With a new EP set for release in May, which includes her recently released track ‘Tangled’, there’s plenty of reasons for gglum to be happy. And plenty more why you should listen to her and her promising debut EP. We caught up with the rising artist.
Many regard the term ‘sad girl’ as originating from around 2011. The Lana Del Ray, cigarette-in-hand, mascara-down-your-cheeks period, which became validated online through Tumblr and the likes of Melissa Broder’s wildly popular @SoSadToday Twitter account. Artist and critic Audrey Wollen even added some semi-academic clout to the term, developing the notion of ‘Sad Girl Theory’ as being an act of female revolt through suffering.
In truth, it’s an age-old trope, as seen in paintings like John William Waterhouse’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’ (1888), or John Everett Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ (1851-52) – both of which, in turn, are characters from earlier literature. Each of them depicts a woman in stasis, defined by heartache, styled by sadness. The rise of social media merely resurfaced this, scattering it over the internet and validating girl’s experiences with every like, retweet and comment.
Ella Smoker, aka gglum, paints the modern picture of such an artist – her songs posing an existential kind of sorrow, some of them (‘glad ur gone’, ‘end of my street’) written in signature lowercase type for added vulnerability. But – as with any artist worth their salt – there’s far more beyond just the single image.
Despite the moniker gglum, there’s in fact plenty of reasons for this half-Finnish, half-British BRIT School graduate to be cheerful. And plenty more for us to follow her nascent artistry.
“When I first started making music, I was very sad girl vibes,” she tells me inside a cafe near Croydon, where she grew up. “I was just being miserable and writing songs. Then over the past year, things have been going really well for me and I’m just generally a lot happier. So there was a weird moment of thinking, ‘how do I write music?’”
It’s the classic song-writing dilemma: ‘can I only write when I’m sad?
“It’s the classic song-writing dilemma: ‘can I only write when I’m sad?’ It took me a while to figure that out. But I’ve started trying to write overly cheesy songs, and realised you can write less sad songs and still like them.
“But the whole ‘gglum’ thing came from when I wasn’t in a great place. And now I’m doing better, I always find it quite funny I’m still called that and writing these happy songs. But I’ve always liked when things contrast each other and don’t quite line up.”
There are certainly reasons for her to be cheerier than her name would suggest. Just a week before we meet, she’d performed her first full gig under her stage name, at Manchester’s YES. “I was really nervous leading up to it, but I actually enjoyed it on stage, which I don’t usually.”
“What surprised me was how afterwards I had loads of people coming up to me saying it was really good. I didn’t really know how to respond. I just kept saying ‘thank you’ in a really high-pitched voice.”
Behind her dark brown eyes is evidently an artist, albeit at the early stages, with an engaging kind of existential angst
Such admitted inexperience might seem at odds with her rising popularity, especially her cover of girl in red’s ‘i wanna be your girlfriend’, a spacious lullaby that has over 2 million streams. But given such in-person events were put on hold for a while (no points for guessing why), what Ella is experiencing now is merely the pent-up contact with her fanbase.
It’s not hard to see (or hear) why this support is growing. Behind her dark brown eyes is evidently an artist, albeit at the early stages, with a kind of engaging existential angst that she reflects in her work. Her first single, ‘Why Don’t I Care?’, which was written just before the first lockdown, has her singing the track’s nihilistic title over a mixture of guitar strings and warbling bass, at a tempo to make you wonder whether she really doesn’t care at all.
“I released that song on Spotify because I thought it’d look cool just seeing it there,” she says though. “All my friends were always putting stuff on SoundCloud so it felt like Spotify would be the next cool place to see your music. I think it just hit the algorithm right, went onto a playlist and people started reaching out to me. I thought, ‘oh, this is actually working a bit.’”
More tracks would follow, including the release of her debut EP in October last year – ‘once the edge has worn off’ – the name for which derived from the detached feeling Ella felt from its tracks.
No doubt many would like to define it as ‘bedroom pop’, but in truth there’s a multiplicity of influences that can be heard.
“I don’t know why, but it felt like every song I wrote on that EP was when I was a bit removed from the situation, reflecting back on it. So it’s ‘once the edge has worn off’, once it’s not as painful. I felt like it summed up all of the songs pretty well.”
It makes for an impressive debut, most of all because of its variety. No doubt many would like to define it as ‘bedroom pop’ – a label that seems to stick to female singers with soft vocals, like Clairo or beabadoobee – but in truth, there’s a multiplicity of influences that can be heard.
‘Navy’, for instance, (my personal favourite), has a sharp, dagger-like arrangement of synths, which build into a wall of noise and contrast with her delicate singing (‘Once I did love, the type that makes it hard to breathe, I’m tired, kind of’).
‘BIDMAS & Nonsense’ has a grungy element, as though she were imitating Nirvana undertaking their A-levels, singing about the mathematical acronym, among other things. ‘glad ur gone’, which celebrates the end of a toxic relationship, even bears the hallmarks of a more typical pop song – though in a less anodyne way.
I quite like when things are a bit imperfect – those are my favourite bits
With all these descriptions, it’s a good thing Ella doesn’t mind the lack of a clear-cut definition, as she admits honestly, “generally, I’m quite bad at identifying genres of music, so I prefer when other people define what the genre is for me.”
Her lack of concern for rigidly fitting into regular genres is mirrored by her song-writing approach. “I quite like when things are a bit imperfect”, she says, “or leaving stuff in songs that sound like a bit of a mistake. Those are my favourite bits – I’ve learnt to love them. I don’t want it to be too polished.”
It’s helped too by her varied musical upbringing, with her Rockabilly-loving parents (including record-collecting Dad), and her time spent as a chorister for her local church when she was younger.
One thing that does remain consistent in her sound, though, is a certain depth of feeling. A blueness, so to speak, like being submerged in an ocean or wrapped in an emotional blanket. Maybe it’s wallowing, but who cares – it’s something worth exploring for the intense ones among us.
One thing that does remain consistent in her sound, though, is a certain depth of feeling
This stems, process-wise, from the act of “trying to turn my brain off when I’m writing music”, to be more in-tune with her emotional state. “Sometimes, I’ll listen to a track and think, ‘This feels like a bunch of nonsense’. Then I’ll listen to it later on and think, ‘oh, I know what this is all about’.
“It feels a lot like my subconscious saying its piece. Writing music is like me telling myself how I feel when I’m not actually thinking about it consciously. So it’s like my own therapy.”
This isn’t always easy to access, however. Her recent single ‘Tangled’, for instance, came about when Ella was feeling – well, tangled – over how to express herself musically. Thankfully she had the help of friend and well-known producer Mura Masa, who she admits she doesn’t know whether to call Mura Masa, Alex or Xander, in a completely unintentional flex.
“I was in a massive writer’s block. So, Alex – or Xander – had to spend all day listening to me having a massive insecure crisis, saying stuff like, ‘Everything I’m doing is shit’. And he was there telling me to chill. So we ended up making that song, went to the pub, and I tried not to think about how annoying I was being about what I was writing.
Her recent single ‘Tangled’ came about when Ella was feeling – well, tangled – over how to express herself musically
“Then my managers really liked it, so I went into a session with Karma Kid (because Mura Masa’s really busy), and we finished it off. Then I started to think it was really cool.” The result certainly has moments of hitting Ella’s objective to create a “90s, nostalgic song” – something she says she wanted “to see how far I could push it before that got too cheesy”.
It’s the first single of a new EP, due out in May, for which Ella admits, as though slightly embarrassed to say so, that she’s “started writing more lovey dovey, nice songs and stuff like that, which are bit different.”
“But I feel like [the EP’s] got a bit of everything,” she adds, restoring at least a semblance of sad girl credentials. “It’s not like I’ve completely thrown away the sad stuff. But I feel like I’m trying to branch out into a few more different emotions.”
Given the promise of her debut EP, news of its follow-up makes us very happy indeed.
As will her gig at Folklore on 4th May, tickets for which can be found by clicking her.
