Read our complete conversation with Shygirl below.
Welcome to Coachella! How has your time here been so far?
I’ve got to admit that I’m not totally a natural lover of festivals. I was a bit nervous, especially post-Covid, which has made me even more anti-crowd than I was before. But actually, I really am loving Coachella. I was really surprised. It's my first kind of big American party experience, right? And there's such a cultural difference between my partying in Europe and parting here. It’s been really fun to just be immersed in the scene and among people who genuinely loved music. And the way that Coachella is split into areas with drinking and without, it really lets people choose their path and allow people who are really there for the music to just get into it. It’s very refreshing.
It really is refreshing. So let's talk about Shy. Since the release of Alias, it seems that your career has been on a kind of unstoppable trajectory. Can you tell us about the experience of creating it?
With a lot of my music, especially with Alias, I had just started making it before Covid hit. I guess I didn’t have any direct intentions with it other than making music. It was a way to explore what was coming out of me naturally because making music was still a fairly new experience to me at that point. When Covid happened, I thought I may have been finished with it, and then I ended up adding two more tracks to it: Slime and Tasty. The whole thing was a very introspective process. I was asking myself, “what do I want from myself? What do I want from the outside world?” I realized I really just wanted to find joy and happiness through my music. The best way for me to do that was to enter into the world confidently with it. And that is really what Alias is. It’s assertive. It’s loud. It’s provocative.
Where do you see yourself going from here?
Well now that, with Alias, I have kind of shouted and asserted myself into this space, it feels natural to go the other way almost. Now, I can be a little bit more quietly confident, rather than so ostentatious. With my next record, my album, I go back to touching on some quieter things from my first EP, Cruel Practice. In a kind of gnarly, experimental way, there’s touches of bitterness, and you know, angst and dissatisfaction. But within that, there’s also confidence, softness, and femininity. I think all of these things run through me as a person. Channeling them is an ever fluid process. I wanted to reveal a bit more of myself. You know, I sometimes want to just say that I’m multifaceted, so that I have room to be one way one day, and another way another day. In the end, it’s all still me. I’m never acting out of character. In fact, it’s all just me still trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be. You can still be confident in who you are at any given day, but know what there’s room for growth and change.