The announcement comes alongside new single ‘Everything I Ever Wanted’, which tackles love at the end of the world.
Delilah Holliday, North London’s homegrown DIY icon, will release her new EP, Invaluable Vol. 1, on July 7th via One Little Independent Records.
The announcement comes alongside new single ‘Everything I Ever Wanted’, which tackles love at the end of the world. Delilah speaks on the desire to runaway together, as well as an acknowledgment that all things must end, in a story that unfolds delicately over a breezy, textured and atmospheric ballad.
She tells us that “it’s basically about the anxiety of the world burning, but it’s still like a love song. It’s about asking your love “Would you still run away with me?” It was one of those songs that just wrote itself, I was staying in the Swedish countryside, there was no one around and I enjoyed being isolated, it allowed me to conjure up the concept of what it would feel like to be at the end of the world hiding in a bunker with the person you love the most”.
Invaluable Vol. 1 exists in the space between fantasy and reality. It collects six tracks of downtempo electronic art pop with added layers of trip hop, and an intoxicating medley of heady synth, penetrated by dancefloor beats. Sonically it’s transportive, but in her lyrics Delilah was keen to keep things grounded. These opposing elements are capitalised on throughout; it’s consistently dreamlike but never without awareness, keeping the listener in expectation purgatory.
She revels in otherworldly sounds and visuals that play with the abstract, the psychedelic and the conceptual, but the lived experiences she mines for creative themes remain at the core of what she does. Growing up on Holloway Road and beginning her creative endeavours with family members has clearly impacted this, and a sense of community provides her bedrock.
Her band, Skinny Girl Diet, which she founded at the age of 14 with her sister Ursula and their cousin Amelia, were a staple of the 2010’s UK indie-punk landscape. She then successfully transitioned to her current solo moniker with the release of her debut single ‘Babylon’ in 2018. Shortly after, she would appear on the Baxter Dury album ‘B.E.D’ alongside Étienne de Crécy.
In a short time, she’s worked with some of the best across both the music and fashion world including Neneh Cherry, Vivienne Westwood, Matt King and more. In 2021 alone she hosted a ‘Goddess Energy Experience’ show at The Old Blue Last with Tyson and Grove, headlined St Pancras Old Church, partnered with Marshall Amps, and she performed an exclusive A/V live session with FACT Magazine. She’s also presented her own monthly NTS Radio show since 2016.
Invaluable Vol. 1 was co-written and co-produced with composer Raphael Ninot both remotely and in his Waterloo studio. As such, they found the location fed the process, with the grinding mechanics soundtracking Delilah’s train journeys and the bleak visual backdrop sculpting the narrative. She tells us that “we wanted to create a sonic world where each song had its own characteristics. We visualised the EP being a house, and imagined how all the songs would sound and feel as rooms in this imaginary house. If you listen to the tracks closely you might be able to hear some trains in some of the vocal takes. ‘Everything I Ever Wanted’ was created on Don Cherry’s piano in Neneh’s house in Sweden which I recorded then cut up and resampled”.
Delilah’s themes explore structural inequality and poverty, they’re politically nuanced, and without gratuitousness. She says “this whole project really is about juxtaposition and mixing things together that don’t really go because that’s how started. It’s the spark that inspired all the other songs. Genre blending and putting pieces together that don’t quite fit”.
The EP, the first of two, says that we are all a product of our upbringing, and Delilah’s creativity is intrinsically linked to her surroundings. She concludes; “Aesthetically I really wanted to communicate all the experiences that go into making yourself. All of us on this planet have had a unique experience. And I feel like they’re invaluable experiences, and they are the riches in life, because they make you who you are. Growing up on a council estate, I feel like that’s made me the person I am, made me create the art, and I just want the visuals to reflect that and be real. Because although I love conveying fantasy worlds and things like that, I do feel like sometimes realism is very important. And the brutal nature of London is the making of me personally as an artist. And although I like to be away with the fairies, it’s good to come back down to earth and to portray that”.
artist Delilah Holliday
single Everything I Ever Wanted
release Invaluable Vol. 1
label One Little Independent
date single 3rd May | EP 7th July
format digital
Art credit: Carter O’Sullivan
Photo credit: Amy Peskett
Live dates
13th May – The Great Escape @ Horatio’s, Brighton
9th June – PLU Summer Camp, Fowey
10th June – Off The Rails, London
14th June – The Glove That Fits, London
29th July – Exmouth Festival @ Sideshore Stage, Exmouth
Video credits
Directed by – Carter O’Sullivan
DOP – Thomas Wilson
DV Footage – Delilah Holliday
Edited by – Thomas Wilson
Tracklist:
1. Steel Charmed
2. Burn Money
3. Silent Streets
4. Everything I Ever Wanted
5. Looking Over My Shoulder
6. Heaven’s Waiting Room
Everything I Ever Wanted single and video
Pre-order EP / Buy single