It follows her acclaimed single ‘2023’ and is the second single in Lila’s self described “new era of music”
London-born singer-songwriter Lila Drew has dropped her new single ‘Crystal Ball’, out 17th November.
Buy / Stream Lila Drew – ‘Crystal Ball’ (AWAL Recordings)
Pairing delicate guitar strings with Lila’s enchanting vocals, ‘Crystal Ball’ is a breathtaking, melancholic ballad with heartache at its core. Her second single release of the year, it follows October’s ‘2023’. The stunning accompanying music video for ‘Crystal Ball’ is to follow.
“I was thinking a lot about predictability…The idea that it is so easy for me to predict the things I’ll do, and yet, I do them anyway”, Lila explains. “Where ‘2023’ (the last song I released) takes this theme on in a more ironic way, ‘Crystal Ball’ looks at it directly. There’s a lot of frustration in it – I remember going to the studio with Jordan Reyes, who produced this song, and wanting to yell into the mic. That was something I’d never done before. All of the vocals I’d ever recorded had been so soft, for the sake of hiding my own fears underneath reverb and delay… The background vocals in Crystal Ball are all first takes of me just screaming the song from across the room, the mic picking up only the loudest frequencies.”
She continues: “The original demo of the song consisted of a scrappy lead vocal, guitar, background vocals, and this little drum machine, and I remember it didn’t feel exactly right. A few weeks after making the demo, I had a chance to meet a hero of mine, James Blake, and our conversation gave me the confidence to strip it back. We talked a lot about the anxieties that come with songwriting and about letting my voice take the lead rather than hiding behind loads of production. That has certainly had an impact on a lot of my new music — allowing myself to yell and be emotive in that way. It’s maybe as sincere as I get.
Lila Drew burst onto the scene in 2018 with a sound that combined the intimacy of electro-pop with elements of hip-hop and R&B. Her debut single ‘faded/2am’, a collaboration with rapper GoldLink, has clocked up over 9 million Spotify streams to date. As a true collaborator and perfectionist with a strong hand in everything she produces and releases, Lila also develops conceptual video pieces that go along with the music. “Songwriting is like lyrical scrapbooking,” she says of her process. “It’s like pulling from a lot of different emotions and situations to articulate a full feeling.”
‘Crystal Ball’ singles out Lila Drew as one of the finest singer-songwriters on the scene right now.
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