INTERVIEW: Sarah Kinsley releases beguiling debut album 'Escaper': "I want people to feel things, and to feel this exhilarating sense of life."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 6 September 2024
Indie pop artist Sarah Kinsley grew up totally immersed in the world of classical music and did not discover a love of pop music until she was a teenager. Both styles of music have gone on to influence her music, which is big, bold, dramatic and multi-layered but with a delicious flurry of electronic beats, tumbling melodies and a carefree vibe.
Releasing music since 2019, today marks a major point in her career with the release of her debut album Escaper. Written by Kinsley and co-produced with John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), the 12 tracks see Kinsley explore friendships, romantic love versus platonic love and the slow disintegration of relationships.
Escaper is an album that never shies away from embracing a soundscape fully, passionately and completely. This is music that is unapologetically everything it can be, without ever sounding crowded or too much. Kinsley explores multiple sonics, with synthpop and indie featuring prominently, but also including journeys into jazz, ballads and soul.
“One realisation you have eventually as an insular, more introspective person is that there’s a world outside of yourself waiting for you to look into it,” Kinsley says of making the album with Congleton. “I had made every single EP from scratch, in the sweetness of my apartment… This record was meant to be grand and unstoppable. A beginning descent into freefall. Why protect that feeling in solitude? Why not invite another into that journey?”
First single ‘Last Time We Never Meet Again’ opens the album in style. Beginning with a frenetic violin, calmer strings and just Kinsley’s voice, it soon erupts into a beat heavy pop song. It is the perfect introduction to the album and Kinsley’s music with its gorgeous melding of classical instruments with pop sensibilities. Kinsley describes the song as a ‘celebratory goodbye’ as it brings a friendship to a final close. It is a bittersweet mix of firmness and melancholy as Kinsley remembers to fun of the old days, while understanding this is a definitive end. “I hope I hear your name and I feel absolutely nothing / Let me be free of you,” she sings.
‘Glint’ ramps up the synthpop vibe with delicious swirling synths and electronic beats, with the following track, the aptly named ‘Sublime’ following with a similar 1980s synthpop feel with Kinsley’s flexible voice jumping through octaves with ease. It builds into a moody dramatic closer with just synths and a powerful drum consuming the final 30 seconds of the song.
‘Beautiful Things’ marks the halfway point of the album and it dials the pace down. A lush piano ballad where Kinsley’s vocal truly shines, it acts as an introspective, reflective moment between the high energy tracks. Following song ‘Matter’ strongly features the synth sound again but takes it more into the indie realm, being more reminiscent of the post-punk, shoe gaze electronica of the early 1980s.
‘Knights’ is a magically diverse song, beginning as a haunting piano ballad, before it brings in string instruments and an increasingly discordant drum beat before turning the tables and breaking into a gloriously upbeat pop song. ‘Starling’ is a beautiful jazz inflected song with lyrics that speaks of enduring friendships: “We'll be fine if we're still here at 45 / If you don't marry someone, then neither will I.”
The album ends with the title track ‘Escaper’, a magnificently over the top cinematic, dramatic track with big electric guitars, big beats and an impassioned vocal performance from Kinsley as she sings, perhaps in defiance of the exuberance of the music, of feeling lost and wanting to escape to a time and place when you didn’t feel so blue: ‘Lately there is no way out of my head / I’m dreaming up around where there is no such thing as regret’. Like the opening track, it is a song that sums up Kinsley perfectly - an all consuming soundscape that combines multiple musical universes into one gorgeous whole.
Escaper is an exceptional album that is full of moments that take your breath away. With pop music that is multi-layered, intelligent and complex while still being a ball of fun, alongside introspective moments and connective lyrics. it is nothing short of a triumph for Kinsley - and an album that is highly likely to become one of your favourites of the year. We recently caught up with Kinsley to find out more about the creation of Escaper.
Hi Sarah so lovely to chat with you today. Oh my goodness, your songs are just beautiful. On Escaper we have these themes of loss, the complexities of dealing with that loss and then of love. I was curious how you went about pulling together such weighted inspirations and putting them into quite buoyant and quite ‘poppy’ sounds?
Thank you for the question. I think that when I was going through these losses, or different events and experiences that were happening my life, you realise that everything is so fluid. Life is so fluid, emotion is so fluid, there's so many contradicting things that I feel were happening within my life that I wanted to write about, and so I really wanted the music to reflect this contradiction. I really enjoy making music that never feels solely like one pure thing. It's always tinged with a little bit of something else. I really enjoy that and that process as a musician and a producer. I was writing all of these different songs about different experiences for a while, and it wasn't until the end of the songwriting process that everything fully came together and felt very coherent. I was writing about grief in a lot of different senses, and death of a friendship, death of an actual friend, and all these different things that presented just so many complexities. I could feel so much anger some days and then feel incredibly light other days. And this album for me was about trying to capture how tumultuous that can be and also how freeing going through those emotions can be. The album for me is very much about who we become after loss and after grief. I am totally somebody who likes to create these imaginary places and needs to escape in order to feel whole again. The question of how we do that, how we return to ourselves after and why we choose to continue in this world that has flaws and that has a lot of pain, is really the underbelly of the theme of this album. But it really didn't come together until the very end of making it.
You mentioned creating these imaginary realities, have you always been an escapist?
Yeah, it's strange. Escapism and what the actual definition of it is, is not something that I'm trying to exactly align myself with because I think there's too many negative connotations about what escaping means. I remember talking to my mum about this when I had decided that Escaper was going to be the name of the album. She was like, ‘what are you running from?’ That’s the initial instinct of what that word means, and I think that I'm an escapist in the sense of someone who relies so much on fiction and fantasy as a way to cope through life, especially in regards to loss and grief, but also in so many other facets of who I was as a child and a teenager. That aspect of running off to foreign and fantasy places is totally how I maintained a lot of sanity growing up and understanding who I wanted to be, because in these other worlds, I'm exactly who I want to be. I have no fear about how I'm perceived, I don't possess any negativity. That fantasticalness is a very childish thing, but also a very beautiful way that I think if we can hold on to it, it makes us more creative and makes us more fulfilled in a lot of ways. Escapism was truly one of the only ways that I understood how to cope with grief and loss, because in these other worlds, the people I've lost still exist. They can exist, they can continue to get older, and they can continue to age alongside me, or these tragic things don't happen. You can decide what that world is. And as a perfectionist and who I am at my core, I rely on that. But the point of the album is that escapism and being an escaper is not the full cycle. You have to decide to come back eventually and that's what brings the story of the album back to its core.
You said at your core you’re a perfectionist. Has that been the driving force in first mastering classical music and then going on to produce your own music too, because you know exactly how it needs to sound?Yeah, honestly, it is. Classical music definitely shaped the perfectionism that was already within me as a child of two people who are very detail oriented and really specific. So that was already genetically going to happen, but classical music only furthered that. I first started out as a vocalist who was featured on these two dance tracks that didn't represent me at all, but I had written all these melodies and these background vocal stems that would find their way throughout the song. So it was impacting the production a bit, but obviously I wasn't a producer on those songs. One of the first reviews that I read about anything I was affiliated with only talked about me as this vessel for sound, the performer, the vocalist, and all the other production qualities were attributed to the people I'd worked with. And I was kind of like I was part of that. The stems and the things that I wrote and the ways that I recorded them, that counts. I remember being fed up about it and I think that anger initially fueled me to learn. I want people to talk about my production, so I'll just learn how to do this. I went to college the next year decided that I would take a class on it and watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials. So it began as a sort of selfishness, maybe, or envy, but I also was just like, I know what I want my voice to sound like, and I don't want anybody else to do it.
Do you have to set yourself aside a moment to create a song, or are you consistently working in your mind with your fantasy and melody and playing. Is it a constant, all encompassing creative process, as opposed to, let's get down to work and I'll sit down at my piano?
No, I can't. I'm so envious of people who can do that and switch it on and say, ‘I'm writing from now until 5pm and then I'm calling it.’ I have never been that way. I'm very much somebody who just feels when things are ready to be created, and I can't really control when that's meant to happen. It was kind of challenging for me to be in a studio for three weeks, but also I'd written all the songs at that point, and I was coming with these sort of half finished ideas, so that was okay. But I'm very jealous of people who can just decide when their mind is ready to actively be creative. I very much wish I could do that.
Your live performances, you’ve got this energy. It might be a little unexpected for a usual concert space, there's a raw nerve to it. Is there something you do with intention to create this atmosphere, or are you just aware that that's what your music does?
I honestly didn't even realise that I was doing that. I do love the shows to be intense, a lot of the things that I'm talking about in my songs, and the feel of them can be quite intense sometimes. I love to prolong these very intense moments, because I want people to feel things, and to feel this exhilarating sense of life, because I think that's what concerts should do. I don't know if I'm intentionally creating that atmosphere it just exists. I hope it's not too intense for people!
When you're creating songs, particularly when you're toying with pace and melody and where the lyrics hit, are you also aware of ‘this would be amazing live’ or ‘I could turn this on its head when I do it live’. Is that always at the forefront?
I don't think it always has been. It's only started since I've been playing live shows, which I've been doing for less than three years in total. I think about it a lot now because I understand the movements and the characteristics of an audience and what feels really exciting and good. I'm so excited to play this album live, I've been itching to do it, I'm just so stoked. But truthfully, I try not to think about it too actively, because if I think about it too much, I get quite overwhelmed with what's the right thing to do or what's the correct thing to write, when I want it to just be more about expression. So I think about it in terms of energy and of movement, and wanting to create songs that have a lot of pulse, but I try not to think too hard, or else I feel like I'll just change my mind entirely to fit what people might like, or what would feel good for them.
Beautiful. Lastly, before I leave you, you have been named one of Vevo’s artists to watch in 2024 which is very exciting. What avenues of music do you see yourself exploring over the coming year?
Wow, I feel like I've been inspired by many new things over this past year already, that I can definitely see myself going into a slightly more percussively intense style of music. I can see myself doing purely string music and almost like film score, soundtrack music. I have no idea what will come, I haven't even thought past this album coming out yet. Like my life ends there! I would love to grow and change Maybe I'll do something vastly different, I don't know, but whatever the project demands of me is what I'll do.
Escaper is out now. You can buy and stream here.
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