Absolutely is in Prague, halfway through tour, doing what she describes as a pretty perfect pre-show routine. “I woke up on the tour bus at 11am, and I looked outside the window, and it was very grey, so I decided to snuggle in bed for a little longer,” she says. There’s lasagne. There’s a jam doughnut. Soundcheck is approaching. “Hopefully, today will be another beautiful show.”
It’s a small snapshot, but it already says a lot. Absolutely speaks about music the same way she talks about food, travel, or downtime: with a genuine enjoyment of being in it. She’s been making music since she was 13, starting out in a tiny studio in her family’s back garden with her dad. “My dad used to teach me how to write songs, and we would record covers together,” she explains. At first, she barely said a word. “I was quite shy as a child, and I didn’t contribute much… but I was soaking everything in and observing while he did everything on the computer.”
Before long, observation turned into obsession. “The next year or so, I started going into the studio by myself every day and making beats and writing songs over them and recording myself,” she says. It became her favourite place to be. “It was my escape and my place to be 100% honest with myself.” After school, she’d disappear into music until the early hours of the morning, driven by instinct rather than ambition. “It quickly became an obsession for me.”
Finding her voice wasn’t about one lightning-bolt song. Instead, it arrived gradually, during the making of her debut album ‘Cerebrum’. “That was the first time I had discovered my sound and a sonic world that felt so unique and true to me,” she says. “The production, the lyrical content, the vocal production, it all was beginning to make sense to me. The world was coming together.”
That sense of scale hit her hard when she played All Points East. “Seeing how many people showed up to see my set was so mind-blowing,” she says. Until then, she’d only ever performed as a support artist. “I’d never seen a crowd come just to see me, and that was a really special moment. And seeing everyone singing along.” It was affirming, thrilling, and also a bit disorienting. Being watched changes things.
That tension feeds directly into ‘Paracosm’, her forthcoming album. She explains that a paracosm is “a world, place, or characters that you create in your childhood that extend through to adulthood.” While making the album, she deliberately tried to reconnect with that mindset. “I was really looking through the lens of childlike wonder,” she says. “That freeing feeling when your imagination doesn’t have to be bound by rules or norms.”
At one point, though, she got stuck. “There were times in the album process where I felt creatively blocked,” she admits. After some reflection, she realised why. “I was thinking about things too logically, trying to see the album from other people’s perspectives and what they may want to hear.” The solution wasn’t technical; it was emotional. “Rather than from the perspective of the one who discovered her love for music… my younger self.”
