INTERVIEW: deryk releases new single 'One Star': "Most of my inspiration from pure feeling...from a mind of excruciatingly over-thinking everything."

UK born, Auckland New Zealand based deryk has burst onto the music scene this year with her first two singles ‘Call You Out’ and new single ‘One Star’, released on 13 August. Inspired by music by artists such as PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Esperanza Spalding, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell and Bjork deryk’s music is a delicious mix of guitar pop and electronica with more than a passing nod to the UK’s Bristol music scene of the ‘90s she is a fan of. With lyrics that resemble poetry - ‘memories stolen by fatigue’ she sings on ‘One Star’ - deryk’s music is both delicate and immensely powerful and is the type of music you immerse yourself in - once you press play nothing else exists outside of her emotive vocals and melodies.

‘One Star’ and ‘Call You Out’ will be featured on deryk’s debut EP WOMb which will be out on 2 October. We recently caught up with deryk to find out everything about this extremely exciting new artist.

Hello deryk! First off the bat, how is life treating you?
It's all good. It’s different again because we've gone back into lockdown in New Zealand. So, we're all back where we were a few months ago but it's okay because it's only level 3. So, we're not in the really intense level 4 lockdown where everything's closed. We still have a bit of freedom. 

Congratulations on the new release ‘One Star’. It's a brutally heart skipping whisper of a track. Again, much like ‘Call You Out’ with that incredible production that just perfectly fits your vocals and your lyrics and your melody. This is a track about loss or loss of relationship, are you able to talk me through it?
Absolutely. It's interesting, ‘One Star’ was a song that I certainly was able to target in terms of what emotion I was going for by collecting a feeling that I'd experienced before and then watched my loved ones and my close friends experience. So by the time I was sitting down and I was feeling it, I knew it was going in that direction. It was like I could articulate what I had felt because of the conversations that I had with my friends and my family about things that they had felt. That's pretty much how it was written. it was truly just a description of a feeling. Not necessarily about a specific scenario, but just articulating exactly what it feels like when you go through betrayal. 

Beautiful. What I really like about this song is I guess you're touching very heavily on the brutality of that social media disconnection of emotion, whilst we're all being so connected we're also so disconnected from basically human kindness. 
Yeah, exactly. Extremely disconnected and it can be very brutal when you're going through betrayal or loss or whatever it is and you're seeing things online that you wish you couldn't see. It's tough. it's really hard. I feel like everybody goes through it because everybody wants to stay friends. You don't want to burn bridges by because online is very permanent if you unfollow someone or unfriend somebody, it's pretty permanent. So, I feel like you kind of have to make that decision and it's all very final. I don't know. It's a lot.

And I I love the way again that you've brought so much. I mean the melody itself it's got that almost opium den feel to it, it's not painful to the ears but it's quite painful to the heart, the production sound. Is that always very important to you to experiment, obviously with your vocals and the melody, but then you go okay, production wise we can really mix it up here?
Yeah, totally. I think production-wise, it's so important for me to have real sounds. Texture is really important, I feel like if my lyrics and my melody are deliberately so transparent, it wouldn't make sense for the production to not be jarring if that's where my words have gone and where the melody has gone. Like specifically with the melody, it was written from a place of what I would sound like if I'm crying. When you're crying and you're trying to say something and you're skipping a beat like when you're trying to talk to a friend about it. That was very much how the melody was formed for the chorus. Then the production was just complimenting that. I think the fact that it's gritty and the fact that it has that trip hoppy sound where it's just textured just suits it. It couldn't have really complimented in a different way without it making it sound ingenuine. 

It's so indulgent. This is the kind of music that you cry to in the bathroom or you lay sprawled out on top of your duvet and just feel all the feelings. 
Completely. I love that you called it indulgent because that's absolutely what it feels like. I always feel so indulged when I'm listening to trip hop and anything from Bristol in the 90s. So so, love it. It's nostalgic. 

Releasing music in amongst whatever 2020 is, there's so much going on I don't even know which one to pinpoint, but there must have been some trepidation on your part about releasing music, but of course this music i feel. Your music is just so very welcome now where people are kind of forced to be sedentary and, you know, indulgent, and focusing on themselves not necessarily trying to keep themselves uplifted but actually take some time to process some of the shit that they've been hit with. 
Yeah, it certainly is that. The social climate is exactly that, it couldn't be more like that in the moment where everyone's inside and they're in a space of stillness. Thankfully this work just so happened that it was time to come out now because I wrote all this stuff over a year ago and I feel like if it had come out then it just might not have had the same connection or it maybe wouldn't have reached the same people. So I do feel like the timing has been reasonably good. I feel like it does bring some stillness to a relatively still place at the moment. 

You wrote those tracks a year ago. However, you shot both of the videos yourself in isolation. I want to get into ‘Call You Out’, because I hear that happened in a cupboard, but even ‘One Star’ you shot yourself. Can you talk me through your inspirations and the hiccups of doing those?
I was lucky because I wouldn't have tried it if I hadn't have been in isolation. I would have definitely just done it with friends because I love creating with friends. So being in isolation and having to do it solo or at home I'm glad because it definitely pushed me into a place where I wouldn't have trusted myself I don't think if I had a choice to like share the experience with friends. I was listening to a lot of PJ Harvey and I feel like you can totally see the energy that I have in the ‘Call You Out’ video specifically. I feel like you can feel that kind of energy that, that very kind of aggressive, powerful energy that PJ has. When I was doing it, I was in that space. It was literally week two of lockdown. So everyone was in a weird space. Every single person in the world was. So it was kind of fitting that I was making a video for that song that suited it so well. 

With your music, I feel like there's something incredibly, almost like dark magic about it. There's like an incantation. Where do you find your inspiration?
I'd say I find most of my inspiration from pure feeling. Which sounds cheesy actually but it really comes from a mind of excruciatingly over-thinking everything and when I go through something I think about it so much that it kind of forms its own world in my head and then all I’ve got to do is describe the narrative that I've got in my mind when I'm writing. That's pretty much where it comes from for sure. I think that this record, because there was a lot to write from because it was my first one, I really just had this massive landscape of different memories and different feelings that I could write from. Just being in my early 20s, so much happened over those years. I certainly wrote it from a deep sense of bitterness and growth and kind of a coming of age without sounding cheesy again. But it truly was that. 

No, it's not cheesy at all. Coming of age. They make the best films and the best books and the best music. You mentioned PJ Harvey, we talked about trip pop. But who were sheros that you listened to and went ‘that's what I want to do’?
The first person that I ever listened to that I thought that was Avril Lavigne. 

She was brilliant!
She really was. I feel like my generation, a lot of young women would say that. Any gender would say that because she was so iconic. And Whitney Houston and Bill Withers. I had a real mix of tastes. I think everything about my sound and the authenticity and how I sound too, it all stems from those acts because they really are genuine.

And was music something that you always wanted to do? Obviously you were always singing. But when was that moment when you went ‘oh i can do this, I can make my own’?
I think in my first year of high school. I met this beautiful girl who was really fun. I met her in my science class and she used to write short fiction and she was super creative as well. So we used to start writing stuff together. I'd write stories and show them to her and she'd read them and give me notes and she’d do the same time to me. We'd go back and forth. One day a couple of years after we started high school, I went around to her house and she had an electric piano and she started putting her work to keys and to chords and to chord progressions that at the time I didn't know. I remember her playing me something and thinking ‘I could totally do that, I should do this more’. It's took me a little bit of time after that to kind of find the confidence and not cringe at myself too much where I couldn't start. But that's certainly where I started. That’s when I definitely thought I could do this and could definitely dive right into knowing how to write a song like all the artists could that we were listening to at the time. 

You said you overthink and you get so involved in your lyrics and you get so involved in the production. You're very much driving the shit out of your music, which is incredible. But unfortunately, in this industry female artists are often saying it's much more of an uphill struggle to be heard as a creator and not just as a voice behind a song. Have you had any experiences yourself, or have you felt the pressure yourself about being a young woman coming out and creating your own music and getting it heard in a very heavily male dominated industry?
I absolutely have experienced that and my close friends within the industry in New Zealand who are female have also shared experiences like that with me too. I remember the first time a friend of mine and I shared our first experiences about that and I just felt so much better after I talked to her about it. It was something that bothered me for a long time that I didn't realise everyone else goes through, because I don't think I fully realised that it was about my gender until I'd spoken to my friend about it. It was the same story between the two of us. It was going into with very talented clever male producers and wanting to have a voice and knowing really what you wanted and trying to explain it and often being told ‘that's not how we do it’. A lot of times that was why I want to do it. That's why i want to play it like this because that's how I hear it and that's how I think it'll fit. Trying to push that was really difficult even after learning the jargon. I specifically went to audio engineering school for six months to do a certificate, which is the bottom one that you can do, just to learn the jargon so that didn't happen to me. It certainly still did. But when I met Justyn Pilbrow who's the man that I co-write everything with, that was really ground-breaking for me because he's such a feminist. He's so incredible. He's taught me so much about music and production and it dramatically shifted my view on all of that stuff. I was starting to get a bit frustrated with it. I can only wish that other women in the industry if they have been feeling bad about that kind of stuff and it's been getting them down, I hope that they can stick in there and meet other strong men like Justyn Pilbrow that are going to help them through it, because it's just a really shit feeling. It sucks. It got me down for a really long time. 

God, that's incredible. You're so right. There are the good people out there, but unfortunately the shitty ones are just louder. Lastly, before I have to leave you. What is on the horizon for you?
Releasing an EP, WOMb. That is really exciting. I'm really looking forward to it because it has been work that I've had for a year. I'm really excited for other people to hear it, especially the people who've been enjoying the first two singles. That's coming out October the 2nd. So keep an eye out!

‘One Star’ is out now Universal Music. You can download and stream here.

To keep up with all things deryk you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.