London-based singer-songwriter WILDES (Ella Walker) will release her second album ‘All We Do Is Feel’ on 12th September.
Today, she shares her new single ‘Without a Heart’. She explains: “Of all the album tracks, this probably took the longest to reach its final form. It wasn’t an easy song to get out. I really struggled to nail the production on it and, in the end, I completely re-produced it, focusing on the intimacy and fragility of the verses and bringing in the vocoder choir to emulate that robotic coldness I was feeling when I originally wrote it. It’s mournful, inevitable, and has a finality to it for me. I knew once I’d written and produced it, a door would be closed on my heartache, and it was such a relief to finally finish it and feel free from that sort of pain. That makes it all worth it”.
LISTEN TO ‘WITHOUT A HEART’ HERE
WATCH ‘WITHOUT A HEART’ VIDEO HERE
Previous singles are ‘Wipe Away The Tears’ feat. Tonguetied and ‘All I Get‘.
WILDES has confirmed a couple of events to celebrate the album’s release, with more to be announced soon:
Wednesday 10 September – Album Listening Party – Shai Space, London – TICKETS
Wednesday 15 October – Paper Dress Vintage, London – TICKETS
When moments slip through our fingers and no feeling is final, WILDES’ returning album is a monument to the love which remains. ‘All We Do Is Feel‘ marks Ella’s reinvention: a kind of radiance that can only be earned when everything – your life and your art – is razed to the ground and built again in faith to a new vision. The story that unfolds across All We Do Is Feel is one which we all recognise: one of love, heartbreak and renewal. But when we are lost in the arctic-white of emotion, when everything is at its most bitter and unending, WILDES will take you by the hand and walk you out of the storm.
Co-produced with her best friend Elena Garcia (Tonguetied), the album was recorded in Garcia’s childhood home, and the music is completely unguarded and fearless in the face of experimentation.
It was Garcia who would introduce WILDES to EDM, which pulses throughout the album in subtle ways. She was fascinated by the quality of escapism, which is so unique to electronic music, and through exposure to the likes of Boards of Canada, Sylvan Esso and Samia, the production, which they shared equally, is infused with this glow. There are almost no organic instruments on the album. “Sometimes, electronic music can be more heart-wrenching to me than a guitar,” WILDES notes, which marks a total transformation of her sound. As a project which is far more DIY than its predecessors, the limitations are exactly what liberated her; when before, she’d surgically remove those touches which made her music human and vulnerable, now she embraces those distinctions and often keeps the first vocal take so as not to disturb that first bolt of magic.
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WILDES found meteoric success as a 19-year-old with her debut single ‘Bare’. A preternaturally gifted singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, her voice cast a long, unforgettable silhouette across haunting musical landscapes. She would go on to release two highly acclaimed EPs, ‘Let You Go’ and ‘Illuminate’, which won the West London artist streams in the tens of millions; she would be mentioned in the same breath as London Grammar, Mazzy Star and PJ Harvey. Walker’s reimagining of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” even caught the attention of Bob Dylan himself, who passed on his compliments and invited her to his show. ‘Other Words Fail Me’, her debut album in 2022, announced WILDES’ coming of age: a breakup record written long before the breakup itself. Stark and radically vulnerable, its creation allowed her to reclaim not only her artistic autonomy after a legal deadlock, but her autonomy, too, following her escape from a suffocating relationship.
PRE-ORDER ‘ALL WE DO IS FEEL’ HERE
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Photo Credit: Jessie Morgan (Download hi-res)