When she was making her forthcoming debut album Gramarye, Taahliah was undergoing a “big personal shift”. Following the overwhelming success of her breakthrough 2021 EP Angelica – which saw her win an AIM award and two Scottish Alternative Music Awards – the Glasgow-based artist and DJ was living off her music career for the first time, and dealing with a new level of recognition. “That brought its own set of social and financial challenges,” she admits over Zoom from her living room, a neon pink scrawling of her name glowing in the background. “I was away a lot touring, which then made me feel quite disconnected from my friends. I felt very isolated, in every sense of the word.”
The resulting album is cathartic, vulnerable and raw, “It’s a record of transformation,” she says. “As I was finishing it I had a lot of positive change in my life – I’ve done a lot of work to get me out of the darkness.”
Though it has its fair share of euphoric, club-ready bangers, Gramarye also represents a departure from Taahliah’s ongoing career as a DJ. “I love dance music and I love what it represents for me and the people in my life, but I found it to be a very limiting genre to be bundled into. I really didn’t want to be known as just a DJ, or just an electronic music producer. I wanted to be known for a wide variety of skills, to be able to talk about sonic narratives.”
“Seeing how classically trained musicians brought my demos to life made me think ‘Why can’t the music sound like this all the time?’”
A collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra in early 2023 helped accomplish this, and shaped Gramarye’s meshing of acoustic and electronic elements. “The LCO project laid the groundwork for where my headspace is now, and I think will continue to be, in terms of making music,” she says. “Before that collaboration I was still searching for how to make my music sound unique in a way that I felt comfortable with. I’m not classically trained, and seeing how classically trained musicians were able to bring my demos to life made me think ‘Why can’t the music sound like this all the time?’ My thought process up until then was that acoustic elements were quite limiting – I had to experience the totality of the orchestra to be really convinced.”
Taking the LCO composition as a starting point, Taahliah enlisted a team of collaborators to work on Gramarye, including Dev Hynes and Fred Macpherson, as well as fellow Scots Naafi and Tsatsamis, both of whom contributed vocals to Angelica. “From an audience standpoint I appreciate cohesiveness, which is why I like using the same vocalists on all my songs. From an artistic standpoint, it means that that relationship is built over time, where sometimes words don’t even need to be said,” she says. “It’s a relationship I really treasure – with the next record, I don’t know what the fuck it’s going to be about, but I know that I definitely want to work with Naafi and Tsatsamis again.”
For now though, she is focussed on the release of Gramarye, and an upcoming headline show at London’s ICA, which sees her using live instrumentation for the first time. While she’s naturally nervous about how the record will be received, the unexpected success of Angelica gives her hope. “I wasn’t trying to make anything that concrete or artistically fulfilling, and people really enjoyed that record. So if I’m trying really hard with this one, hopefully I can get even better results.”
Gramarye is out October 18.