“Feeling bad can be very lonely. Music you relate to can be a cool companion”: Exploring dark shadows and brilliant light with A.A. Williams

“Oh, I’d definitely be winter,” says A.A. Williams. “You could probably guess that, though.”

In a dark, snug pub in London’s Covent Garden, A.A. Williams – Alex, off the clock – is working out which of the two annual solstices she’s most like. As it goes, the cosy, wintry hygge of December, with the year’s shortest hours of daylight, fit the low-lit intimacy of her new album, Solstice, very well.

There’s another question within the question, though. Because one implies the end of darkness and the beginning of renewal. The more obviously bright summer celebration, meanwhile, is deceptively bittersweet, marking the beginning of the end of the growing season, and the start of the slow descent into autumnal grey. As Alex eventually concludes, this becomes half the point. She can’t have one in her music without the other.

“Basically, this album is a collection of songs that, on one hand, tackle love, and on the other, tackles loss, and this kind of slightly murky grey area that is between the two of them,” she explains. “As an individual, I certainly feel like these two things are far away from each other. But they are inherently linked, and you need one for the other in the same way – light, dark, summer, winter, all of that.

“I'm always on a journey between these two extremes of emotion. You don't even know you're doing it most of the time. You just emerge there at some point. I feel that there's a nice parallel between the two, and it's a turning point, and it's a change. It’s never one or the other. There's always that journey between the two.”

On record, this journey results in the moonlit, goth-edged mix of darkness and frailty that’s made Alex’s name so respected in recent years. As with Solstice’s dual, almost contradictory meanings, she’s one of the few artists at home both setting the velvety tone on tour with Sleep Token, as well as appearing at Damnation Festival alongside Discharge, 200 Stab Wounds and Nails.

Sat in the pub, she’s far warmer and friendlier than her icy music suggests, laughing when it’s noted that Solstice sees her cursing in song for the first time. “I swear all the time anyway, so it actually made it more real, in a way.”

Other inspiration strikes from all over the place, “Random phrases, stuff in movies, something on the side of a bus”. As someone who actively enjoys the creative process, sometimes she’ll pan for gold in an old thesaurus she got off eBay which, “Very sweetly, has a kid's name and class written in the front of it.”

“I’ll literally just flick through it, just choose any old page, and see if anything in there triggers a little ideas. It's nice to have a bit of randomness to it sometimes.”

Pay attention, though, and the depth of Solstice is great. Alex gives an amused shrug when she says that the single Wolves might have had a blastbeat were the idea not gently ushered out of the room, but its talk of being ‘Tethered to a place I don’t belong’ and how ‘I would let you down all over again’ carry a huge weight of emotion. So, too, does Hold It Together, where she sings of being ‘Overwhelmed and unprepared / In the stillness I have become tormented by words unspoken’.

When asked what she’s driving at, she gives a comical sigh and a “Nobody needs to know about that”. She’s not being deliberately vague – “It’s not misdirection, I like to keep things plainly spoken” – but she also wants people to be able to fill in blanks, as needed, to form a connection for themselves.

“They're rooted in personal experience, but they're not fully autobiographical,” she continues. “I don't want it to be like reading a cryptic crossword. I want it to be understandable, but not in a way that's so specific to me that somebody can't listen to that and go, ‘I feel like this is speaking to me.’ It's not like I'm different or special or had a particularly good or bad time, I'm just getting on with life like everybody else.

“When I listen to other people's music, it is nice to hear someone else trying to understand something that I am trying to understand for myself. If my music can offer that to somebody else, then that's good, it's done a job and it served a purpose. It's not just about being in the background. Feeling bad about stuff can be very lonely thing sometimes. Hearing a song that feels like someone else understands how you feel is like having a cool companion.”

Live, Alex says she can see these connections in real time. Sometimes it can be at odds with “seeing massive neon Red Bull adverts on the bar that are just pulling you back into the real world,” but it remains a strong connection.

“I get a lot of very emotional people, and I'm not sure if they come to the show with that intention or if it just happens because they have a certain relationship with the songs and the music, and because there is a vulnerability to it, but sometimes people can find it a little overwhelming, emotionally.

“For some people, it's a very emotional experience. For some, they just kind of let it wash over them, and they’re there just having the best time of their life, but there’s definitely some people who come so they can feel things. I can't imagine being happy making music that didn't make anybody feel anything. So if someone’s at my show and expressing themselves in that way, deliberately or not, I'm happy.”

And there is a gentle catharsis to A.A. Williams that brings things, like the sun, back round again. One notable thing about Solstice is that it does start to let in shards of light as it goes on, the acid of opener Poison eventually giving way to green shoots on It Won’t Rain Forever and Breathe towards the end. This wasn’t intentional, but it was natural.

“I didn’t start out doing that, but it ended up like that, and I don't mind it, because I think across the record there is a bit more optimism sprinkled in here and there,” she says, getting ready to leave. “Again that wasn't a deliberate choice, it just came out like that. But I think it's kind of cool that there’s that flow to the whole thing.”

So, is A.A. Williams summer or winter, light or dark, beginning or end? As she says, it’s not that simple. It’s all connected. It’s vague, it’s relatable. It’s random words in a thesaurus, it’s bright emotional flares that are easy to spot for those who see them. It’s also what is, and what might be.

“You know what?” she laughs, “If I had thought better about this release, I'd be releasing on with the summer solstice, but I'm two-and-a-half weeks short!”

Solstice is out now via Reigning Phoenix.

Read this next:

• A.A. Williams: “It never felt like classical was enough… I needed to make more noise!”
• A Series Of Fortunate Events: How A.A. Williams found her voice
  
• Emma Ruth Rundle: The 10 songs that changed my life