. It’s called “Software Update.” It was a song I wrote when I was in a really awful time of my life. It is basically a song about feeling used and wanting to upgrade yourself or change yourself for someone, but even after you try and try to change, they still throw you away. It’s also about turning to substance abuse and problems with self-image. It was a really vulnerable track for me to write.

It’s such a beautiful memory now looking back because I felt like I learned so much. I can look at it from a very objective point of view at this time of my life. It’s been three years, so it’s like I look back at it and it’s a beautiful memory because it made me strive to become a more emotionally present person and learn some self-respect, to not change for other people. Sometimes it’s not on you, but on them.

I used to think way too hard about writing. It’s way more relaxed now. It’s just allowing yourself to be uncontrolled and spontaneous in the studio rather than trying to plan every single thing out. I also feel like I used to be very vague in my writing style, but now I just say it as it is. “He laces my shoes for me and he holds me like a gun.” He literally does all these things. I’ve gotten way less metaphorical. But an artist’s way of writing never truly changes. It’s just the stylings that do.

I actually wrote in my journal that day, a letter to myself. I like to write letters to myself.

I said, Dear Nat, you are finally able to sit with yourself, and you do things that make the inside of you smile today. You drove out, up the mountain and cried as much as you could, but only a few tears came out. As you read this in a few years and look back at the beauty of life and feelings of a playground love of infatuation, so beautiful that it cuts all your sadness into tiny little pieces like speckles of dust in a night sky.

And you feel your ocean of tears into the Vanta black of oblivion and give love so deeply and truly. And you’ll find yourself the love and respect you deserve. And the artist who you are meant to be will come find you. You’re beautiful as you are, even when you are by yourself and you don’t need anything to complete you, for you are already complete.nAnd I love you so much. Love, Nat.

I went into my calendar and I put that note in a really far, random future date. Then when I check my calendar and that date, I’ll say, “Oh what’s this?” and I’ll see the message.

I’m practicing a lot of forgiveness and self-love. Emotional dysregulation is very common and people who struggle with schizoaffective disorders or borderline [personality disorder], and there’s a lot of stigma with mental illness. I feel it is really important to try practicing self-love, even if it’s cringe. That is what I would tell myself. When you try too hard to be a certain thing, it comes across as really inauthentic. As a young artist there were a lot of times where I would just feel really lost because I was trying really hard to be something, but in the end I just didn’t even have to try.

Yeah, I do. I love Donna Haraway so much. Rosi Braidotti as well. I really like academic writings on noise. [Japanoise] by David Novak. It’s a Western point of view towards the noise subculture that arose in Japan and different parts of Asia. But I still feel like it’s a very interesting intellectual approach to the genre of noise. Some people get really annoyed at academics, but it’s just really interesting to read about it in a very deep and complex way. When I was in school, I was doing a lot of noise installations. I was always trying to talk about the disturbia of capitalism.

I’ve always loved neo-technological aesthetics. And now that we’ve come to the end times where AI is gonna take over everybody, this is our last hoorah and we should play as much video games as we can and fuck around on the internet and do as much as we can until they take over and kill us all and take our jobs and everything sucks and there’s no independence or identity or creativity or human touch in anything. Am I complaining? I’m not complaining. It just is what it is. We created this. Human beings created this. Human beings created war machines too. So it was bound to happen. We’re the only species who have the tendency to commit suicide. It’s built into our DNA to destroy ourselves.

Being a non-binary person, I feel like there was a lot of closure in reading Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto because it allowed me to realize more of a post-humanistic point of view on gender. There’s a lot of criticism about post-humanist theory, given that it is quite deluded, in a sense. It is post-human, after all. It might also seem quite egotistical or utopian, but I feel like post-human theory is not meant to be a stringent course on what the optimal human perspective should be. It is more a perspective of being open and allowing yourself to experience a new perspective through this openness. It depends on if you understand where it’s coming from or not.

I’m really into cars now. It’s like a big computer. If you open up the hood of your car, it looks like a massive computer. I like to know the way things work. I just got into motorcycles a year ago. It opened up a whole can of worms for me. I’m doing welding next week. yeule is gonna become a motorcycle company [laughs]. I learned how to drive a manual car when I was 18, and I was like, this is how it’s supposed to feel driving a machine. I want to be able to feel it. You’re more connected to your vehicle. There’s always so much energy that you put into a machine that works for you.

Even with people, too. I got this from my mom. She’s a lawyer, and she thinks like this. My dad is more nonchalant. I’m definitely a very analytical type. It’s a curse and a blessing because it makes you very curious and intuitive, but it also makes you go insane. I’m on some antipsychotic medication right now. That’s helping, but it’s making me a little bit boring, not gonna lie. I’m tapering off of them now. I’m doing a UK/Europe tour soon, so you’ll get to see me off my meds [laughs]. It’s a whole new era. I’m trying not to swear. I’m being really good this year.

It was an absolute wonder to work with Jane Schoenbrun. They’re one of the most profound directors of this era. I really related to the film they made. I watched it, I think, five times. The first time I watched it, I was just dumbfounded. It was something so specific, like that happened to me too, but in a different universe.

If I relate to a story or a concept or a script, it comes very easily to me. That song, “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” is one of my favorite songs. The movie touches on this idea of having an idealistic view of a person, because if you have a view of something or a concept onscreen, it idealizes it. It reflects a lot about the way you put things on a pedestal or create fantasies. And then the fantasy becomes the pedestal, the utopia.

Sometimes that translates into being part of the computer sphere or the media sphere. That’s what happened to me. That’s still happening to me. When I’m sad, I just go on my computer and I turn my phone off and I turn everything off and I stare at my video game. I think, in a thousand years, people are gonna have this in the archives. They’re gonna be like, “This was a phenomenon in the early 21st century, where people were making up fantasy worlds on the computer: yeule, Jane Schoenbrun, and the Silent Hill franchise!” [laughs] They’re gonna shoot it up into space. It’s gonna be the archive. That’s so funny, just thinking about that. We’ll all be dead and gone by then.