Wild Things is Ladyhawke’s first album release since 2012’s Anxiety.
“People wonder why there’s always a massive gap between my albums,” says
Pip. The reason is both complicated and easy. The simple explanation: “I’ve
never released anything I’m not proud of. That’s important to me.
I don’t want to release anything that I have a weird feeling about.”
Those instincts have served Brown well. She released her self-titled debut in
2008, which peaked at No. 16 on the U.K. album charts and No. 1 in New Zealand
and Australia’s album charts. Featuring the songs ‘Paris Is Burning’,
‘My Delirium’, ‘Dusk Til Dawn’, and ‘Magic’, the album took home an
incredible six NZ Music Awards, and won Australia’s ARIA music awards for
Best Breakthrough album & Best Breakthrough Single. Ladyhawke was also
nominated for The Brits’ much coveted Best International Artist.
Three years later, Ladyhawke’s more aurally angular follow-up, Anxiety,
yielded the stand-out, synch-friendly single, ‘Blue Eyes.’ Like its
predecessor, the album charted in the U.K.’s Top 40 and in New Zealand &
Australia’s Top 20, respectively.
Brown’s conviction to authenticity led her on a journey starting in
2013. Over three years, she scrapped a full Ladyhawke album (“The material
didn’t feel like me. It felt too dark or something”). Once reliant on
alcohol to surmount social anxiety (“I’d never done a sober show in my life
until last December”), she quit drinking and focused on getting healthy. Then
she welcomed that newfound clarity by crafting her latest release, the
blissed-out
Wild Things.
“I think I went even more synthy and poppy this time around,” Brown
says of the buoyant
Wild Things. “I feel good for the first time in 10 years. I actually have a
clear mind! I have a wife. I feel stable. That is what I’m
celebrating.”
Pip worked on the album on and off over the course of a year with producer
Tommy English (Børns, Tiësto, Dark Waves), whom she met through her L.A.
neighbour, tattoo artist/musician Kat Von D.
In many ways, Wild Things is less about past demons and more a catalyst of
what’s to come. “This album has given me a sense of purpose. Even if it
took me months or years to get that purpose, as soon as I finished that record
it was like an unbelievable weight was lifted off my shoulders,” she says. You
can hear that freedom in Wild Things’ unabashed exuberance, a powerful,
vibrant expression of life itself. “Everything I wrote was all the stuff
I was going through. I got it out of my system, exorcised it from
my soul.”
‘A Love Song,’ is one of the deep-dives into relationships from the
album – a sweeping, reverberating revelation. “‘This is what a love song
sounds like’—meaning it’s not all sappy,” she explains. “I’d lose
everything if I didn’t stop drinking. The other person in your life,
sometimes they have to be cruel to be kind.”