A.A. Williams: Solace In The Darkness
It may feel as though A.A. WILLIAMS has been around for a very long time in the music consciousness. Yet her first self-titled EP dropped as recently as 2019, followed rapidly by a purple patch of two more studio albums, a covers album, and two other EPs, all in the space of three years. Add to that frequent touring, both as headliner and in prestigious support slots, and festival appearances – her career to date has been a whirlwind of activity.
As such, the four-year wait for her third album, Solstice, feels purposeful. An intentional pause? An unexpected disruption? Williams is keen to bust the myth. “A lot of the time there is the impression that an artist has deliberately taken a break, or made a strategic point of taking this time… It’s just because life happens!” Relentless touring, combined with a lack of a record label until last year, broke the pressured production cycle of her early career. “There was no one saying, hey, you’ve got to deliver this album [by] this month or whatever… It gave me the luxury of time, which was actually great because I’ve never done that before.” Not that the scheduling has gotten any less intense this time around. “In true A.A. WILLIAMS style, I’ll be travelling between two festivals on a plane when the record comes out!”
The other factor driving that recognisability is the consistency of the A.A. WILLIAMS sound, fully-formed right from that first release. Her style is dark and introspective, with slow-tempo songs that build in intensity, full of emotional heft and crunching, distorted guitar. Solstice continues that trend – there’s no drastic shifts in tone or attitude from her previous work, just a continued honest reflection of Williams’ inspirations. “I’ve always been a melancholy person, so those elements are just baked in,” she shares. “I am a person who just feels stuff in a big way. I’m not really one for avoiding stuff and ignoring it. I would rather face it head-on and try to understand it, or find a way that I can manage things for myself to make it a bit better.”
In conversation, however, Williams is engaging, amusing, occasionally self-deprecating. “Someone told me I was the bleakest songwriter in the UK the other day. I was like, to be totally honest, I’ll take that!” To characterise her music as miserable would be both lazy and inaccurate; there’s plenty of beauty within Solstice, and a few flecks of optimism embedded as well. Well, at least a couple. “I’m not suddenly going to start writing songs about what a nice day I had in the beer garden!” The record reflects a growing confidence, too, with Williams emphasising her technical growth as a singer and songwriter over the last few years.
Central, though, is the thesis of dealing with emotional hardship. “Struggling with shit can be lonely sometimes… If you can listen to a record and feel like someone else has experienced some of that stuff, that is to me one of my dominant goals.” It’s a relationship with her fans deepened through her live shows – often heavily backlit and buried in fog, a gauzy light show that one fan told Williams made her appear as if underwater on stage. The extent of the emotional reactions has come as a surprise. “I have got what appears to be a very welcoming, safe space, for people to come and step into a little smoky dark slow-mo place with me for an hour and a bit, and just let the music serve them… [People say] we just come along and we kind of leave life at the door for an hour.”
Those strong musical and thematic traits sit at odds with the lack of an obvious genre characterisation for A.A. WILLIAMS. It’s a flexible state that Williams is keen to foster; when put to her that one potential association based on touring and specific collaborations would be post-rock and post-metal, she bristles, quickly rattling off appearances with SLEEP TOKEN, THE SISTERS OF MERCY and CRADLE OF FILTH as counter-evidence. “I don’t try and put a label on it at all,” states Williams. “I’m hardly the only one… So many artists are just doing what they want to do. They’re not thinking about ‘hang on a minute, let me go to the shoegaze drawer…’”
It’s an enlightened view that has enabled the growth of a fanbase drawn from many different sources, thanks to a range of opportunities. Plenty of bands can sometimes find themselves in cul-de-sacs based on the associations they develop early on. As such, Williams gives direct praise to promoters and booking agents brave enough to think outside strict genre lines and instead cater to audiences with broader tastes.
Those early career years, whilst consistent in sound, featured a range of different releases: plenty of collaborations with other artists, including an EP with MONO and a CULT OF LUNA feature on the debut LP, a covers album drawing praise from Robert Smith and Billy Corgan, and arco, a classical re-arrangement of her first EP. Solstice doesn’t feature any guests – the timing and logistics for more joint work haven’t panned out recently, though Williams retains an appetite for collaborative work. “You’ve got a list as long as my leg of people who I’d love to work with… I would love to work with more industrial artists, or louder, aggressive post-metal artists. I love listening to that stuff, that’s my kind of comfort blanket.”
But much like the core thesis of her music, the ambitions for the next stage of A.A. Williams are simple. “I would tour relentlessly if I had the opportunity… A couple of years from now? I really hope that I have actually got further into making an album than I did this time. I’m itching to get going on it now, I love writing.” On the strength of her work so far and this latest effort, those aims will doubtless leave her fans well pleased and will likely earn her more, hopefully from continually unexpected sources.
Solstice is out now via RPM. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS130 here.
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