Ladyhawke reveals details of new album 'Wild Things'
/Wild Things, set for release on Friday June 3rd, is Ladyhawke’s first album release since 2012’s Anxiety. “People wonder why there’s always a massive gap between my albums,” says Pip. The reason is both complicated and easy. The simple explanation: “I’ve never released anything I’m not proud of. That’s important to me. I don’t want to release anything that I have a weird feeling about.”
Those instincts have served Brown well. She released her self-titled debut in 2008, which peaked at No. 16 on the U.K. album charts and No. 1 in New Zealand and Australia’s album charts. Featuring the songs ‘Paris Is Burning’, ‘My Delirium’, ‘Dusk Til Dawn’, and ‘Magic’, the album took home an incredible six NZ Music Awards, and won Australia’s ARIA music awards for Best Breakthrough album & Best Breakthrough Single. Ladyhawke was also nominated for The Brits’ much coveted Best International Artist.
Three years later, Ladyhawke’s more aurally angular follow-up, Anxiety, yielded the stand-out, synch-friendly single, ‘Blue Eyes.’ Like its predecessor, the album charted in the U.K.’s Top 40 and in New Zealand & Australia’s Top 20, respectively.
Brown’s conviction to authenticity led her on a journey starting in 2013. Over three years, she scrapped a full Ladyhawke album (“The material didn’t feel like me. It felt too dark or something”). Once reliant on alcohol to surmount social anxiety (“I’d never done a sober show in my life until last December”), she quit drinking and focused on getting healthy. Then she welcomed that newfound clarity by crafting her latest release, the blissed-out Wild Things.
“I think I went even more synthy and poppy this time around,” Brown says of the buoyant Wild Things. “I feel good for the first time in 10 years. I actually have a clear mind! I have a wife. I feel stable. That is what I’m celebrating.”
Pip worked on the album on and off over the course of a year with producer Tommy English (Børns, Tiësto, Dark Waves), whom she met through her L.A. neighbour, tattoo artist/musician Kat Von D.
In many ways, Wild Things is less about past demons and more a catalyst of what’s to come. “This album has given me a sense of purpose. Even if it took me months or years to get that purpose, as soon as I finished that record it was like an unbelievable weight was lifted off my shoulders,” she says. You can hear that freedom in Wild Things’ unabashed exuberance, a powerful, vibrant expression of life itself. “Everything I wrote was all the stuff I was going through. I got it out of my system, exorcised it from my soul.”
‘A Love Song,’ is one of the deep-dives into relationships from the album - a sweeping, reverberating revelation. “‘This is what a love song sounds like’—meaning it’s not all sappy,” she explains. “I’d lose everything if I didn’t stop drinking. The other person in your life, sometimes they have to be cruel to be kind.”
Check out the lyric video to 'A Love Song' below