FEATURE:
Spotlight
Alice Glass
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MOST of the time in Spotlight…
I feature artists that are very new or starting to come through. Alice Glass is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She is the co-founder and former frontwoman of the Electronic band Crystal Castles. She began her solo career in 2014. Her debut solo album, PREY//IV, came out last month. That is the reason why I wanted to highlight her. Such a remarkable artist whose recent interviews have revealed the personal pain and experiences she put into an extraordinary album, I wanted to proffer the brilliance of Alice Glass’ music. One of the most honest and exceptional artists of her time, the release of her debut album confirms Glass as a mesmeric artist who is going to be an icon. I know her story, songs and words have helped and supported a lot of other people. I want to source a few interviews later on. Before that, I have been looking at the interviews Glass conducted around the release of PREY//IV. DIY spoke with Alice Glass last month. She discussed her new work, in addition to her complicated feelings regarding nostalgia:
“For anyone who grew up in the noughties, it goes without saying that Alice Glass has long been a star. A microcosm of the fucked-up Tumblr cool that capitivated young millennials, she was an icon of the Skins generation, topping cool lists and raising awe for her whiskey-chugging, stage-diving antics. It’s painful to realise that she was merely a teenager herself, joining Crystal Castles at the age of 15 and instantly coerced into the fabrication of ‘enigmatic’ PR folklore.
“There was that whole thing of, ‘Oh, it was a mic test’,” she says, recalling the infamous origin story of her ‘Alice Practice’ vocals. “No, it wasn’t. Everything was an allegory; how we met reading to the blind and all this fucking bullshit. None of it matched up; how could I be this fucking feral creature but also be playing hundreds of shows a year all over the world? It just didn’t make any sense. It was hard to keep up, so it was easier to back down.”
The more her ‘damaged’ onstage persona was praised, the further Alice retreated. “When I was crowd surfing, I wasn’t trying to, like, be hype and have fun,” she nods. “Honestly, it was more that I was a bit suicidal that whole time, and it was like, fuck it. If anybody wants to… I don’t know. That was my mentality.” Like a feeling of having nothing to lose, we suggest? “Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was around a bunch of dudes that were all like, at least 10 years older than me, where everybody treats me in a really weird way. It was not very pleasant.”
With the internet abuzz with a so-called ‘indie sleaze’ revival, Alice’s own feelings of nostalgia are understandably complicated, but she remains proud of the musical contributions she made to Crystal Castles and her subsequent growth since. Though ‘PREY//IV’ definitely makes use of the cathartically-dark narrative and ethereal electronics with which she has become well known, a distinct melodic knack shines through her newly-undistorted vocal, breaking down the notion of any ultra-hip pop snobbery.
“Definitely not!” she laughs. “I just did this radio show where I played a Babyshambles song, ‘Fuck Forever’, which I’ve loved for years. I really like Ariana Grande too, the vocal tone on some of her songs. I don’t really like major chord music, you know? Nothing too happy. But the perfect mix is despair, sprinkle a bit of hope in the chorus, and then back to despair again.”
Nowhere does hope hit harder than on recent single ‘FAIR GAME’. Working closely with Jupiter Keyes (previously of HEALTH), she uses spiky synths to reclaim manipulative sentiments once aimed at her by Kath (“Where would you be without me / I’m just trying to help you”), stating them slowly in order to remove their sting. “It sounds silly now, but when I first left and started to talk to a therapist, she said that he treated me as if I was in a cult,” says Alice. “You stay in a situation like that because your self esteem is crushed, but then ironically, the only thing that could make me feel like I was worth anything was writing music and performing. I didn’t think I was going to put it out at all, but Jupe was like no, you should. It was SOPHIE’s favourite song too; SOPHIE was going to remix it. I wanted to do it in respect for her.”
Given Alice’s previous brushes with online trolls, her nervousness was more than understandable, but the response was overwhelmingly kind. “People started writing me back; people who had been gaslit by similar phrases and could relate to it. So now it’s like that song doesn’t really belong to me anymore. And it feels good”.
This Spotlight feature is a chance to highlight an artist who is adored and an astonishing talent. I will return to rising artists soon enough, but I have not featured Alice Glass before. Looking at DORK’s interview, we learn about Glass’ transition from her former band, Crystal Castles, and her experiences leading up to PREY//IV:
“Even a decade and a half from her first introduction, Alice Glass might well still be one of the most iconic characters in music. Since she left Crystal Castles in 2014, she’s kept a relatively low profile with a solo EP, sporadic single releases and a burgeoning career as a DJ. This slight step back from the alt-pop spotlight is understandable, though.
After leaving the band, Alice revealed the abuse she experienced while in the group. That part of her life was traumatic and harrowing and inspired her creative and artistic rebirth as a fully-fledged solo star on her debut album ‘PREY//IV’. Happy and creatively energised living in LA, re-emerging into the spotlight is an experience fraught with both excitement and trepidation. “I’m excited and nervous because this is the most personal piece of art that I’ve ever released,” she explains. “I’m nervous about expressing myself for maybe the first time as an artist.”
The last six years have been a period of self-care and self-reflection for Alice. “It’s been intense,” she reflects. “When I started in that band, I left high school. It was like going from not having your frontal lobe developed to being an adult and being in a fucked up situation where you have to start from scratch. I’m lucky that I can pay for a psychiatrist. I’ve been doing a lot of self-help work. I’ve been medicated.”
Moving to LA and finding new friends and collaborators – like the producer Jupiter Io who she worked with on the album – was a catalyst for a new brighter period in her life. “I didn’t really have a circle of people that I trusted, let alone have a group of artists that I trust. It’s been another world to be in LA. Just to have peers and friends who are doing things that are really inspiring. Being able to trust other artists and feel comfortable and confident, like you belong. That’s been really life-changing for me.”
The album she has created is a staggering achievement. Immensely powerful and with a pulsing dark heart, it’s electro-pop full of hooks and memorable bangers, but with a starkly compelling emotional tension. The songs are predominately Alice’s reflection on a bleak time in her life – at once both sad and invigorating but always vital. “I wanted to make sure it meant something to me,” she reveals. “I’ve been writing music this whole time, but I’ve felt the pressure to have a record speak for my experience, rather than having songs and singles here and there that I was working on at the time. I wanted this record to be a statement.”
As she talked more about her experiences, she realised that putting these feelings and emotions into one body of work felt necessary. Frustratingly though, she still had to deal with extricating herself from her past. “I was dealing with things that just kept on happening,” she explains. “It wasn’t like leaving the band, and that was it. It was an intense hurricane of lawsuits and online harassment. There was always seemingly something that would put me back in time and make things harder. I had more to write about then. I think I started talking more about what had happened, and I started to get a lot of messages personally. I never really talked to a lot of survivors and people like me because I was so isolated. It was eye-opening to see that I wasn’t alone and how frequently it happens to all types of people who can find themselves in shitty abusive relationships. Seeing how common this is made me want to put the record out more, and not just for my own artistic reasons. I wanted to have something to comfort people with”.
The album’s title – ‘PREY//IV’ – exemplifies the power imbalances that Alice has previously experienced. Unfortunately, no matter how many progressive steps have been made, they’re also still horrifyingly present today. “Young women are not going to be predators in this cultural ecosystem,” she explains. “They’ve always been told that there are predators and prey, but you can choose to be a predator, and you can choose to stop whenever you want, but you can’t choose to stop being prey. For some people, that’s how they’ll always see you. You might not even realise that you’re being preyed on.”.
The juxtaposition between dancefloor ecstasy and crushing emotion is at the heart of the record. “I really like writing melodies that seem like they’re happy, but once you get deeper and they get stuck in your head, it’s actually pretty dark. I’ve always loved Jupiter’s production. He has an ability to make sounds sound really sad,” she says. “I definitely like sad music, but I don’t listen to it all the time. I like to dance when I’m sad”.
There have been a lot of positive reviews for the Canadian artist’s debut solo artist. PREY/IV is one of the most powerful and important albums of this year. This is what DIY wrote in their review:
“Haunted music box twinkles; punishing industrial throbs; glitching, limit-pushing electronics. Before you even begin to dissect the lyrical content (not-so-spoiler alert: it’s bleak) of Alice Glass’ solo debut, there’s little that makes for easy or comfortable listening within the claustrophobic, unsettling world of ‘PREY//IV’. It should come as little surprise both to fans of her work in Crystal Castles - the early ‘10s flag-bearers of the ‘indie sleaze’ era that’s found itself somehow back in the cultural lexicon - and of those who’ve followed her story since leaving the group in 2014, later accusing bandmate Ethan Kath of continued sexual, physical and mental abuse. ‘PREY//IV’ does not shy away from Alice’s story; instead, its imagery is violent and visceral, with portraits of isolation (‘PINNED BENEATH LIMBS’) and self harm (‘BABY TEETH’) riddled throughout an album defined by a sort of constant itchiness, a wish to rid itself of trauma by occupying it so fully. Much has already been made of the lyrics to ‘FAIR GAME’, which repurpose direct quotes from Kath - “I’m so embarrassed for you / I’m so embarrassed for us”, but the scars of the relationship are to be seen all across the record. You just hope that ‘PREY//IV’ has gone some way to exorcising them”.
I guess a lot of people will compare Alice Glass’ solo work to that with Crystal Castles. Glass made a statement about the abuse she has suffered. It adds to the sense of struggle and trauma that one can hear through PREY/IV. CLASH had this to say about such a remarkable album:
“It’s almost impossible to listen to Alice Glass’ solo debut without certain expectations – not only musical expectations, but personal ones, in a way that can hardly be entirely helpful even if they’re well-intentioned. In 2014, Glass left the hugely innovative group Crystal Castles which she’d formed with Ethan Kath, and three years later accused him of prolonged abuse throughout the time she’d known him. Other women came forward with similar claims, and the Toronto police confirmed in December 2017 that Kath was under investigation.
But even if those allegations had never been made public, 'PREY//IV' still clearly announces itself as an album about trauma. Over 13 tracks, Glass dissects her experiences from every angle: she sounds alternately enraged, broken, contemptuous, and often surprisingly matter of fact, marking these changes in tone with virtuosic shifts in her vocal performances. In Crystal Castles her voice was frequently semi-audible, buried under distortion and strange effects (including, famously, video game bleeps ripped from an Atari 5200). Here, though, the vocals take a front seat, exposing us not only to the extreme imagery of Glass’ lyrics but to the extreme variation of her delivery.
Nowhere is this more evident than in 'THE HUNTED', where she screams “Watch the hunter be the hunted!” before swooping down to a breathy sigh, confident and unerring. But these polarised lurches can be found all over the album, informing every decision in creatively productive ways. 'LOVE IS VIOLENCE' sets off its fat bass growls and knife-like synths with gaps of vertiginous silence; 'EVERYBODY ELSE' juxtaposes the sound of a music box with imagery of sexual violence (“Tie up my wrists like I’m nothing”); 'ANIMOSITY' doesn’t even stay put for the time it takes to sing the chorus, as Glass howls, then almost whispers, then howls again across three lines.
The effect is to draw attention not only to her voice, but to what she’s using it to say, literally or otherwise. Like Manic Street Preachers’ 'The Holy Bible' or Nick Cave’s 'Skeleton Tree', 'PREY//IV' is not simply music to listen to: it’s an attempt to communicate genuine pain in ways that simply aren’t possible through a written statement posted online. Little surprise, then, that the lyrics go for the jugular on occasion (“You taste like rotten meat”; “Are you picturing my insides outside of me?”).
However, they’re at their most effective when their visceral imagery gives way to narratives of coercion and control, as it does on 'FAIR GAME'. It’s no coincidence that 'FAIR GAME' falls slap bang in the middle of 'PREY//IV', as it's the album’s heart and ambiguous fulcrum, a withering put-down built around the question “Where would you be without me?” That question has echoes of Glass’ allegations: according to her, Kath “often told me how replaceable I was”, and “that all the people that came to our shows were only interested in his instrumentals and that I was ruining the band”. Sung by Glass, though, the words take on a new meaning. Her rebirth as a solo artist has taken almost a decade, but it shows how central she was to Crystal Castles’ success, and how little she needs anyone else to create thrilling music”.
To end, I want to source NME’s review of PREY/IV. Now, if you do not know about Alice Glass, is a time to listen to her music and learn more about an artist who has put so much of her personal experiences into her music. True art, this is an artist whose voice and words will resonate and resound for years to come. NME provided PREY/IV a very positive review:
“As well as functioning as a pun, the title of Alice Glass’ debut solo album ‘PREY//IV’ is a strong statement. Continuing with the Roman numeral naming-scheme used on the three albums she released with former electroclash band Crystal Castles, it’s a clear middle finger in the direction of her ex-collaborator Ethan Kath, whom she accused of abuse and manipulation (which he denies).
Kath touted their hit ‘Alice Practice’ as having emerged from an accidental recording, arguably positioning Glass as some kind of unwitting muse, but everything she has done since leaving the band feels incredibly intentional. Though its horror-show cover seems fairly tongue-in-cheek, the relative lightness is deceptive. Pain has been made cartoonish here, and deliberately so.
Here vocals often occupy a menacing high register – see the stuttering ‘Pinning Down Limbs’ or the helium-fuelled ‘Love is Violence’, for instance – but Glass creates an intensity in other ways too. On the cavernous ‘Fair Game’, her speaking voice cuts through the industrial beats as she asks in a near-whisper: “Would you like… another pill?” It’s completely chilling.
Yet there’s deep humanity here, too: as deep as her lyrics dig into shadowy darkness, the record’s unrelenting pulse feels like a cathartic release. Many of these songs are couched in layers of rave, industrial dance and even flickers of upbeat and slightly saccharine contemporary pop (albeit twisted and gnarled pop). Often, Glass’ music recalls hyper-pop as she blends genres, drawing on everything to trap and hip-hop beats to ambient electronica. The LA-based artist’s music also has much in common with the early macabre imagery of fellow Canadians Purity Ring, who blended fairytale with body-horror on 2012 debut ‘Shrines’. “I’ll cut your tongue out your mouth,” Glass warns on ‘Suffer and Swallow’, “and wear your fingers.”
An astoundingly honest, and at times brutal, listen, ‘PREY//IV’ still ends on a note of hope. Far softer-sounding than the rest of the record, there’s a gentleness to ‘I Trusted You’. In the opening verse, Glass is mad at herself for wasting something she doesn’t specify – time, perhaps. As the song reaches a close, her words have softer edges. “I trusted you / are you mad that I wasted it?” she asks. “You know I’d rather be wasting this.”
By the time the album’s closer ‘Sorrow Ends’ – less a conventional song, more a sweeping piece of sound art – drifts off into the ether, it feels like the opening of a new door. Barely comprehensible, Glass’ voice whispers beneath its rich waves of synth, just on the brink of resurfacing”.
An utterly superb artist who will go on to release a lot of albums, this is sort of a spotlight of the start of a new chapter for Alice Glass. Having achieved so much already in her career, who knows how far this future legend will go! Whatever she does, it will be original, daring, uncompromising, spectacular and memorable. Make sure you follow and listen to the music of…
THE mesmeric Alice Glass.
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