Seraphina Simone has always pursued her goals with a singular mind-set.
Travelling to London from her native United States, her academic gifts saw her accepted to Oxford University, reading English. The stifling atmosphere saw her burrow inwards, however, and music became a source of respite and escape from the stale surroundings.
Word of mouth spread, with Seraphina Simone invited to become part of self esteem’s live band. Touring around the country as the songwriter’s work reached countless new fans, Seraphina kept working on her own music, kept focussing on her own plans.
Her debut EP is out now, melding together synth-pop tropes with her own unique brand of melodic melancholy. The process behind the EP became therapeutic, a way of Seraphina Simone excising old emotions.
“The EP is a reflection of me dealing with my shit for the first time in my life. I’d had some quite heavy emotional trauma growing up, and not dealt with any of it – I just pushed it down into a black hole inside me and it (obviously) manifested in other ways, one of which was a kind of phobia of vulnerability,” she says. “Then 2020 hit, we spent acres of time having to confront ourselves, and I started working through my shit properly for the first time in my life.”
Seraphina adds: “The songs on this EP mirror the early stages of this process – It’s me unstitching big parts of my identity and trying to re-patch them together in ways that reflect who I am now, and figuring out which beliefs and feelings and judgments are innately mine, and which I’ve just had transplanted onto me by society or the value systems around me or as a reaction to my own insecurities.”
Lead cut ‘Lovesick’ bristles with promise, a self-described “cry-dance” banger worthy of Robyn, or even Lorde. Written in 2020, it’s come to form the fulcrum of this new phase of her work. “‘Lovesick’ is me processing the fallout of a big relationship, where we’d broken up not through lack of love but because it wasn’t right. That kind of grief, where you’re breaking your own heart and someone else’s, took a while to get over.”
She adds: “I couldn’t write a single song for about six months, until ‘Lovesick’ tumbled out. It’s about heartbreak and hurt and apathy and doom-spirals and the fear of being alone and self-sabotage, but I was going out a lot to numb the sadness and doing lots of crying on dancefloors, so I wanted the song to reflect that.”
A video co-directed by Seraphina and Joseph Hurst is out today, too. Tune in now.
Seraphina Simone will play her first live headline show at Paper Dress Vintage, London on September 28th.
