INTERVIEW: Gabrielle Aplin releases fourth album 'Phosphorescent': "It was like making an album for the first time...everything shifted around for me to just be left to be an artist for a year."

Interview: Jett Tattersall

British singer-songwriter Gabrielle Aplin first released music in 2010 when she was just 18 years old. Two years later she was at the top of the UK singles chart with ‘The Power Of Love’, and more hits in the form of ‘Please Don’t Say You Love Me’ and ‘Panic Cord’ followed. Her mesmerising indie-folk-pop music defined a musical era and has lead to a decade of music that has accumulated over one billion global streams.

Today Aplin releases her fourth studio album Phosphorescent. After relocating to rural Somerset with her musician partner, Aplin found reconnecting with nature and the country lifestyle not only brought her back into touch with herself but also reinvigorated her creativity to a purity she had not felt since her very first releases. This lead to her writing with complete freedom and liberation, with no-one to answer to but herself.

“I was writing again for fun,” she says. “I was purely expressing myself with no brief. No-one was telling me what to do, in fact I didn’t have to do anything. At the start there was no goal, but as the songs started emerging I could see that they were about things I’d never really processed until that time.  I think a lot of people didn’t really stop until the pandemic forced them, and that was definitely the case for me. A lot of them were addressing things I’d put off until then. It really made me question who I was when everything was stripped away.”

Aplin’s new found creative freedom has made Phosphorescent arguably her greatest album to date. Encompassing a large range of soundscapes and influences, there is a depth and maturity to the music that make the album a true listening experience that takes you on a journey through every life mood. First single ‘Skylight’ kicks off the album and is classic Aplin, a gentle, warm, indie-pop swinging track, a sound that is revisited on ‘Don’t Know What I Want’ and ‘Good Enough’, but is not indicative of the sound everything on the album takes. ‘Never Be The Same’ and ‘Anyway’ are gloriously uplifting, pure pop tracks while ‘Take It Easy’ sees Aplin embrace synth-pop in one of the album’s highlights.

‘Wish I Didn’t Press Send’ mixes pop with jazz and features a superb vocal performance from Aplin as she recounts the familiar experience of sending a text message when you really shouldn’t have. ‘Mariana Trench’ is a beautifully pared back piano ballad with a naturalistic and emotive vocal from Aplin as she looks back on difficult times “I don’t know how we get through the shit that we do / But we get through.” It is a beautiful, soul grabbing moment.

The album ends on a high with a return to electro-synth infused pop with ‘Don’t Say’. The beat gallops along into a euphoric, trancey chorus taking you to where you probably never thought a Gabrielle Aplin song would ever take you - straight onto a pulsing late night dancefloor.

Phosphorescent is the sound of an artist reborn and fully in control of her creativity. It is surprising, familiar, explorative, life affirming and always, always mesmerising. A career highlight for Aplin, we recently caught up with her to chat more about the creation of the album.

Hi Gabrielle, so lovely to chat to you again. You have a beautiful new album Phosphorescent out and that title, I just think of glow stars on my roof.
That's exactly it. I've got a bit of obsessed with glow in the dark animals and plants and things in the pandemic. I was watching that episode of Blue Planet where they go down to the Mariana Trench, and the one with the salt grinds and stuff. They previously thought nothing lived down there, because it's so deep and dark, and then they went down there and found out there was loads of life down there. At the time, and the pandemic, it just felt like a real metaphor of there being life in dark places, and light in dark places, and it made me think about human resilience, and that kind of kick started the concept. At the time, I'd completed Netflix, I'd done all the things that you did in lockdown and it just got to the point where I was writing some songs not because anyone told me to go make an album, and when I had that idea, that was when I was like, ‘okay, this is a project now and I’m making an album. When a theme or a metaphor or anything that inspires it happens, I feel like that's going to be my life until I finish the whole project. I want to live inside a project, you know?

I imagine for a creative person that must be such a freeing thing to have happened. I'm so glad you brought this up because ‘Mariana Trench’ is my absolute favourite track on the album.
Oh, thank you. You're right, it was a very creatively freeing kind of feeling and thing to do at a very restrictive time.

It's absolutely beautiful. Of course they all tie in but I just think ‘Mariana Trench’ is just the ‘nanna blanket’ of the album, it's so sad and it's so comforting at the same time. It feels so light and at the same time so heavy: you've got the heaviness of the water and then the phosphorus glow underneath.
I didn’t think about that, the heaviness of the water. That bit when they go down in that weird little kind of submarine bubble thing. What if it breaks it? It made me feel so uneasy watching it. For them to get down there and see fish and plants, I just thought it was really,  really cool, and then there are all these glow in the dark animals swimming around down there. I just think it's so cool.

It's so beautiful because you go through it in the lyric and it just keeps repeating: ‘I don't know how we get through this shit’. That track in particular, it feels to me like it really pulls that whole experience of just blanketing in with lockdown and reassessing everything in your life.
That was the time, every day, there was a really awful historical event in the news. Every single day. I was like, when is there going to be a break? Jesus, it just keeps coming. We’re all so heightened and then we almost become acclimatised to it. And then it's also about realising that's not normal, none of this is normal.

And people, much like the phosphorescent animals at the bottom of the ocean, just keep on being phosphorated.
Yeah, people were just being really nice to each other and that's kind what really started the whole project for me. It kind of made me think about if that was so inspired by such a natural thing, then why can't the whole album be inspired by nature and our interaction with it? I recorded it over a year, I’ve got a studio which is in the middle of nowhere, and I got to see the album developing throughout seasons and how they interacted and worked alongside each other in some kind of ways. I found out that the studio was running on renewable energy and I just thought that was really cool that the fields were heating and running a studio. That natural energy made the songs, and then started to think what if natural energy could make the photos and the artwork and then it built into how do we make it so the vinyl is not made of plastic? What can I do within my means? If this is going to be inspired by nature, maybe I should try my best to not hurt nature with it. So my album cover and all the blue images were printed via a cyanotype process, just in the garden in the sun, and the sun printed them and it feels really cool knowing that the sun and some fields actually worked on my album. I think it's really nice.

That’s gorgeous.
Feeling like the whole project is connected in some way was really important to me. It was the first time, really, since my first album that I had made an album in one place as well. My previous one [Dear Happy] as much as I loved it and it was so fun, I was writing all over the place with different people, and at the end of it, we kind of stuck these songs together that were very disjointed and just kind of made them fit. I love it and it worked, but it was really good to be stationary and make something. As a singer songwriter, it made me learn a lot about myself because with Dear Happy, I wrote [the songs] with producers, I then had to go and sit myself down and teach myself how to play my own songs, and that was bizarre. Whereas this time, before I’d even recorded anything I was able to sit and play my songs because I wrote them just at the piano. The songs already existed as they were before I even walked into the studio and started recording them. That was a really important thing. What are the bones of these songs before they are dressed up in all the sparkly stuff? What are they on their own? That was important for me to be able to do as a songwriter.

Your music, as it should, it always shifts. With [first album] English Rain it was almost like we were sitting in a room with you, which was a lot of its appeal. Whereas with Dear Happy, there's colour, there synth, there was just so many pop music elements. With Phosphorescent, you've almost got this orchestra of nature in the background and I'm so glad you said you listened to the seasons because I feel like you can hear it on the album. It's richer sonically than English Rain, but at the same timeI feel like you could just pop down and perform it all in one setting. It’s interesting that you've come back to that experience while still changing up your sound.
It's really interesting because I made this album with this new producer, and at the same studio I made English Rain, and it was kind of like making an album for the first time again. Except this time I'm an independent artist and it was just myself and [producer] Mike Spencer up there making an album. We kept all the things that made English Rain great. It was because we were left to it, to just deal with it and make it, that's what I was really allowed to do this time with the way that it was structured, not allowed as in they gave me permission but the time allowed me for this. I was able to go out there for a whole year and not send anybody anything and no one pestered me. No one wanted to hear anything so they could change it. It was very much ‘just go off and then hand in an album when you're done’. I wanted to make something very modern and new and current sounding, but I think it’s really cool that it felt really traditional in how I made it and how, everything shifted around for me to just be left to be an artist for a year and then worry about all the admin afterwards. This was ‘just go make it and do creative stuff, and then come back to us when you're ready’. And that was really valuable, artistically.

Again, just how absolutely liberating, and I feel I can hear it in your vocal delivery as well. The opener ‘Skylight’ is one of my favourites on the album, it's so beautiful and what an amazing intro to the rest of it. Your top notes are just lifting off, it's very hard to have a note climb that high and have it carry such weight and confidence to it. You just seem very strong, but at the same time, very free in your performance. Am I picking up on that correctly?
Definitely. That's really nice. It's very free. When I was making the track listing, I wanted them all to flow in together. I didn't just shove them all together on a playlist and send it off. What was really important to me was that it felt like a day, like there was a cycle. If ‘Skylight’ was the morning  or a really easy Sunday morning and then ‘Don't Say’ was like, the end of the night. That's how I wanted it to be and then everything else was the day in between. That's how I wanted it to run.

‘Don't Say’ is really making a positive impact on people, judging on the comments on YouTube. People are feeling seen and it’s a club anthem this song, but at the same time it's not - it's one of those songs that can go either way.
Yeah., it’s a bit like that. I was really inspired by Bicep and the Chemical Brothers and stuff like that. It was quite sweet when we wrote it, but right at the last minute I was like, ‘Hey, Mike, can we put some synth in just at the ends of the section’, because I wanted it to feel a summer night.

Absolutely. And everyone's always a fan of when you have a song that could just be so stripped back and so raw, and then at the same time, add some synth, and the right kind of drums and beats, and it can take you straight into the club, and then you can just cry on the dance floor.
Yeah. I look forward to my club remix album! I would love that.

Phosphorescent is just going to go and do wonderful things for people and it's going to be incredible to see you perform it. Have you got any plans to be doing that?
Yeah, definitely. I'm doing a few album release shows in the UK, and in the early part of next year, I plan to travel a bit. I just really want to play [the album live]. I don't feel like it’s completely finished until it’s out in some ways. It's such a big part of the process. So until it’s out, I feel like they can't be full. I kind of want to let [the songs] go in some ways, because then I can crack up! I've had them for so long and I've even been playing them myself, I want to share it now. I know it too well. Especially with my fans, I can't wait to be able to talk to them, and them know what I'm talking about because they've heard it. Also to humanise [the songs]. Because the album was written in such an isolated time, even when we recorded it, I wanted it to be very human to counteract that and have a physicality. At the moment, the songs almost feel 2D in some way and playing them to people in real life, it gives them that kind of physicality. I'm really excited to be able to play them to people.

Phosphorescent is out now via Never Fade Records/AWAL. You can buy and stream here.

To keep up with all things Gabrielle Aplin you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.