Fenne Lily "Breach" Album Breaks The Boundaries & Touches New Highs
☆ By Saachi Gupta ☆
ENTERING A NEW CHAPTER OF PERSONAL GROWTH AND OBSERVATION - Fenne Lily’s upcoming album BREACH takes the listener on an interpersonal journey. Out September 18th, BREACH highlights a matured, and more intentional, creative process for the artist. Deceivingly upbeat, her latest single and video, “Solipsism”, delves into the present generation's relationship with social media and the anxieties that it causes.
Describing herself as a “free-range kid”, Fenne Lily spent a year in her childhood traveling all over Europe in a live-in bus with her family. This magical freedom she experienced is encapsulated flawlessly in her music – all of which is mesmerizing, spellbinding in the way that her dreamy vocals melt into her tender lyrics and soft tunes.
Writing songs started as a therapeutic exercise for the enigmatic musician, but it wasn't long before it turned into more. Her first album, On Hold was self-released in 2018, and found love and acclaim all over the world. While the record was a vulnerable documentation of Lily's love and relationships, her upcoming album BREACH is a look inward, diving into her own feelings and her life without the involvement of those outside. The record, exploring themes such as isolation and loneliness, is especially poignant in today's circumstances, leaving a soft feeling of wistfulness in its wake.
“Isolation is an extreme word for what I did to start the writing process, I really just rented a flat in Berlin for a month by myself, but that was the first time I hadn’t had people I knew around me,” explains Lily, throwing a light on how being alone impacted her creativity, “There were obviously people, I didn’t feel totally isolated, but I definitely felt lonely for a while. It’s a weird thing, having yourself for company and only new things and places as distractions. It impacted me personally in the sense that I became fully comfortable with an internal dialogue instead of actual conversations, that was a big thing. I think it’s easy to ignore your own thoughts and swap them out for other stimulation a lot of the time, and I wanted to see whether I’d be able to focus and work more freely in a less comfortable place. Also to feel a bit lonely isn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least for me, because it turned my thoughts inward and I started writing about situations I thought I’d moved on from - that was a strange thing, giving my mind space to wander and realizing sometimes it goes backwards. It was cathartic though because clearly I wasn’t fully over whatever feelings crept back in.”
This striking feeling of clarity, of being hyper-aware of your own emotions and actions and focusing inwards, is something that is undoubtedly reflected in the various tracks on BREACH, each of which explores different subjects with a stunning amount of power and rawness.
When asked about her favorite tune off the album, Lily has two answers, “I’m attached to the first track, ‘To Be a Woman Pt.1’ because it’s the first song I’ve released that I recorded completely by myself — we didn’t change it from the demo. I recorded it at home with a cold. But overall I’m going for “Berlin”, purely because I thought I’d lost the initial idea and guitar part when my phone died on a plane and then it came back to me like a good dog.”
Lyrically too, BREACH sees Lily reaching new heights, with her words more refined and stunningly subtle.
There are some lyrics from the album that she is exceptionally proud of, and for good reason: “‘I gave up smoking when I was coughing up blood / and when I felt better again I took it straight back up’ — that one feels satisfying to me,” she states, “There’s a track called “Birthday” which makes me feel so freshly sad and angry whenever I think about it, and the opening line is ‘you sent me a head on my birthday / you said it was made with love / it made me laugh’. I think people hearing it at shows assume I date killers.”
“Alapathy”, the startingly urgent first single from Lily's album has already been out since June 23rd, with several comments on the official video declaring it to be “timeless, unique and beautiful.”
The title of the song combines the words ‘apathy’ and ‘allopathy’ to describe Lily's struggle with mental health and Western medicine.
Lily's work, she says, is inseparable from her mind, and so, according to her, the connection between mental health and art is indisputable.
“It’d be hard to separate a person’s mind from the work it creates, so in the simplest sense mental health and art go hand in hand. Whether that feels like a positive thing or a negative thing changes like moods do but I feel like I still lean into my lowest points; I don’t try to avoid feeling anything anymore, anything I’m feeling is important to be feeling,” she muses, “Sadness and apathy aren’t things I necessarily need to draw from but I definitely use music as a kind of free therapy. It works the other way too, sometimes lyrics appear and I wonder where they came from because they seem unrelated to whatever I’m feeling in that moment, and then a couple months later I’ll realize they perfectly describe whatever’s happening — like emotional time travel. I also find that I think too much about everything with the exception of music — it’s become something I can trust my instincts on and not constantly be worrying about whether I’m doing the right thing, because there IS no right thing.”
Lily's own relationship with social media, she explains, has changed over the years: “Honestly it used to be a toxic one - when I was feeling particularly insecure I’d use it for validation, which never made me feel satisfied and ended up creating a whole new feeling of emptiness. social media can 100% be used in a healthy way but it definitely has the potential to create more of a distance than the closeness we assume it provides. Now I use it a lot less - I’d like to disappear off the map between album cycles and only use it for promo around releases to take myself out of that pattern of posting and checking and comparing myself to everyone I see on a screen. It’s easy to criticize yourself for what you feel you lack purely based on what you see others having. I don’t wish it didn’t exist but it’s a tool not a crutch.”
An album that Lily poured her heart and soul into, is bound to have changed things for her, both emotionally and professionally. Thinking back on something that the creation of BREACH taught her, Lily answers, “That angry doesn't mean loud and playing piano isn't like riding a bike.”
BREACH is a record that is heavy with the weight of unresolved feelings and situations, and draws a lot of honest revelations from Lily herself. Her listeners, Lily hopes, will be able to feel this vulnerability and hope in the record, too.
Speaking of how she wants the album to make its listeners feel, she says, “I don’t know ‘how’ but I think ‘feel’ is enough for me. Once something’s out in the world, the way it’s absorbed isn’t up to me anymore, but I like to think this record is hopeful, and resilient, a bit intense, and maybe funny in parts although if I think I’m funny that probably means I’m absolutely not.”
With COVID-19 still going strong, future plans, for Lily, are uncertain at the moment.
“I’m hoping science saves us and we can tour properly, I’m not totally sold on livestream gigs — they make me more sad than satisfied, generally, but I’d like to play in a video game. Travis Scott did it, so now we know it’s possible,” she says.
In any case, the one thing that is certain is that BREACH, with Lily's ethereal vocals and exploratory lyrics, is bound to be a smashing hit, one that is only the first step to a Fenne Lily who breaks the boundaries and touches new highs with every new record.
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