Finding Solace In Creation: Alice Low Interviewed

With uniquely melancholy, power driven vocals and over ten years musical experience under her belt, Alice Low is smashing expectations of genre and gender with her rollercoaster synth heavy ballads and her debut EP, ‘Transatlantic Sugar’, is out now. Wiping all of her previous releases from the algorithms and starting fresh with this new project, Low began by releasing ‘LadyDaddy’ in 2021, a gender-bending homage to 80s synth chaos. Low has since released a myriad of diverse singles chronicling the tumult of the queer life and love. 

Clash had the pleasure of chatting with Low to get a sense of her as a person, an artist and of course to pick her exceptional brains about the upcoming release. 

Despite answering the zoom call by telling Clash she’s “sick as a dog”, Low provides a strikingly articulate view of her hopes, fears and musical musings…

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Hi Alice! Lovely to meet you. Can you tell me a little bit about your musical background – when did you first begin writing and what were some of your first inspirations? 

Oh wow, I’ve never been asked that question, this is actually only my second interview. Well… back when I was 14 my mum brought me out of school. I’m autistic and I found it really really hard to focus and to play by the rules. I was really naughty and I’d lash out for attention. So when she took me out of school, my brother had a guitar and pretty much immediately I could just write songs. They weren’t good songs but I understood that language a lot more than I understood communicating with others. 

Early on I was really inspired by all of those boys with guitars from the 2000s. I’m 29 so when I was 14 that would have been 2008. I loved Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes were my favourite band in the world, I just thought they were so cool. Oh and loads of 80s records like the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen. 

The lyrics in your latest single ‘Fruitcake’ are very visceral and emotional, can you talk about the inspiration behind the song? 

Lyrics are important but I don’t think of the job of a songwriter as being at all similar to the job of a poet, so I always just improvise my lyrics and usually then when I look back some pattern has emerged. 

I think it means sometimes a whiffer (a ‘not good’ line) will get past the gate. All my songs have a few whiffers but I like the immediacy of improvisation. I’m much more interested in the music-making process than the writing process because I think I write in order to communicate quickly, so editing lyrics is just not important. 

I wrote ‘Fruitcake’ maybe four or five months after I first came out. I don’t want to give too much away but I suppose it’s quite obvious. In it I’m just really scared, not just of my own prejudice but of other people’s. 

Before coming out, to the world I was just a cis, straight guy. I didn’t have to worry about anyone’s prejudice, and I acted with total privilege. I was blind to it in lots of ways because it was just normal, I’d lived with it my whole life. Then all of a sudden lockdown happened, I came out and was faced with the reality that those things are going to go away. It was interesting to me how bad that felt. 

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What’s interesting is that transitioning is in many ways a difficult thing, physically and mentally, but alongside that, transitioning your position in the world and your relation to others can be really scary.

Oh my god yeah, you summed it up! 

So you said that your lyric writing is more of an improvisational process, but would you say there’s some key philosophies that come through in your music?

That’s a really hard question to answer because it’s much easier to reflect on the way that other people’s work moves you and the way that you see it interacting with your life. I think other people’s music and art is a lot more altering than your own. I’m not altered by my work, I’m altered by the process of it. 

There’s only a few experiences in life that give me complete bliss, where I almost feel for a little moment like I’m neurotypical. In the studio, or in front of a piano or being with somebody that I really love intimately, those are the moments. I’m searching for that feeling, maybe it’s acceptance or even self-acceptance, feeling normal or feeling good at something. It’s nice if what I make moves someone but to be honest I’ve been doing it for over ten years now and we’re still only at the point where a thousand or so people have heard the songs so that’s obviously not the drive for me or I would have stopped when I was 21. There’s something about the process of making music that makes me feel whole, makes me feel like I’m finally functioning and I think the music reflects that. 

We’re beginning to see more trans representation in music, which is amazing, however I’d imagine it’s also difficult to be in the spotlight as a trans person right now. What are some things you find solace in? 

Gosh. Yes it’s hard. There’s solace in simple things. If I have enough food in the house so that I don’t have to leave that day. Then I don’t have to worry about the war between passing and not passing and the way that changes how I approach people. In regards to music I feel solace when I see a trans woman and she’s just being such a woman, which in my work is not something I’m trying to necessarily achieve, it’s a very different space for me. For example when you see Arca performing and she’s no longer confronting the cognitive dissonance between the ‘what if’, she’s just doing her thing and it’s just so womanly and beautiful. 

A lot of my support group has been cis women, and I remember a conversation with one such friend. I was saying maybe I don’t wanna continue my transition, maybe I’m nonbinary, because I don’t wake up every day feeling like a woman. She said she and all of her friends feel like that all of the time, that’s just a normal part of living under patriarchy and facing all these pressures to be constantly feminine and beautiful, whatever that means. Conversations like that, where you can see the gulf between what it means to be a trans woman and a cis woman is really not that wide. That also gives me solace. 

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I’m curious about the process of making music while transitioning as of course it’s a process that can facilitate massive physical and mental changes. Do you feel as though your music has changed or developed in tandem with this process? 

It really changed things. I had a project before Alice Low, using my deadname. A lot of the records I made were very explicit in how I talked about gender and I thought it was some cosmic joke, thinking pronouns were a great tool of language and playing around with how I used them. As my music and my curiosity towards gender evolved, the music became very explicit. The last album before my coming out was written in the style of Elton John about internalised homophobia. I wrote from the perspective of a character who was trans, but couldn’t accept it. And I thought that that was just an interesting subject… and a year later I’m out. 

Who would’ve thought? 

Now my transition takes up a lot of my creative focus, maybe because I’m thinking about it all the time. It’s also just a very fruitful story. You can centre so many other ideas around a transition, there’s other subtextual avenues that you can take. Just by talking about what it is to be trans, it can become universal in a way that the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up to yet. 

It’s limitless really. An opening up of possibility, a change, a metamorphosis. What great musical material! Something I also appreciate about your discography is that there’s such a range displayed between say ‘Show Business’ and ‘Sodomizer’, providing possibilities for endless reinvention. Are there any particular stylistic avenues you want to explore going forward? 

That’s nice of you to say! I love lots of things about making music, I love feeling like I’m able to communicate. ‘Genre’ to me feels like another barrier to communication within the thing that makes me feel finally free. 

I think people’s styles within music are authentic but the idea of genre is just some leftover drudgery from capitalism trying to find a way to market musicians and put them in their lane. 

I’ve been working on a new album and I think it’s a bit of everything. I suppose something new has come from my love of hardcore punk music. I listen to a lot of older proto-punk bands and also met some people in Cardiff who play in the DIY hardcore scene and just being around those people, seeing what they’re doing and being like ‘oh those notes sound evil, I wanna use that.’ 

I try to be mindful of being too appropriative of styles without doing due diligence though. That’s why I took ‘sodomizer’ off of spotify. You make mistakes and learn from them and that’s the beautiful part about being a human and being an artist. 

Sometimes your mistakes can lead you to new avenues too! I’ve seen you’ve been doing quite a few live shows recently, how have you found performing the material live? 

So in January I started having laser hair removal on my face and of all the decisions I made in my transitions aesthetically, that’s been the most unbelievable improvement in my mental health, performing live and just my overall situation. I used to have a really full beard, if I didn’t shave for like 12 hours it would be back fuller and darker than before. 

I’ve been doing shows with Aldous Harding and I promised her I would chill my show out and make it less rock, to be more appropriate for her lineup. What I found was when I pulled the energy down and still performed with my level of intensity, it suddenly felt a lot more powerful. Now because I’m not afraid of my face…wow… I’ll stand still on stage and lock eyes with one person for a whole verse, and then I’ll shift to another. There’s a tension that’s happening between me and the audience that didn’t exist when I was just going 110% straight out the gate.

I’ve actually fallen in love with performing. It’s beautiful. And I hated it before. 

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From your first single in 2021 to being in the run-up to your debut EP being released, that’s quite a journey! What’s been the most enjoyable element of this project so far? 

As a consequence of not just being just a lil DIY schlub (which I love) I’ve been able to meet some people that to me, as a fan of music, these people were like higher beings to me because I saw them as their work. To meet and in some cases become friends or work with these people who I admire so much and for them to say they like what I’m doing? I’m an aquarius so I found it very validating and just in general helpful for my constant need for approval. 

On the other hand the more official avenues of the music industry can be incredibly frustrating. They move slowly, they’re encumbered by money, they rely on big groups of people coming together with a joint vision and executing it and it takes so long. 

Creatively I’ve really struggled this time because I feel stifled by the pace of it. As a listener and an artist I’m exclusively interested in albums, so to be releasing single after single is driving me mad. My enthusiasm for finishing a record is dwindling and I’m so desperate now after working with my team for almost three years to start releasing and working on albums because I think it’s where my work shines. So those are the goods and the bads. I love my team to death though, they are brilliant! 

What’s something you want people to know about your upcoming EP?

The whole thing was written while watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer. 

I had my computer by the bed and I’d just started taking oestrogen so I didn’t really want to move. 

I wrote the whole thing in a month, originally a double album actually but we’re only getting five of those songs because of the answer to the last question. 

So I would sit in bed and I would watch Buffy and I had a little Spanish guitar which I’ve lost now and I still feel grief for. You could really strum this guitar like an electric so you could pump, you could get going but also you could finger-pick and it would resonate beautifully. 

But yes, Buffy was the instigator. The sad ones were written when Willow’s partner, Tara, gets shot. In the background of all the demos you can hear the show and when the theme song plays I would play along. In fact most of the EP is in the same key as the theme song because I wanted to be able to transition to it. So there you go!

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Alice Low’s debut EP ‘Transatlantic Sugar’ is out now.

Words: Oshen Douglas-McCormick
Photo Credit: Huw Evans