New Music Friday can be a lot. That's why every week we cut it down to the songs you need to hear for PLAY, our new music edit, and deliver a new cover feature to go alongside it. This week... piri.
"I wanted to take it all into my own hands.” piri means business as she releases her first solo record ‘girl in stem’. It’s an album entirely written, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by piri as she navigates a future following the breakup of her band piri & tommy, on her own terms, with her vision for electronic pop and the liberating feeling of total control and complete freedom.
It’s taken a while for piri to get to the point where she felt able to release music in this way. piri & tommy released a string of brilliant singles, one EP and a mixtape over four years, establishing a distinctive electronic pop sound, but they never quite got the opportunity to make a full album. ‘girl in stem’ is piri’s chance to make that definitive statement of who she is and who she wants to be as an artist.
“I’ve had quite an unusual journey through music,” she says, reflecting on the years leading up to this record. “I got into it so suddenly. I was doing my chemistry degree and had just graduated when I met Tommy. I always thought of songwriting as a hobby. We got thrown into the industry and a major label and had so much to learn. I feel like I’m finally at the point where I’ve learned a lot and I have a vision of what I want to do and how to do it. It’s so good to be fully in control of the music as opposed to working with Tommy; that was great, but it’s really nice to do it all myself. I don’t have a label and people pushing things back and slowing it down.”
The album is a product of the clarity you can get by taking a step back. “I’ve taken a second after piri & tommy ended to think about what I really like about music and what I didn’t like and what made it really hard,” she explains. “I think a lot of artists these days find it quite disheartening when you put so much effort into the promotion, the visuals, the TikToks, as we’re musicians - we don’t necessarily need to be doing that stuff. I wanted to take the pressure off and really evaluate why I do music.”
The album charts the emotional progress and eventual dissolution of piri and Tommy’s creative relationship. Sometimes it’s just hinted at, and sometimes it’s raw and unflinchingly honest, like on the striking opening track ‘both be happier. “I put it at the start because it feels like the thesis of the album,” says piri. “It sums up what happened emotionally and where I am now.” With lines like “So good boy, you wanna trade me for another?’ and “At least I won’t go down without a fight”, it defiantly makes the case for piri exploring her own creative vision, a vision you can hear in the genre-bending experimentalism of the music that clearly charts a new way forward. “I love the sound of it,” she enthuses. “It has funk stabs, weird chords, breakbeats, saxophone solos. It has my Todd Edwards influence. Everything about that track is so me.”
piri always loved actually making the music in piri & tommy, but it was all the other stuff that started dragging her down. The constant pressure to have an identity, a voice, an image. The way people saw her was at odds with how she really thought about herself and the art she wanted to make. “I’d been trying to be someone I wasn’t for the past few years,” she admits. “People saw me and would say pop star! Pop star vibes! Subconsciously, I started really trying to be a pop star. I always was more a weird, creative kid. I was never meant to be a pop star. I had that realisation that I wanted to drop that and focus on myself and doing what I want and doing it really intuitively rather than strategically.”
The path to ‘girl in stem’ was a growing realisation that she actually didn’t need anyone’s help and could trust her own artistic instincts. “It came together gradually,” she says. “piri & tommy did a support tour last September, we had been away three weeks in the van listening to a lot of music. We hadn’t made any music but just listening so much that I had so many ideas and inspiration that I got home and made the first three tracks from the album straight away.”
That initial spark of inspiration led to a burst of activity, however it took a while to realise she was actually a producer and was making an album. “I didn’t know that they were going to be anything serious, as at that point, I was still in piri & tommy, and I didn’t take myself super seriously as a producer yet,” she says. “There’s a whole thing about women being conditioned to not take themselves seriously as producers. I really enjoyed it and kept making more beats, and before I knew it, I had seven tracks. The music told me it was going to be an album. It was all written from September to March. It was super quick. I just thought oh my god, this is an album, it all fits together, and thematically it worked. I thought, wow I can do it. I then mixed and mastered it.”
‘girl in stem’ is piri’s maximalist self-sufficiency opus. “It’s not very typical for an artist to master their own stuff,” she says proudly. “Having it sound like how I made it was important to me. It’s nice to prove a point that artists, especially women, can do it all ourselves. You don’t need to pay all that money for mixing and mastering.”
The music on the album is piri expressing herself in different ways. It still sounds very identifiably her, but it has an idiosyncratic, slightly warped quality that gives these electronic pop songs a beguiling edge. It’s a record that fits with more experimental sounds being incorporated more and more in modern pop in 2026. “I’m trying to make slightly weirder music,” she laughs. “I mostly listened to jazz fusion. On the more traditional jazzy side of things, jazz fusion seems to be getting huge, old stuff and new stuff. I wanted to take a bit of influence from that. It’s not super jazz-coded because I’m not a jazz-trained musician, but I love those weird chords. I didn’t want it to sound typical. The structures are a bit weird as well. I wanted to include sounds that I love hearing. I think I’m incapable of making music that isn’t upbeat and energetic. It’s a very colourful feeling. With the lyrics, it’s real and a bit deep. It’s a journey. It’s a unique combination of those three things. It’s still super bright and energetic.”
"Saying ‘girl in stem’ is a shoutout that women in STEM can do it"
— piri
The album title is a reflection of piri’s blossoming as a solo artist and her recognition of the influence of the inspiring woman working in science, a shout out to her chemistry background and the fact that, y’know, she’s super smart. "‘girl in stem’ is like women in STEM - science, technology, engineering, maths,” she explains. “I did chemistry and I was part of the women in STEM and I would always say it as a joke. I did the audio engineering, and I made it all myself. Making music is a science. Saying ‘girl in stem’ is a shoutout that women in STEM can do it.”
It’s also an acknowledgement that the album is the forming of a new creative life for piri. “There’s the science side, but also stem in terms of growing. A new beginning and finding who you are. Writing and releasing this album has been a massive growth period in my life,” she says proudly.
The growth period coincides with the end of a period that defined a large chunk of her life with piri & tommy, and that’s reflected in the lyrical content of the record. While the music can sound fun and frothy, there is dread and fear creeping in the background. “It’s a reflection of me. I’m a very open person. I probably say too much. It’s not a bad way to be, at least it’s genuine,” she says. “I can’t hold back, and even when it’s slightly embarrassing to say how I feel, it will still come out anyway. Hopefully, people can feel it and relate to it. It was an interesting experience I’ve been through. A lot of it is about piri & tommy and leaving it. It was always how do you end it, how do you know if you should end it? It’s so difficult. It’s also about new experiences and meeting new people. I had a lot of emotional material to dig into.”
The album also gave her the opportunity to address some more political themes, but in a way that didn’t sound too earnest and serious. There’s also the beautiful act of following the song ‘sex dreams do cum true’ with ‘trickle down economics’, a juxtaposition that encapsulates the twin feelings that dominate a lot of our lives between desire and freedom and the societal constraints and existential dread of modern life as she sings obliquely, “Something isn’t right”. “I wanted to tread carefully with that one,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of thoughts politically about the state of the world, but I didn’t want it to be too on the nose. It’s kind of vague but to the point as well.”
Politics and political activism have always been important to piri, and she intends on embracing that even more now. “I’ve got another political song in the works,” she says. “I might try to collaborate with different people. I’ve met [Green Party leader] Zack Polanski a couple of times and was wondering if it was worth exploring doing something with him.” The relationship between dance music and political activism is something that has always been important and increasingly so now. “Dancing is a huge thing that brings people together,” she exclaims. “The Green Party have been throwing the Green Party parties, being in a political club vibe was really cool. There was a lot of energy. Sometimes, at the end of protests, they have a sound system. I walked past one day, and they were blessing garage at the end. We’ve got to uplift ourselves as well as focus on what’s wrong with the world. It’s good to open it up to the dance music lovers.”
While piri loves dance music and electronic music is at the heart of what she does, she’s keen to emphasise that this album is something a little different. “It’s definitely not club music. I’ve always been semi-mischaracterised as a club artist. My music is far too wordy for that. There is still a taste for the more kind of bedroom pop and dance music with heart as well and emotional lyrics. It sits in its own lane. I don’t think there’s much that sounds like this record. I want to sit with those artists who are really known for just doing their own thing, like Caroline Polachek, Charli xcx and Magdalena Bay.”
It’s always thrilling when an artist finds themselves caught up in the rush of creative freedom. Right now, piri is bursting with ideas. “I’m keen to start exploring remixes. I’ve got a loose idea for the next project, and I want to lean even more into jazz fusion. I know a bunch of jazz musicians in London. I just want to make some beats, get some chords from the jazzers and mash it together and say do a solo, let’s go. I want to make the beats with actual jazz-trained musicians who I love.”
To celebrate ‘girl in stem’, piri is planning some more unconventional events. “I’m throwing a house party at my house on release day,” she laughs. “A lot of artists do release day performances or events, but I just want to celebrate with my friends. I want to do a speech, but not a performance, because I want to get a bit messed up and let loose. I’ve got a show in November called piri & friends with my three actual best friends supporting me. I’m going to play the album in chronological order of when it was written. It’s the journey I went on as I was writing it.”
The journey through ‘girl in stem’ redefines piri as an artist, informed and inspired by her previous experiences but with a newfound optimism and confidence for the future. All the boundaries, barriers and misconceptions have been firmly smashed. “I learned how much I was capable of and how much I love working independently,” she concludes. ■
Taken from the August 2026 issue of Dork. piri’s album ‘girl in stem’ is out now.
