Cold Angel by Brooke Henzell is a slow-burning, emotion-packed trip-hop production perfectly tuned to your weekly trip-hop mood. Tuesday night, anyone?
Describe your sound in 3 words
Atmospheric, ethereal, visceral
Tell us a few things about Cold Angel, what is the main idea behind it?
The song was inspired by a few different sources. Prior to writing it, I’d read two books back to back which both (coincidentally) dealt with feelings of paranoia and alienation. At the same time, I was listening to a lot of PJ Harvey and Portishead, and was struck by the way some of their work evoked the same emotional world. I wrote the song with just vocals alongside piano and showed it to the track’s producer, John McHugh, whose ideas and additional instrumentation transformed it from a strange ballad into something genuinely cool, strange, fun and (dare I say) beautiful.
You grew up in Australia and then moved to New York to study at Barnard. Trip-hop is historically rooted in the moody, rain-soaked landscape of Bristol, UK. How do you think the collision of your Australian roots and the gritty, nocturnal energy of NYC shaped the atmospheric landscape of Cold Angel?
As much as it might be associated with sunshine and easy beauty, the Australian landscape often has a kind of frightening, raw quality that I think reverberates in say, the music of Nick Cave (as much as his early work was influenced by the London punk scene.) My time in New York, as well as London and briefly Bristol as well, has probably made me interested in finding kind of metallic, cosmopolitan pieces of contrast against that which I’ve come from — something like the trip-hop beat set against moodier, slightly goth soundscapes.
Tell us a few things about yourself, when did you decide to become a musician yourself?
I started taking piano lessons when I was six years-old, and trained classically until I set off for college. I started playing professionally in a more commercial capacity as a teenager, when I released my first EP (under a different artist name, with a slightly more pop sensibility). I loved rock and alternative music then as much as I do now, but my self-concept at that age was in some ways a little bit timid, at least when it came to translating myself creatively.
Artists and people that have influenced you?
I’ve been influenced by so many artists. Perhaps, to limit things to this record, I’d say I was listening to a lot of PJ Harvey and Portishead. I also had some visual references, like the photography of Francesca Woodman.
Your most honest and personal lyric?
It’s funny because the closer and more personal songs I’ve written have felt, the more I felt I was pulling from sources outside of myself — fiction or stories about other people. Maybe that’s the actor in me, only being comfortable showing something true if I’m wearing a mask of some kind. On my last EP, Blue Room, the titular track is based on a book called A Death in the Family, by James Agee. Both the book and the context for its publication made me think a lot about grief. The lyric in that song — “I’d take the ghost of your company / Most days I’d gladly be blue in this room” I think gets at something inevitably personal about love and loss, negotiating with reality for a reprieve from the binary of life and death, and preferring to have endured the grief than be without all it represents.
In which place or state of mind do you imagine people might listen to your music?
Potentially an anxious state of mind. I’m very soothed, when I’m anxious, by music that can meet me in that headspace.
One thing not many people know about you?
I’m a yellow belt two stripe in Taekwondo.
Thank you!
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Follow our playlist Trip into the Hop in Spotify/Deezer feat. Brooke Henzell
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