INTERVIEW: spill tab on her new single 'Assis' and her upcoming debut album 'Angie': "I've finally got to a place where I just let myself enjoy the songs that I enjoy.”

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Jade Sadler
Published: 18 March 2025

LA-based French-Korean artist spill tab (real name Claire Chicha) today releases her new single ‘Assis’, the fourth taste of her eagerly anticipated debut album Angie which is due to be released on 16 May.

Produced by John Hill (FKA Twigs, Charli XCX) and Solomonophic, ‘Assis’ is a shimmering, spacey melding of synthpop, funk and indie with an insistent trip hop drum beat that transforms into a chaotic, electronic breakdown at the end of the song. Sung entirely in French, it is a melancholic look at a relationship that is dying against her will. “I move forward, your heart is running away.”

“The production for Assis feels like the stitching between a 50s Italian film soundtrack and psychedelic rock,” Chicha says. “The song is about watching someone you love pull away from you in slow motion. You try to reconcile the beautiful, tender moments with the bitter ones, because ultimately you want no one else.”

‘Assis’ will feature on Chicha’s debut album Angie out on 16 May. Written after parting ways with her record label and while touring with Sabrina Carpenter and Wallows, the freedom of being an independent artist once again allowed Chicha to create music she truly believed in with no limits. “It became this beautiful experience of only following ideas that I really believed in and exploring all the musical avenues I hadn’t before,” she says. “I’ve never been more excited about the songs on Angie, and I’ve never felt like a project is more mine.” 

Sung partly in French, the album is an eclectic mix of synthpop, rock, indie and hyper pop, often combining hard, even aggressive, sounds juxtaposed against Chicha’s gentle and at time nonchalant vocal delivery and lyrics. “I want the album to feel like the most honest thing I’ve done,” she says. “It’s personal not just in its themes but also in the production and sound design, which is as important to me as the lyrics. I want to create a whole world of textures and feeling in sound.”

Born to a French-Algerian jazz composer father and a Korean classical pianist mother, Chicha was surrounded by music from the very beginning, growing up around musicians in her parents LA recording studio. After moving to Thailand aged 12, she discovered traditional Thai music alongside learning guitar and began to play covers of Green Day and Paramore. Relocating to Paris to live with her aunt saw her discover the sounds of Serge Gainsbourg and Édith Piaf, before returning to live in the US

Having such a wide range of musical influences during her formative years is apparent when listing to Chicha’s music. Releasing her first single ‘Decompose’ in 2019, she gained attention for her lo-fi, bedroom pop style but quickly showed her versatility as an artist with indie, pop, electrothrash, synth and even country inflecting her discography.

She rapidly found a fanbase and was soon signed to a major record label contract. She released two EPs but soon became disillusioned with the corporate side of the music industry. “it felt like I was always chasing the carrot,” she says, “I felt a certain pressure to put out tracks quickly and find that ‘hit’. It wasn’t the right environment to truly make what I wanted.”

With streams in the millions, she has become one of music’s biggest independent young artists and Angie is a remarkable debut album that highlights Chicha’s sonic evolution and also her innate musicality. We recently caught up with Chicha’s to chat all about ‘Assis’ and her upcoming album.

Hi Claire! How is everything with you, are you winning?
Yeah, you know, I'm fighting the good fight! 2025 is what I thought would be the summit of the mountain that I've been climbing, but I believe there's perhaps more mountain to climb. It's all about the journey.

Let's just go straight into the fact that you have this glorious debut album coming out in May, which we can only talk about a little bit because it’s not out yet, but I’m going to congratulate you anyway, because what a beast of a debut. It's already promising to be a very genre bending sonic and visual party.
Thank you, that's a great tagline. I like that as an introduction a lot, that works for me.

You have said it feels like your most honest work. You've been creating and releasing music for a while now, and I’m curious to know was there a particular moment that you went, ‘oh I’ve not hit that nerve before, but it feels good.’
Yeah. I think mostly what it was is I got out of my own way a little bit. I know people use that phrase a lot, but for a long time I didn't really understand what that meant. But it's so easy to overthink making music, especially from the pandemic onward. Like, I was selling weed at the beginning of the pandemic and by the end of it, I was playing shows and it was my full time job. And with that came the onboarding of so many new people, like management and label, so much happened quite quickly and I'm someone that's always been quite a people pleaser. With the onboarding of more people comes more opinions and you just want to please everybody. For a long time I was just overthinking a lot of this stuff and not getting out of my own way. What's been nice is that I've finally got to a place making this album where I just let myself enjoy the songs that I enjoyed, without the extra layer of ‘but will others enjoy this the way that I am enjoying it?’ I just let myself pick my favourite songs and go with that. So that felt really nice, to get out of my own way. I've not perfected it, but I feel like I've gotten much better at it and for that I'm grateful and proud.

I want to talk about your new single ‘Assis’. It has this closing instrumental sequence that I can only say sounds like it was an orchestra of a Space Invaders arcade game, which I'm so here for. And I love that it disappears and takes you out of the track, it’s brilliant. Talk to me about this track.
It's so funny, because I think that track is a great representation of the spaces that each section was made in. I collaborated with this great producer, John Hill, and a long time collaborator and producer Solomonophic (Jared Solomon). We started that song at John Hill’s studio which is very warm, he has a lot of analogue synthesisers, and the drum tones on that song are from that studio and they’re just very warm. And then the back half of the song we made in Jared’s studio, and his energy is much more high energy, very fast paced and so that crazy arpeggiating synth was made at Jared’s. I find it really cute, because they do really represent the producers who space we were in.

A similar thing happened with (2022 single) ‘CRÈME BRÛLÉE!’ where it was a crazy choice in the guitar and I thought that it was fun enough to me that I wanted to do it. A lot of those ideas sometimes are great starting points, or they get people thinking, but to me those ideas are the freeness of just letting it be in the song, to make it exciting and feel experimental and weird. So I had a lot of fun making ‘Assis’ sound a bit like a 50s Italian movie track soundtrack and take it out of that space and do something a bit more weird with it at the end.

What I find interesting is the way you approach the production of your music. You are very much a soloist, but you've got a very collaborative approach, but your music still sound very much like your own I imagine that's a really difficult space to navigate, taking on other people's opinions but still have it sounding very much like your piece.
First of all, that’s a really kind thing to say, because I struggle with that. A really big concern for me is that the album was made with so many different people across a span of, like, five years that it wasn't going to sound like a cohesive project and would be a bit discombobulated. It was something that I worked really hard on, transparently, in mixing. Sitting down with my mixing engineer and spending a good week or two, just me explaining what we're looking for in terms of how to make this sound like it's somewhat in the same world. Nathan Phillips, who mixed the album, is an incredible mixing engineer, and we're also good friends and he understands what I like and what I don't like, which is always such a great base to start off with with.

So it's really nice that you say that it sounds like it's coming from the same place. I think a lot of it is that I do almost all of my vocal tracking and a lot of the processing and I’m very involved in the production. But I also feel so in awe of my friends that I've collaborated with on this album. They're all so mega talented, and have spent years and years honing their craft, so it's always such a pleasure to have them roam free and do crazy shit that I could never do. I feel mega blessed, that they share their creative energy with me, and they are so much a part of this world. This album would not sound like anything without all these friends that came and gave a little piece of themselves.

You just mentioned vocals, maybe one of the things that also holds it together is your ridiculously dreamy, Disney-princess-in-a-1950s-musical voice. It is incredible. Before all the rest of the music came in, did you just sing constantly?
That's so funny, that's so sweet! Yeah, I think so. I love singing along to whatever's playing in the car or just singing in the shower, I've always loved singing. What is nice compared to other instruments is that there's no learning curve to speaking and even singing, I don't think there's any bad singing, it's just whatever way you express yourself vocally. As long as it feels natural to you, that's good singing. Anyone can sing and sing along to the radio, which is what I used to do as a kid. I did choir for a long time, I was in an acapella group in college, I absolutely love singing.

What I had a lot of fun with on this album is chordal arrangements with the vocals and doing cool harmonies, engaging and challenging myself in doing harmonies that are maybe not my first intuitive response. Playing around with different harmonies and trying to find interesting places to land on, what the harmonies are doing and how they're moving.

Along with your voice, lyrically you also mix languages. When you're singing and writing in French is there an inclination to lean into it because there are certain emotions that just don't cut the mustard in English, but you can get there in French?
Right. My best friend of like, 20 something years, is also half French and we've both lived in both France and the US. Although I would say I'm more comfortable in English, when we speak we still switch to French sometimes because there are just certain words that pack a bigger punch when you say them in French and the idioms just hit harder. Or they just express that exact energy I'm trying to say a bit better than any of the words you could use in English. There's just certain things, even texturally and tonally in the language that make it fun to explore those rhyme schemes because I've done it less than I have in English. It's always a bit more of an adventure when I write in French, because it’s like ‘I've never used this word before’ and in English, it's hard to feel like ‘I've never, ever used this sentence before’, you know? It's fun and It's a challenge, because it's definitely not my first language, but a lot of words sound really cool. It's almost like an instrument in itself, because I get to play with the consonants and all the weird sounds in the back of the throat.

Your live shows always attract such a crowd, you seem to create this beautiful band camp chaos shows in the best possible way. What are you most looking forward to performing with your upcoming debut album?
The coolest part about having so much new work is that it really is a complete overhaul of the live set. Rolling out one single at a time, a lot of it is just taking the live set that I have and then very slightly shifting things around and adding the song, or taking out another song. Which is super fun, but there's a level of attention to detail and effort and energy that I have to really intentionally make space for when I'm rehauling the entire set. It's not going to make sense if I just add four new songs in a random order. So I'm just really excited about discovering the personality of the album live, because a lot of the times it's not really intentional beforehand. When I get on stage, we find that voice as a band from playing more and more shows and discovering what parts of the song can be more silly and fun or is this a solo that we get on the floor for? Those things happen organically and naturally, honestly also shaped by the response you get from the crowd. So that I'm really excited for, discovering what that set is going to feel like. It's really not possible to do that in rehearsals when there's no one there to react with. So that's what I'm really most excited for.

‘Assis’ is out now. You can download and stream here.
Angie will be released on 16 May. You can pre-order and pre-save now.
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