Delilah Bon: Dream Manifest
There’s no musician like DELILAH BON. Ever since she kicked off this new side of herself in July 2020, Lauren Tate has expressed the thoughts and feelings she has experienced in the music industry thus far in her life and career. Originally beginning in HANDS OFF GRETEL, Delilah took what she witnessed and channelled it into her rage and power in all the bars and verses she spits alongside her self-produced brat punk beats. As her sophomore album, Evil, Hate Filled Female, is released this year, we spoke with DELILAH BON all about the record, the upcoming tour across the UK and Europe, and turning the hate into her art.
“I’m feeling excited for tour,” Delilah begins, very excitedly. “That’s my brain’s at right now. Just tour and I can’t wait to see the fans. I start the tour out in Paris, so I’m starting on probably my biggest date. I think I’ve sold the most tickets for Paris, so it’s going to start with that. I don’t think I’m ready. I think it’s going to it’s going to hit me, because I’ve not actually had a room full of my own fans for a while because I’ve been doing festivals. So I think as soon as I walk out and they’re all screaming, I’m just going to cry my eyes out, because I’ve just not seen them all in so long. France is cool, I love all my French BonBons. They’re so they’re crazy. For example, when I played Paris the first time, they started a riot after my gig, it was an anti-police riot, and I had to ask the venue, I was like, ‘what? What’s everybody saying?’, and they were like, ‘oh, yeah. In Paris, people are really angry at the police, so I think you’ve got them all riled up now, and they were protesting’. It was crazy.”
After her self-titled debut album in 2021 and a follow-up Halloween EP, Ready To Kill, later that year, DELILAH BON released the single, Dead Men Don’t Rape in response to the overturning of Roe v Wade in the USA. She notes how her music has progressed from those beginnings into this newest record, as she states, “I would say it’s more hip hop. I think it’s just I’m more confident in this one. When I did my first one, I was still just testing the water and doing things that scared me, and I was confident in my first album. But I think I’ve got better at rapping in this one. When I rap, I try to get rid of the American twang. I listen to my first album, and I can hear it on some of the songs, I think, ‘oh the the American twang annoys me so much’ because it just so naturally comes out in my voice sometimes. But then I think with this one, I’ve used my voice in different ways to express myself and used way more of my weird parts of my voice, like the weird voices in Committed A Crime. That’s something new that I’ve never done. I think I’ve just been a lot more free on this one, and it’s like a mixture of being serious but also not taking myself so seriously at the same time. I don’t know how I’ve managed to do that, but that’s definitely what I can feel in this record.”
In Evil, Hate Filled Female, DELILAH BON shows many different sides of herself, both comedic and raw, all the while never shying away from important topics that need to be discussed. “I think the more honest I am, it just feels more freeing to me because all of these words that are in the album are usually things I’d write in my diary,” she explains. “I’m just a natural born show off. I like to just put words out there. I like to just say how it is, because people can recognise when something’s honest, and they can recognize when something’s quite personal to you, and you’re expressing yourself like that, that’s what inspires me in music.”
“When I listen to people like AMY WINEHOUSE, it’s so deep, so personal and that’s how I want to be. I want people to feel close to me when listening to my music. So the more honest and the more raw I can be, they’re going to feel understood in themselves when they listen to it. For example, with the track Epstein, originally I wanted to release that about two years ago. It was when it was big in the news, I watched the documentary about it, and I just started writing this song, about how it made me feel, and about society in general. The idea of this elite that gets away with everything, and how horrendous it all was, and I’ve wanted to release it for ages, and it was one song that I was like, ‘I can’t leave this one behind’. This one has to live somewhere. So definitely had to put that one on the album and I think that was one of my favourite ones.”
So what is next for the queen of brat punk once the album and UK/EU tour is done? Like with her manifestation for success in France, which came true, DELILAH BON is also manifesting an American tour in the future. “’I’ve been trying for so long,” she explains as our interview wraps up. “It’s so hard. I don’t know why it’s so hard. I’m trying to find an agent over there, and I get interest, and then they don’t reply, and I’m just chasing people. I don’t understand, I don’t get it, why there’s such a huge demand for me to go to America. Every time I post about gigs, everyone’s like, America, America, America. So I need to go next year. It has to happen, especially once the album is out. I hope it just brings them into their villain era. I think we’re all in a revenge era, in just a ‘giving no shits’ kind of place in the world.”
“There’s so much bad going on in the world right now,” she continues. “There always is, but I think currently it all feels overwhelming. So I hope for people, it empowers them, but it also gives them a bit of an escape. But it also when they listen to it and and they’re listening to the album, I just hope they themselves feel like they embody it, and they can kind of feel like it expresses something about them. If they’ve felt villainised in their life for being loud and opinionated and outspoken. It’s like they can listen to it and hold their middle finger in the air and just be like, I don’t care what anyone thinks about me. I want people to be empowered and feel powerful and confident and listen to it. If I can manifest it for France, I can manifest anywhere.”
Evil, Hate Filled Female is out now via self-release.
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