INTERVIEW: Rising star and queer activist Amy Lilley on new single 'Video Games' and upcoming debut album
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Brandon Hinton
Amy Lilley is an artist who creates remarkable music and really should be your new favourite pop star. Hailing from South Africa, she first started releasing music in 2020 with the single ‘Formidable’, which was followed by her debut EP She. Her music is capable of that rare thing - to surprise and intrigue you, not knowing where she will go next. A song may start off as a gentle piano ballad before adding more and more layers until it becomes a smooth electronica track, or an acoustic track transforms into a shimmering synth number. It is the type of music that thrills on the very first listen.
At the end of last month Lilley released her first new music since 2020 with the single ‘Video Games’. The song is a joyful, upbeat synthpop number with an underlying melancholy in the lyrics of conquering shyness and unrequited love.
“I was so nervous to talk to anyone and always in my head. I found solace in video games a lot, I never put myself out there and it took me so long to come out of my shell. I still am trying to,” Lilley says. “I came out early as a kid and it was always really hard for me to interact with people, I was terrified of asking a girl on a date! I wrote 'Video Games' to make light of being so shy and in such a shameful place, and turn it into something powerful and playful. I am a shy, video games nerd and I love who I am kind of thing.”
Lilley has also announced she will be releasing her debut album PETRICHOR later this year.
“Petrichor means the smell after the rain. In my debut single, ‘Formidable’ the main line was ‘I hope it's raining on the other side’,” she says. “I wrote that album in such a heartbroken place and this new album is about finally making it through to the other side. I felt like I could make music without a heavy weight on my chest. This album is a lot more personal and introspective for me.”
Aside from her music, Lilley is a strong activist for the queer community. She built an eatery and live music venue, The Raptor Room, as a safe haven for the LGBTQIA+ community and also ensures her music embraces culturally inclusive conversations and represents and increases the visibility of all who identify as LGBTQIA+.
Only at the start of her career, there is so much to get excited about with Amy Lilley and her debut album is sure to be gem. We recently caught up with her to find out more about her music and career.
Amy, it is such a delight to speak to you. I want to start with ‘Video Games’, it's such a beautiful track. Talk to me about it.
I'm so happy you like it. It's a very different track for me, I usually make quite like sad and emotive music. I wrote this song about when I was a kid, I grew up in South Africa and it wasn't okay to be queer. So I kind of reverted back into a shell and I was really scared to talk to anyone. I used video games as an escape and I wanted to write a song to my previous self as a form of therapy - it's okay that you were so shy, playing video games actually made you a better person. I thought I could use it to say, ‘Hey, I can't talk to you, but do you want to play video games with me instead?’
That’s so beautiful. A love letter to your former self is such an important thing for us to do as we grow. Did you always envision the melody and the production to have that nostalgic arcade feel to it? Because as you said, it's very different to your previous work?
The producer I was working with Greg Abrams, we'd never worked with each other before and after we wrote one song we were like, ‘we make this kind of music together, so let's just keep doing this thing’. The whole album is quite nostalgic with the sounds that are in it and what it meant to me at the time. It is definitely purposefully done to make you think, ‘okay, it sounds old, but it sounds new’.
It's also looking back on a time that, whenever anyone's living through it, it can be quite savage, and still is savage when you look back on it. But because you’ve come out the other side, you can see the goodness in it.
Yeah, I think you need enough space. It took me like, 20 years to have enough space it be like, ‘oh, there was actually a good thing that happened that way’. Even though there was some bad things, some good things came out of it.
You said that you grew up as a shy person and quite introverted. Now you are a performing artist, how does that sit with the shy girl in her in her room playing video games?
They fight a lot! Especially for me doing live shows, I have to psych myself up. Florence from Florence + The Machine said when she performs, she imagines she starts off in a really small bubble, and then she does things to make the bubble bigger and bigger before she goes on stage. And then the whole crowd is in the bubble, and then she feels safe. I just practice that all the time: ‘Okay, you feel like this, but just open up the bubble a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more’
I want to talk about your career trajectory. What did music mean to you when you were playing video games? Has it always been an interest of yours?
Oh, yeah, in a lot of ways. My mum and my dad were really into music and my mum used to sing in the kitchen all the time while cooking. I wrote songs for other people all the time or I was always playing piano. I also had a queer live music restaurant so I was always surrounding myself with it.
You were a a restaurateur first, what was the shift? How did you go from dabbling in music to releasing your beautiful debut EP She?
It was actually luck. I didn't think I'd ever be a singer, I thought I would be behind the scenes. But I did one song called ‘Formidable’ and the right person heard it and was just like, ‘you should be doing this.’ And it started from there, just the right person hearing my track. That's all.
That’s really gorgeous. You spoke about growing up queer in a place where that wasn't acceptable, particularly when you were younger. Do you think, possibly not seeing someone like you representing, making music in South Africa that may have unconsciously made you think ‘why would there be space for me?’
Yeah, for everyone who is queer, or if you're different in any way you always feel marginalised or unseen, so I think it does play a role for anyone who feels that way. So I didn't think there was much space for me at all, so I kind of just shied away from it.
Your song, ‘No Show’, and its accompanying music video, just celebrate love and it is so so gorgeous. I want to deep dive a little bit into that song because it's very different to ‘Video Games’, but it just speaks volumes to you as an artist. Can you talk me through a little bit about the creation of that song and also its paired visuals?
I actually wrote ‘No Show’ in tears in Heathrow airport in London, because I was supposed to meet someone there and they just dropped me last minute. It was someone that I loved very much and they broke my heart in a really bad way. It's called ‘No Show’, so I was obviously calling them out on it. It was a really therapeutic thing for me to write because I immediately felt better. It was my first music video ever, and I thought ‘I am South African and I am a queer South African, but I also am a South African who is white.’. There's a lot of problems in the queer community that white people can do that people of colour cannot do just because of either class, or religion, or how the whole system has messed everything up. So I thought, ‘Okay, let's take two men of colour, who are suffering the most in this country from hate crimes and everything, and let's show them being genuine and loving and not terrifying’. I wanted to do that and with me in the background and not be in the video at all, it's like speak up and say, ‘Hey, this is important.’
I honestly think it’s one of the most beautiful things I've seen. I applaud how you use your platform. You do champion not just the loner, not just the shy girl, not just the sad queer girl, you're championing a lot of people already with your music. How have you found wielding that platform of political statement as a public figure, particularly with the world we live in people look to artists for governance in a way. How have you found that?
I just try and do what I think is right. If I see a problem, if I can say something about it, I'm gonna say it. I don't want to do it with every video that I make, because the impact will be less, it'll be just another statement after another statement. I try and think about things that I want to do, and then try and plan it so it comes out sporadically. I can still be an artist as myself and not give everything away to making a statement or showing something that needs to be shown. Because I don't want to overstep the boundaries because I have my place in this world as well.
That is such a beautiful and a genuinely great perspective on it. You have such a different sound coming out with ‘Video Games’ and you've got a debut album on the brew. Can you talk to me a little bit about the direction that's going in?
Yeah sure. I sent [music distribution company] Platoon some tracks and they were just like, ‘none of these sound the same Amy!’ and I was like, ‘yeah, that's just me, I can't pretend to be something I'm not’. The one thing that carries through is that I keep changing. I'm still trying to find that particular sound that artists talk about, ‘oh, I finally found my sound’. I'm still enjoying trying to find it and not making a whole mission about finding it. The album goes from heavy country stuff to a little bit of R&B, like ‘No Show’, and then [there’s also] some weird electronic vibes, and a happy song, like ‘Video Games’. For me, it was just a process of looking back and looking forward. Like I was in a car, driving away from something towards something else, but I didn't care what was in front of me or behind me.
Because of the way we receive music now, I feel like artists are really going at that album as themselves as opposed to going ‘Oh, should we write a hit, and the ballad, and the slow dance? How did you go about collating the tracks for the album, because there must be have been hundreds.
Me and the producer Greg we just listened to all the tracks and were like ‘okay, we can’t lose this one, this one means this’. Then we just kept changing the order of the tracks and seeing how it fit and seeing if we could make a story out of all the songs that were not associated with each other. It was quite hard, but I think we made the right decision.
Beautiful. Lastly, tell me what's coming up for you. What are you looking forward to?
I'm very looking forward to going to London soon, to see if I can work with some writers there and see if I can get a cool live show going because I'd love to do a tour of Europe. And then I have another track coming out, the second feature of the album is coming out soon so I'm just focusing on that.
‘Video Games’ is out now. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Amy Lilley, you can follow here on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
