Your journey with faith recurs throughout the album; you have these interludes titled as psalms, and songs that touch on this idea of finding a different kind of spiritual devotion in your lover.
I grew up with a faith, and I definitely don’t have one anymore, or at least not in the same way. But it’s strange to be in the world and be like, Oh, I’m just floating untethered to anything bigger than what I can see around me. Writing this album also came at a time when I was in nature a lot more, because I’d just got a dog. I would go clubbing at night, but then spend hours walking the dog and just… thinking. And it opened up a different side of my imagination. It felt quite childlike—this sense that there was something magical afoot. I think even the songs on the album that are about sex and clubbing and friendship are about forms of worship, or putting your faith in things. And when it came to the psalms, I always wished I was posh enough to make choral music, but I’m not. Not that I’m saying Kieran [Brunt], who I co-wrote the psalms with, is posh enough, but he just has this amazing understanding of how harmonies work and how choral music works. So we spent a lot of time back-and-forth-ing these choral songs, and they really became the checkpoints along the journey of the album that split it up into sections for the body, heart, and mind. I don’t know if I have more of a sense of faith now, after writing the album, than before, but I definitely feel more comfortable thinking about it?
How did the song with Romy come about? The song feels like a really interesting joining of your two sonic worlds.
She’s so wonderful. I’d never met Romy, but I was loving her album, and she was on tour and had done this interview in a record shop, I think, in Nashville. They asked her three favorite albums of the year, and she chose Body Building as one of them, and I was so shocked. So I messaged her and was like, “Are you kidding, diva?” I probably didn’t say “diva,” but I asked her how she heard it, and we got talking, and then we didn’t talk for a while. Then, last November, she asked me if I wanted to open for her at the Brixton Electric, which was amazing. I stood on the DJ booth and I nearly fell off. It was very chic. I wrote this song a few weeks after that and it had this sort of dreamy feel to it that I thought Romy would sound amazing on. I was sort of scared to ask her, but I just sent her it and was like, “Would you listen to this, and if you like it—but only if you like it—would you ever consider singing on it?” And she said yes. I listened to her voice so much in my mid to late teens, so it was just amazing being in the studio with her. At one point I thought, God, maybe I should have asked for her to be on some giant trance radio banger, but it’s so nice that it’s a song about queer friendship, actually.