FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Eaves Wilder

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

Eaves Wilder

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SIX months ago…

I spotlighted Eaves Wilder. It was an omission on my part to neglect her music to that point. Though I have been a fan for years. I wanted to revisited this incredible London-based artist. I am not going to repeat things I wrote in the previous feature. There are some great 2026 chats with an amazing and beautiful artist that is among our absolute best. I have so much respect and love for everything Wilder does. She plays London’s The Social on 24th June. One of our finest artists – as I think I acknowledged last time -, her debut album, Little Miss Sunshine, came out in April. I think that it should be shortlisted for a Mercury nomination. It is a perfect album for inclusion, as it is exceptional and worthy in its own right, though it is important we recognition artists genuinely deserving. I love Sam Fender, though he seemed dismissive last year when he won it for People Watching – even though the album was worthy. I am going to get to a couple of interviews around Little Miss Sunshine. I am ending with a positive review for the album. I don’t usually just dump in entire interviews without editing but, when it comes to some, I feel it is important to include the majority of what is said. In the case of Eaves Wilder, we get some explanation and background. In terms of why Little Miss Sunshine is important. Someone who, at one point, took a big step away from music. Why her debut album arrived this year and not sooner. DIY spoke with Eaves Wilder in April. Having hit pause until she had something to say, “with debut album ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, Eaves Wilder is learning to follow her instincts”:

“After releasing her debut EP ‘Hookey’ in 2019, London’s Eaves Wilder took a step back. “There’s so much noise in the world, and so many people making music, and I felt like I was one of them,” she explains, speaking from her living room over Zoom. “I thought: ‘I need to figure out if I’ve got something to say that I think I could add’.”

During what felt like a mid-life crisis (“well, hopefully not mid-life!”), Eaves decided it was time to throw in the towel and, if she ever wanted to move out of her parents’ house, get a more stable job - that, or she’d join a nunnery. “I still think it’s quite a good idea,” she grins, citing The Sound of Music as inspiration. “It’s free rent and free food; you get to garden, read and listen to music all day - it sounds lovely!” Unfortunately, her boyfriend pointed out that she’d have to give up beer, which put the plan firmly to bed.

Before calling it a day entirely, Eaves - who’d previously felt constricted by a pressure to produce radio-friendly, all-out pop - decided to try leaning into her own tastes. The result was ‘Mountain Sized’, which she describes as “basically a huge train of thought thrown up onto a song”; finally freed from writer’s block, the rest of her imminent debut album, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, soon followed.

“I’m really fuelled by the stuff in my gut. I think that’s why I’m drawn to certain sounds and why I love big, heavy distortion and loads of reverb,” she says. “It’s really instinctive now, rather than led by what I think I should be doing. It’s purely me and my stomach, and what I think sounds cool.”

Her comeback single of sorts, ‘Everybody Talks’ addresses the saturated online content farm that made her want to quit music in the first place, with her airy vocals growing more urgent over a spiralling chorus. “Everyone talks before they actually realise if they have something to say,” she explains. “We’re not meant to have this many opinions about everything. Our worlds are way too big.”

Right down to its name, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is a rejection of the ever-cheerful, smiling woman Eaves felt expected to impersonate, packaging the anger, frustration and fear that felt truer to her experience of young womanhood within snarling guitars and massive instrumentals inspired by Wolf Alice, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots. Opener ‘Hurricane Girl’ reimagines the oft-mythologised troubled woman from a more sympathetic angle, while the thundering ‘Just Say No!’ recalls the intoxicating false praise of being taken advantage of.

It’s clear that being a young woman has consciously shaped much of Eaves’ relationship with the industry. She credits that to her mum, journalist Caitlin Moran, who would sit Eaves and her sister down in front of MTV “for hours” while pointing out how none of the male artists wore barely-there spangled leotards. “She’d say: ‘do you see how powerful he looks?’,” Eaves remembers. “‘He’s not having to do any of that shit - why are they?’”. That early education was formative; now, it pervades every facet of her musical life. “My view of the world has always been through a very feminist lens,” she nods. “It’s inescapable - once you see the world that way, you can’t go back”.

I do like this interview from Under the Radar earlier this month. Rather than it being the standard interview regarding promotion and getting insights into her debut album, instead, Eaves Wilder reveals her ‘firsts’. It is a great insight into a truly tremendous songwriter. I do hope that Little Miss Sunshine receives lots of award nominations, as it is among the best albums of this year. Women are ruling music, and Eaves Wilder is an example of queens on top. Little Miss Sunshine is an album you need to get on vinyl, as it contains music that draws you in. Even if there is a lot of her in the album, I think everyone can relate and understand. An experience that never excludes the listener. When I hear the album, I close my eyes and imagine myself in the songs. The feel and warmth of vinyl means it is an album you really need to get on this format:

“Wilder garnered attention and acclaim for her early singles and 2023 EP, Hooky, but considered walking away from music and even toyed with becoming a nun. But then she wrote and arranged Little Miss Sunshine in her shed and later co-produced the album with Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine; The Horrors; Black Country, New Road; Sorry).

“I remembered when I realized I’d written a concept album and that it was a whole self-contained world. It was like ‘Holy shit!’ And in that moment I realized that’s why I had almost walked away,” she explains. “At my lowest, I just wanted to be unhuman, unfeeling, and unmoved. Like a mountain or a tree. Or the sky. These are all things that have a purpose but I didn’t know what my purpose was. And so what I had to do was figure it out, song by song.”

Read on as she discusses the early influence of her dad, her love for a certain Time Lord, and unlikely first musician crush.

First record your parents played for you?

My dad was constantly playing records. I remember him playing [Nick Drake’s] Bryter Layter a lot, and also ELO a lot.

First album you bought?

Elastica, by Elastica.

First favorite band?

The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

First favorite song?

Everything in the Doctor Who soundtrack by Murray Gold.

First concert you went to?

My dad’s a music journalist, and my mum was away a lot, so he would take us with him for all the gigs he had to review, which was awesome. I saw Carole King when I was really little and I remember it really stuck with me. I don’t think I’d seen a band fronted by a woman on piano.

First instrument?

High School Musical microphone that lets you duet with Troy. I ran that thing to the ground until his voice was like all distorted and fucked up cos I think I had also kissed it a lot it and it fucked with the electronics.

First recording device?

I got a four-track little portable recording machine when I was about eight and would mysteriously walk around school listening to my demos waiting for someone to ask me about it.

First time you performed in public?

I had formed this band for the school”.

Prior to getting to a review of Little Miss Sunshine, let’s come to Rolling Stone UK and their interview with the remarkable Eaves Wilder. They spotlighted an artist who “turned anger and disillusionment into newfound power on the glorious and deserved second chance of debut album ‘Little Miss Sunshine’”.

“What did it feel like when you started to write songs again after the break? What sounds and ideas were coming out?

It started from a point of me being like, ‘I’m gonna quit music, so what would I make? I’m just gonna experiment a little bit and see what I would make’. I was really anti-music at the time. I was, like, over it. I was really into books, and it was all coming from a few books and a few movies that I loved. About half way through, I realised, ‘Oh, this is all coming from the same place, and these will tie in together. Maybe it could be a thing!’

I remember talking to my mum and my sister, and my sister knew I was having writer’s block. She kept on hearing songs by, like, Olivia Rodrigo, and being like, ‘You should write a song like that!’ I’d say, ‘Fuck off! I’m trying!’ I remember just being like, ‘I can’t write a banger right now. I just can’t’. I just wanted to write something really pretty, and she was like, ‘Well, you’re allowed to do that too’. That just clicked something in me. I was like, ‘Oh, I could just make something that I think sounds really nice and isn’t meant to have mass appeal’. I remember my mum playing me a Liz Fraser song, which I’d never heard before. I went straight to the shed in my garden and wrote the first song for the record.

You’ve said your album is about world building, and its song titles – ‘Hurricane Girl’, ‘The Great Plains’, ‘Mountain Sized’ – are very tied to nature. What does the world you’re building look like in your head?

It was the polar opposite of where I actually was, in this really rainy spring in the UK. Everybody was so depressed! I was thinking of really vast American landscapes. I was super into the Laurel Canyon scene, and then from that, I was reading Daisy Jones and the Six, and Little House on the Prairie has always been one of my favourite books. It all just seemed to be this place that was pure fantasy and escapism – just being a little girl on a ranch, not having to think about her phone or, like, having a job or joining a nunnery…

The album is called Little Miss Sunshine – did that film inspire the album?

It actually didn’t! I’ve watched it before, but [the title] was more of a joke to myself, because I was such a bitch at the time – I was really going through it. I wasn’t nice to be around. Really, I was quite unhappy and really angry at the world actually, I think. I liked the idea of it, especially when you’re a woman that’s my age, it’s really not hot to be really angry or kind of a bitch or annoyed, and you need to have this sunny disposition. That’s what’s encouraged. And I really want to have that! At first I present as having that, but then deep down, I’ve got all of this other shit that’s going on, and that’s songs like ‘Mountain Sized’ and ‘Hurricane Girl’. I tried to use weather to describe all of these different weather fronts that were coming in and out of me at the time. It started off as a joke, and now it makes me quite happy, because the point of the album was trying to find the light in things again. I guess I did that eventually”.

I want to end with a review from DIY. They gave some great insights into one of the most important debut albums of this year. In terms of getting this incredible young artist to a wider audience. A complete and arresting album from Eaves Wilder. I do feel that this album is worthy of being played on some huge stages. Let’s hope that Wilder’s summer is busy with festival requests and a load of dates:

“Despite its sound owing much to late-‘90s alternative – and that it’s coming two years on from her initial breakthrough – there’s something so beautifully ‘now’ about ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, this debut full-length from Eaves Wilder. Not the ‘now’ that one might imagine rapacious, cartoonish A&Rs to seek – that’s already been and gone, despite their efforts, if it even existed. But a ‘now’ that, among other things, has digitally-literate teens metaphorically crate-digging in a way that’s seen many a veteran act performing to audiences younger than their biggest hits; Olivia Rodrigo using her stage as a pseudo mixtape, Hayley Williams spilling her own guts across new material, and acts like Mitski, Wolf Alice and Wet Leg crossing over into pop spheres in various ways. That tangent is to say, there’s an audience ready and primed for a record like this, should it find them.

The scene opener ‘Hurricane Girl’ sets is one that contrasts Eaves’ saccharine vocals – exaggerated in their effect as to veer towards the sinister – and soaring guitars. To use a decidedly ‘90s reference point to match its result: it’s as if Alisha’s Attic had been reached by riot grrrl. Similarly, ‘Ropeburn’ continues in the ‘90s alt-pop vein, while that same intense vocal turn adds a dollop of intrigue to ‘English Tea’, its “…or we could go for a drive / Or you could sit with me” given multiple interpretations.

There’s a glorious oomph to ‘Just Say No!’, while ‘The Great Plains’ feels like a classic summertime radio bop, a hint of wistful resignation to its repeated “I wanna be a cowboy, mama”; closer ‘Summer Rolls’, too, whirls dreamily into being a classic, expansive final song. It’s ‘Daisy Chain Reaction’ that’s the true gem here, though; its witty title matched by an enviable ability to ooze ennui, an excitable, chugging pulse and an immediate sense of having already existed for decades, a song that’s not trying to be - but just is. Equal parts escapist and infectious, while simmering with if not rage then an itchy frustration, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is, yes, the exact misnomer one would assume its title to be, and yet entirely suited to the coming months”.

I really love Little Miss Sunshine and everything Eaves Wilder releases. A quick follow-up from my Spotlight feature late last year, I am going to watch with interest what comes next from Wilder. She will want to take time to promote her debut. And not be rushed regarding a follow-up. If you are searching for an artist who is going to endure and be releasing music for many years more, then you need…