Yours Truly: Holding A Mirror To Ourselves
YOURS TRULY had the world at their feet. Riding a wave of success from their EP Afterglow and leading into writing their debut album Self Care, they were playing shows across Australia and further afield to adoring fans. We all know what happened next; the world plunged into lockdown, with Australia enforcing some of the most protracted measures. It meant that the band was effectively put on ice with no shows to play and practically no ability to get together other than a day or two here and there.
The original plan had been to record a three-track companion piece to Self Care, tentatively titled Self Sabotage, to discuss the darker side of self care, that it wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. But as singer Mikaila Delgado remembers it, once they started writing they swiftly found themselves going in something of a different direction. “As we kept writing, we were taking the pressure of ourselves and trying new things. It really allowed us to explore who we actually were as musicians and what we actually liked, without there being any boxes we had to tick,” she explains of the writing process for new EP is this what i look like?.
If the title sounds like something of a self-reckoning, that’s because it is. Delgado swiftly realised that she’d placed a lot of stock in live music and being in a band, being Mikaila from YOURS TRULY. That it was so cruelly and suddenly ripped away from her forced her to confront a lot of things effectively plastered over before. “When your life changes, you go through the different stages of questioning your own identity, questioning what you’re doing with your life and a lot of anxiety comes with it,” she begins. “The themes of the EP are a lot of the things that I went through during that time.”
The chorus from the EP’s final song, Lights On, illustrates this succinctly, as well as being where the title was drawn from. “Is this what I look like with the lights on,” Delgado muses in its refrain. It’s both literal and figurative; once the lights go on at a gig after the bands have played, you’re right back where you started. That person inhabiting the stage is gone, the performance ended. “I really struggled with [social media] over the pandemic,” she admits. “We’re trying to put out this album and then, looking at other people’s lives like, you’re doing so well through this, you’re so happy with your partner and your family. I started picking apart my life like, what have I done wrong?”
That led her, ultimately, to the realisation that “social media isn’t fucking real, you actually look at yourself in a mirror with full lighting and there’s no filter, there’s no facetune. There’s real shit going on!” Honesty about social media and the realities of life definitely informed not just lyrics but the visual choices too; Lights On’s video is a murder mystery (“I’m not telling everyone I killed anyone, that didn’t happen!” She laughs), depicting, at least to her, that she had to kill this ideal of herself she held before the pandemic, being thrust into the dark on her own in isolation. But “once I got to see them [her bandmates] again and we wrote this EP, it was almost like me being with them and writing the songs pulled me away from that dark place.”
The actual rediscovery process wasn’t simple; trying to find herself as an individual again led her to try therapy only to realise that she was already doing that. “[Writing] is the only thing that’s worked for me so far,” she admits. Putting that pen to paper has always been her way of unpacking the world and her place in it, one that’s led to fans flocking to YOURS TRULY for that relatability. It’s just lyrical but extends out into the world of social media. “I feel it’s hypocritical to write songs where I’m so honest and then be this completely different person on social media. Being honest and personable, it feels good to me. It makes me feel like I don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”
It wasn’t just Delgado forced into confronting herself during the lockdowns; while the conversation around mental health has been getting better in recent years, it effectively wasn’t until everyone was locked in that we were forced to confront certain uncomfortable truths about the world and ourselves. “You had no choice,” she remembers. “You have to be uncomfortable, rip the band-aid off and start to talk about our own personal feelings and things that were going on in our minds.” Despite this and being “quite a talker,” she finds it easiest to open up in song. “I feel like I can’t express the way that I truly feel through my words because sometimes I pick the wrong ones,” she admits.
You wouldn’t think that, to listen to is this what i look like?; its bold sonic leap forward was a result of them choosing to push themselves as far as possible to see what happened, with Delgado narrating both that and her own trials in less diary form and more like a storyteller would. Even despite an incredibly challenging start to 2022, she’s resolute in that commitment to honesty, so fans can connect with the band, to know they’re not the only ones struggling.
is this what i look like? is out now via UNFD.
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