Cape Town, South Africa artist Esspi, the project of singer-songwriter Sarah Pearson, releases her new album, ‘FAUXstalgia,’ led by focus track “Retrograde,” both out now. The album takes its title from a word Esspi coined herself while studying the meaning of nostalgia in college, sitting in her mother’s office one afternoon doing homework. “I went, wow, that’s an emotion I experience every day, but I didn’t know it existed,” she says. “I knew the word was too iconic not to use.” FAUXstalgia, as she defines it, is the feeling of mourning a time you never lived, or deeply understanding an emotion you never personally felt.
Musically, the album is a love letter to the production values of the 1970s and 80s, with Esspi trying to inhabit the mindset of artists like Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Queen while tracking the record. “I tried to picture what those bands and artists were thinking while making their songs in that time period,” she says, channeling that era’s sound through her own folk-pop, alt-pop and indie-country lens, a style that sits somewhere between the acoustic warmth of America and the confident pop sensibility of Wham!, carrying the emotional honesty of artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine.
‘FAUXstalgia’ represents six years of work that began when Esspi was just 13. The first song written for the album, “What Am I Supposed To Do,” came from watching a close friend’s parents go through a divorce, written from the child’s perspective. “I wanted to try to imagine what she was feeling and thinking, and how the children always get overlooked in the situation,” Esspi says. The rest of the album came together gradually, pieced together from voice memos that Esspi had to transfer every time she got a new phone. “That was absolutely terrifying,” she says. “Some songs took ten minutes to write; others took six years.”
Esspi recorded the album during school holidays in a home studio with producer David Jones, an environment built for total creative freedom. “We had the time and freedom to be experimental, try random things, and see if they worked,” she says. When saxophonist Dave Bettesworth came in to record his parts, the sessions became known, inevitably, as being run by “Double Daves.” For “All I Hear Is Rain,” Esspi and Jones stood in front of a microphone clapping at different volumes and hand shapes for what felt like 500 takes, a sound that ended up buried under the saxophone solo but stayed one of her favourite memories from the sessions. Pro Tools crashed often enough to force repeated re-recording, and Esspi says a lot of the album’s random sound effects made it onto the final mix purely out of studio delirium, the two of them throwing digital sounds at the wall until something sounded right.
‘FAUXstalgia’ marks a real shift from Esspi previous release, “Tainted Heart,” which came from a period of isolation. “That whole song was literally a two a.m. spiral,” she says, “the kind you get when you’re completely alone at night and the whole world feels like it’s pressing down on you.” With this album, she wanted to reframe those same spirals as a source of strength rather than something to hide. “So many people have those two a.m. moments,” she says. “I took a bunch of those spiral thoughts and used them as a strength instead.”
That reframing sits at the centre of “Retrograde,” the album’s focus track and, in Esspi’s words, “my baby.” The song moves through the exhausting weight of trying to be the strong one while quietly spiraling backward, born out of the disappointment of running with the wrong crowd. “I don’t like the person I’ve become, I don’t know how I’ve changed or what it’s from, yeah I just retrograde instead of run,” she sings, later admitting, “I’m tired of living a lie, they say smile, you’ll be fine, I can’t move on with my life if I’m always wrong.” Looking back on the song now, Esspi says she still thinks about the version of herself who wrote it. “I will always remember the girl writing that song in her two a.m. spiral,” she says. “Looking at it now, I know I have incredible experience, I’ve learned so much, and I have so much more knowledge going out into the world.”
Elsewhere on the album, “Darkness at the Disco” turns heartbreak into something bittersweet, the realization that loving someone fiercely sometimes means letting them go, while “What Am I Supposed To Do” remains one of the album’s most tender character studies. Esspi is deliberately open ended about what the rest of the record means. “I could tell you every scenario I had for the rest of the songs,” she says, “but I want you to interpret it in the way that most resonates with you.”
With ‘FAUXstalgia,’ Esspi turns six years of voice memos, late night studio delirium and private battles into a record built to be shared, an album about the emotions we all recognize the moment someone finally names them.
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