FEATURE: Spotlight: Eaves Wilder — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Eaves Wilder

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I am doing a lot of…

Spotlight features, where I highlight exciting artists to watch I have not covered before. I thought I had written about Eaves Wilder, but it seems like this is an omission. I am correcting that now! Even though she has been putting out music for a few years now, she is being tipped for suycecss in 2026. Since her Hookey E.P. in 2023 – which is when I first heard her, I think -, there have been some singles. There was a bit of a gap since 2023, but Wilder released Everybody Talks in November. An incredible new single that could form the basis of another E.P., it is a great time to dive deeper into the work of this brilliant young artist. I am going to get to a fairly new interview. However, I want to first head back to 2023. DIY spoke with the Secretly Canadian-signed nineteen-year-old about her music and how she would describe it. I was really excited discovering Eaves Wilder in 2023, and I am so glad that she continues to put out incredible music:

“Describe your music to us in the form of a Tinder bio.

Hyper-femme, fuzzy dream-rock.

What’s your earliest musical memory?

I was a Doctor Who obsessive, so Murray Gold who wrote the score was like Elvis to me for a while. Every Saturday I used to just freak out on a swing in my garden to the whole score and call it my circus, which I found some deeply haunting footage of recently.

Is there a visual world to what you’re trying to create? If so, how would you describe it?

I love music that builds worlds, that’s why I love Gorillaz. Riot Grrrl taught me the idea of reclaiming my girlhood. We all grow up really quickly, especially in London. I went to a music production college where there were only four of us girls on the course, and I realised I was dressing and acting masculine to be more respected, but I was still disrespected. So I gave up trying to do that and started leaning into the extreme opposite. Pink, lace, ribbons, stickers, toys - that’s the world I’m interested in at the moment.

Describe the vibe of one of your gigs in three words.

Joyful. Sweaty. Lispy.

Musically or otherwise, what are you most looking forward to this year?

Festivals!!! I grew up on them, wishing I could play and we’re playing loads this summer!!! I also really wanna have some under-18 gigs because I write my lyrics for teenage girls and I haven’t been able to sing them to them yet. But mainly, I got a banjo for Christmas and I need to learn it in time for the summer so I can sit on a hay bale and jig.

Which track of yours should a first-time listener start with, and why?

To quote the Sound of Music, the beginning is the very best place to start! ‘Won’t You Be Happy’ is the song where I figured out how I sing and where I figured out what my sound was gonna be”.

As Eaves Wilder’s parents are author and journalist Caitlin Moran and author and music writer Pete Paphides, there is that love and knowledge of music in the household. People who would naturally foster their daughter’s dreams and ambitions, but also provide insight and experience into the music industry and what it is like for artists. One more 2023 interview before moving things more up to date. The Line of Best Fit spoke with an artist inspired and strengthened by artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna. These incredible and vibrant women who helped lift her (Wilder) out of her sadness – or liberate her form it:

“Finding her voice wasn’t quite so painless. Overwhelmed by shyness, Wilder took to filling secret notebooks with scrawled lyrics and singing only when the house was empty. “I was very much the kid with the toy microphone, stomping around the place and shouting lyrics, but as I got older the whole thing just became super embarrassing to me,” she admits. “I joined my school choir when I was ten – mainly because we got a free trip to Disneyland – but I just mimed the whole time.”

Her bedroom was a sanctuary where Wilder evaded the social horrors of school and silently honed her craft. Like many timid teens, she also found solace on the microblogging platform turned internet hellscape Tumblr - a discovery she credits with the volant decline of her mental health. “It was full of these totally unrealistic, glamourised ideas about mental illness and I grew up on that,” she muses.

By the age of twelve, the young musician was losing her identity to a struggle with anorexia and found her bedroom refuge traded for cold, empty consultant rooms and underfunded hospital wards – a scene described in Moran’s memoir, More Than a Woman, as “a tiny rescue boat in a sea filled with drowning children.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Zachariah Mahrouche

“When I became mentally ill myself and started going to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), I realised how wrong that all was," Wilder tells me. "Everything about it was so ugly and horrible. It’s not pretty or cool, at all. Eating disorders are all about being as small as possible and I don’t mean just physically – but taking up as little space as you can in a room and not drawing any attention to yourself.

"And the smaller you get, the smaller your life gets. And because your life gets so small, it becomes only what you’re going through.”

Desperate to cling to a semblance of self beyond her illness, Wilder penned lyrics on these dark disparities and set musical goals to help her pull through: “When I decided to recover, music was my North Star. My mum found some of my old CAMHS reports a few weeks ago and between all the fucked-up stuff, I’d written goals like ‘practice the My Sweet Lord riff on guitar' and 'learn the solo from Uncertain Smile by The The.’"

Wilder might have grown up with parents in the industry, but making it on her own terms was always on the agenda: “From the start, I didn’t want to use my parents as a way to weasel in,” the young musician affirms, “I really wanted to make it of my own accord.”

When she turned 16, behind an anonymous email, Wilder got to work reaching out to labels, managers, and producers from the hallowed music directory. “I remember my rule was to send five emails a week,” she laughs, “and by probability, someone should reply… That’s how I made contact with people like Stephen Street, and eventually my label”.

All the new articles highlighting Everybody Talks – Eaves Wilder’s new single – say how it is this ‘return’. People who read my work know how much I hate that return, as it implies an artist has disappeared or retired and then come back to music. It is never true for newer artists. In the case of Eaves Wilder, she needed time to focus on herself and prioritise other things. She did not leave music nor tell anyone she was done – so it seems like a stupid word to apply to the single! I keep thinking I have written about Eaves Wilder, though apparently not. A bit shameful on my part! Before coming to this year, there is an interview from Under the Radar from February last year. Eaves Wilder reacting to a year (2023) of growth and new experiences:

“She also worries about living a life online for the next young generation who have grown up not knowing a time before the internet. “Social media can encourage you to have fewer hobbies and not look at different ways of expressing yourself; constantly posting all your thoughts unfiltered publicly doesn’t always lead to a positive experience. I enjoy writing songs because I spend hours and hours obsessing over them so that they say exactly what I want them to say within three minutes. I don’t really do ‘trains of thought;’ I like to think things out properly before I put them out into the world.”

Another track on the Hookey, “I Stole Your Jumper,” which centers around female revenge, took a couple of rewrites before Wilder was happy with the energy and tone of the song. “I had a lot of dark things I wanted to talk about and had initially approached them in a kind of sad girl way, but it just didn’t feel cathartic, so I tried to write in a super aggressive riot grrrl, badass way about this guy. But that didn’t feel right because all I’d done was take his clothes and burn them rather than confront him. And I’d also just watched Thelma and Louise with my sister and thought—well, my revenge story was burning his clothes, so that’s what I should write about. It actually felt more cathartic singing about that because it was completely true. It’s the song I really get lost in the most when I perform it live.”

Wilder’s previous single “Freefall” was framed as a kind of companion track to “I Stole Your Jumper,” in that it deals with coming to terms with trauma. “A lot of girls who have had a bad experience of assault, become celibate for a few years as a way of coping with the trauma,” Wilder explains. “That’s what ‘I Stole Your Jumper’ was about, and ‘Freefall’ is like the follow-up—it’s meant to sound quite sloppy and drunk. And it was when I was at a house party; it’s about the realization that you are kind of over it enough to go out again.”

PHOTO CREDIT: James Loveday

Wilder’s balance of soaring pop hooks and witty incisive lyrics, often dealing with weighty subject matters, have certainly connected with people, including the “BBC6 Music Dad” demographic that appreciated her recent cover of the Blur classic, “She’s so High” (from their 1991-released debut album, Leisure).

“I’ve always loved Blur,” she enthuses. “And Leisure especially. Graham [Coxon] loves My Bloody Valentine, and I can always hear that influence on a lot of their songs. Blur was like a gateway drug for me; they got me into Elastica which, in turn, got me into PJ Harvey, so I’m forever indebted to them. I always loved how British they were, the fact that they never put on that fake American accent style of singing, which always grates. And I think every girl wants to be that girl Damon [Albarn] is singing about. It’s also the song that when I play it live, always gets the 6 Music Dads going too, which is great fun.”

Looking back on 2023, Wilder reflects it has been a year of growth, and development as well as some incredible and unexpected moments

“It’s been a real learning curve; some amazing things happened like playing Glastonbury on the “BBC Introducing Stage.” After their impressive performance, Wilder got a call to play Glastonbury’s iconic “The Other Stage,” when an artist had to drop out. “That was crazy,” she laughs. “Some of us had only just got back to our tents from the night before when we got the call saying if we could make it we could have the slot. We only had like an hour, and our gear had already been taken from the site; we had no manager or tour manager on-site. And we were running around the site trying to borrow some equipment so we could play, but it was such fun. Another one was playing the Green Man festival, as that’s such a special place for me; I’ve gone every year, so to play there felt like a full circle; it was incredible, and it was off the back of our slot on the Other Stage that they saw us and booked us. In 2024 I’ll be going back in the studio and writing songs which will be informed by knowing what it’s like to play live, 2023 really was an amazing year!”.

Actually, I thought there was a new interview with Eaves Wilder, though it seems more coverage of her new single. I think we will get some new interviews next year. I will end with a review/feature about Everybody Talks. Just before getting there, in an interview for Music Week’s Women in Music Roll of Honour 2025, Big Life Management’s Kat Kennedy tipped Eaves Wilder as an artist to watch. She said this: “I’m really excited for the world to get to know Eaves Wilder. She’s had a couple of great EPs out already but I’ve heard some new music that’s in the pipeline and it is brilliant. She’s both fierce and adorable, with a unique voice and bucketloads of great ideas. My colleague & friend Ros Earls at 140db manages her. Ros is another massive inspiration to me in my career, and I’d love to see the two of them have some well-deserved success together”. It is exciting that there is new music from Eaves Wilder, as she is someone to watch closely. This feature gives us more insight into and background behind a wonderful new song from an artist everybody should know:

“Born from an intense moment of on-stage dissociation—a reaction to intrusive and loud audience chatter—the song harnesses a "queasy cocktail of emotions" and transforms it into a powerful, cathartic explosion. Wilder went straight to work, crafting a piece of music designed to mirror this sense of chaos and the "rising waterline of punishing intrusive voices."

‘Everybody Talks’ is built on fast, driving rhythms and artfully unrelenting, chant-like vocals, with a structure that continuously escalates in size and volume. The track's energy is deliberately relentless, echoing the feeling of an overstimulated, overwhelming modern world. As Wilder herself states, the song is a "big, dirty mantra" for when you need to "drown everything else out."

Sonically, the single is ambitious. The press release draws smart parallels to the frenzied final ascent of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ and the urgency of The Walkmen’s ‘The Rat’. Its panoramic climax, featuring back-to-back guitar and piano solos, is said to possess a gravity-defying release reminiscent of modern classics like Slowdive’s ‘Star Roving’, highlighting a sophisticated grasp of dynamic songcraft.

Lyrically, a quote from the track captures the anxiety and defiance of the modern musician: "Everybody takes. But they never give. I am running off of pure fear and adrenaline”. This raw, honest perspective is what makes Eaves Wilder feel so rooted and current, possessing a sister-energy to artists like Wet Leg and Wolf Alice.

‘Everybody Talks’ is a high-voltage statement. It’s a track that doesn't just ask for attention; it demands it with a sonic tidal wave of urgency and fury. This single solidifies Eaves Wilder not just as a talented songwriter, but as a genuine music connoisseur capable of sketching a rich new landscape influenced by dreamtime pop (Cocteau Twins, Lush) and full-on rock blast (Jane's Addiction).

The central lyrical theme of ‘Everybody Talks’ is a powerful and candid expression of overstimulation, intrusive anxiety, and defiant self-preservation in the face of modern overwhelming noise.

The song’s inspiration is highly specific yet universally relatable: an on-stage experience where the artist was confronted by loud, invasive chatter from the audience, leading to a feeling of dissociation and chaos”.

It is no surprise that Eaves Wilder is being selected as an artist to watch next year. Indie Is Not a Genre included her as one of their names to look out for: “Eaves Wilder has become a standout figure in the next wave of British indie thanks to her sharp wit, understated charisma and a knack for turning personal chaos into melodic gold. Her sound sits somewhere between grunge-tinged melancholy and crisp, hook-heavy pop, delivered with an honesty that feels both youthful and wise. Having already earned a loyal cult following, Wilder is rising fast, and her ascent shows no sign of slowing”. I would love to interview Eaves Wilder one day, as she is a fascinating artist I would love to know more about. What she wants to accomplish next year and what her creative drive has been like since 2023. How her life and experiences the past couple of years have impacted her new single and thoughts for the future. I know we will hear a lot more from her in 2026. If she is new to you, then make sure you play the music of the wonderful Eaves Wilder. She is a mega-talented and fascinating artist….