Heidi Curtis is stepping into the limelight — and honestly, it’s about time. Since the age of 16 she’s been writing and performing songs in her North Shields home, and 8 years later is ready to finally start sharing them with the world. After honing her craft through major support tours in arenas across the country and finding her identity through various iterations of her back catalogue, Heidi is ready to step up and embrace her career beginnings proper with debut single, ‘Undone’.

“The overall drive and commitment to writing hasn’t changed,” Heidi says of her lengthy gestation period. While she is just now preparing her world debut, her music has been no secret to those in the North East; locals, friends and family have watched her bloom from early open mics to a full-band set-up rocking local venues, a full-fledged artist slowly but surely manifesting in front of their eyes.

Once songwriting efforts were once again allowed out of closed doors following 2020, Heidi quickly bounced back with a succession of massive live shows in the years to follow. From becoming the first artist to kick-off post-pandemic gigs at Newcastle’s Gosforth Park, to opening arenas and supporting era-defining artists, a lack of released material has never held her back from thriving on stage.

At the time, these wildly generous opportunities were not to serve Heidi’s commercial success as a way up the touring ladder, but simply gave a chance to reflect and observe the artistic foundations on which careers should be built.

So, no pressure for the debut then, right? “For a new artist, a lot of the pressure can be on the first release, the first single, first album. But instead, I’m thinking: where do I want to be in 10 years’ time? Always thinking ahead seems to be the common practise for a lot of these artists and that’s easy for me. I’m a bit of an overthinker, really.”

Sonically, the music wears its influences on its sleeve; Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Jeff Buckley are clear touchpoints, but the most common denominator is that elusive timelessness in the songwriting (as well as great vocals). “I’ve always been really in anything that's old, vintage, whether that be like music, objects, people,” Heidi suggests. “I can talk about anything old and whimsical and magical all day.”

A great voice is wasted with nothing to say, but ‘Undone’ shows Heidi Curtis opening the floodgates on material that has been finely crafted but withheld from public consumption until today. With her live set list constantly rotating as old tracks were discarded for the next and newest improvement, the choice of tune to kick things off was not haphazardly made. Nostalgia and melancholy have always echoed through her work, but the maturity of the songwriting has only developed year by year, song by song to forge material she deemed as worth your investment.

“At the time I wrote it, which was about a year and a bit ago, I'd just experienced my first big loss,” she recalls of her debut single. “My Nana had passed away and we were really, really close. That was my first experience of really losing somebody I really loved, and it made my whole perspective on life just completely shift. The songs at the time were super inward, emotional, and I felt a little bit like I'd stripped myself of everything I'd known before, it had all changed overnight almost, everything that made me me. I started to think about the rest of my life a lot more.”

Chipping away at the track over the course of a month, the tune became a catalyst for self-realization. As she says, “it helped me deal with the change of what I was going through, and it gave me focus on the person I really wanted to become. So it's like my own personal redemption song. When I sing the song, I tap into the energy of who I'm becoming. I celebrate every person I've been and every person I'm going to be.”

And so, Heidi Curtis’ life work begins, with ‘Undone’ as just the first domino. “Sonically and visually, it feels like it blew the doors are open, and everything's spawning from this singular place.” Heidi declares: “It felt like a matriarch, a leader song; it made me feel untethered, free and wild, like nothing's impossible. It’s powerful, it’s driving the rest of the material.”

As for the other material in question, there’s certainly no lack of it. Having initially started recording her new era with now Mercury Prize-recognized producers Joe Atkinson and Dean Thompson, she soon stepped out of her circle and comfort zone to record with Damn Hume at Hymn Studios in Wales. After a few tracks, though, she was already confident enough to take the reins herself.

To date, only very few have heard any of the next steps of this journey, including those who recently attended a sold-out hometown headline show at The Cluny. “In the room the other night, it was so beautiful because it was like my own show,” she beams. “There was no outside stress about time or about backdrop. I could curate the whole thing to be exact, as if everybody was in my room, my dream kind of environment.” With a velvet, moody sheet covering the walls, a “witchy” aesthetic adorning the room and a 13-track setlist teasing what is yet to come, it’s clear that a new page is truly turning.