Carrie Baxter: "Raye put out a project called Genesis, at the time when I thought I was going to put out this EP… That actually contributed to me pressing pause"

Carrie Baxter’s new album Seven didn’t start as an album at all. When she started writing it in 2023, it was only meant to be an EP.

“I had like five tracks done, and I was like, ‘Yes! It’s ready!’” Baxter explains. “But in my gut, when we went to put the first song out, I was like, ‘Something’s telling me it’s not the right time for this.’”

Instead, the Waterford-born, London-based artist put together four previously-written tracks to release as 2024 EP Keep Swimming, and set off to discover how the project would take shape.

“The only way I’d ever done a project is I’ve come up with a theme and then worked backwards,” Baxter says. “But this one was completely different: I just started writing and the concept evolved and revealed itself over time.”

Now, the project has revealed itself as an 11-track full-length – her first – that spans from Baxter’s Irish childhood through the present day.

“It’s a bit surreal, if I’m honest,” she laughs. “I’m ready because I’ve had it for so long now, and I’ve worked my ass off for this, so here you go! Enjoy, world!”

Baxter recorded Seven between Dublin and Brighton with producers Benza (Chris Bubenzar) and James Berkeley.

“Chris has a darker influence on his sound,” Baxter says. “He listens to a lot of old-school ’90s hip-hop. James is super-cinematic and quite expansive, and everything feels quite light.”

The divide in her producers’ approaches influenced how she sequenced the album.

“When I started writing the project, it was with Chris, so the earlier songs are darker… more shadow-leaning stuff. By the end, it moves into James’s work, which is a lot a lot lighter, sonically and lyrically. Chris’s tracks go together, and then there’s a definite split in the album, and then James’s tracks go together. It moves from darkness to light.”

That darker, shadow-work mentality can be heard on ‘Change’, the album’s lush and groovy opener: “1990, I was chilling / Picked up and my legs swimming / Now I’m sinking in the bathtub, thinking it through.”

“That’s one of my favourite things I’ve written in my life,” Baxter says of ‘Change’. “That was a struggle. That was two days back-to-back in Dublin. I will never forget the pain of trying to finish that chorus, just because it was quite revealing for me and I wanted to get it right.”

And as for the back half of the album?

“‘Magic Wand’ is my favourite with James. It’s probably my favourite on the album, because when I wrote that, it was a really quick one. It came in like an hour. There were a lot of magical moments in this process. You don’t realise how magic they are until they’re gone, and then you’re like, whoa, that was so not a coincidence. When you look back at the process, it was a really fucking magic three years.”

The album’s title, Seven, stems from that magical serendipity.

“The title came quite late, when I had finished the album,” Baxter says. “When I wrote the original EP, the five tracks that I had, I called it Genesis. At that time, it was because some of the tracks were unearthing… growing up quite heavily influenced by the Catholic Church in Ireland and what happens when you leave.”

“At the time I’d started reading more, not the Bible, but teachings, to understand what I was trying to say. I wasn’t studying religion, but more so trying to understand the notion of God and different perceptions of higher power, what people pray to, and why you would think that doesn’t exist at all… I thought, ‘This feels like a brand-new cycle, I’m going to call the EP Genesis.’”

But Baxter’s plans for her title were thwarted by another songstress.

“Then Raye put out a project called Genesis. It was at the time when I thought I was going to put out this EP… That actually contributed to me pressing pause.”

But it was Raye who indirectly inspired the name Seven.

“I was listening to an interview with her, where she was talking about one of her tracks being seven minutes and seven seconds long. She was speaking about that being the last song… I just stored that in my memory somewhere.

“When I finished the album, I remembered seven being the number of completion, so I started to study why it’s so popular in the Bible, and why seven is the number of transcendence in numerology-based stuff. I was trying to understand the meaning of it from a lot of different perspectives.”

Soon, Baxter was seeing so many sevens that it started to feel meant-to-be.

“Seven months later, the tracks were done, and I’d done seven more tracks. I started to join the dots… writing the seventh track in the seventh month of the year, just weird stuff like that, you know. When I completed the cycle, the album felt done, and I said, ‘Cool, let’s go with Seven, because now it makes sense.’”

To help inspire the sound of Seven, Baxter brought her own “Album Flow” reference playlist to the studio.

“There’s a lot of heavy leaning R&B on there,” she says of her mix. “Maverick Sabre… I had Cleo Sol, as well. I was listening to a lot of old stuff. I don’t really listen to a lot of new stuff , shamefully – I probably should!”

Over the years, Baxter’s genre has been the subject of great debate.

“I don’t know if I have a genre,” she shrugs. “I guess I’m R&B, but I don’t know. I’d consider myself more soul than anything, to be honest. I think everybody is a little melting pot of what they grew up on. For me, it started out more jazz-leaning. I am a huge jazz fan. I love big band… I studied musical theatre, and that’s where I found old jazz standards.”

That jazz sound, which inspired Baxter’s 2020 EP Placebo, earned her frequent comparisons to Amy Winehouse.

“When you first start in the industry, you latch onto that,” Baxter says. “It’s very hard to get away from who people compare you to when you start.”

But upon finding her music sorted into R&B playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, the singer’s original reaction was a puzzled one: “Huh? Do I do R&B?” For Baxter, her songwriting takes precedence over any aim for her sound.

“I love to write so much,” she says. “I never really wanted to be a singer. I always wanted to be a writer. English was my thing when I was in school. Oh my god, I could have written essays for days!”

She’s looking forward to sharing some long-form writing on her new Substack in the coming months, and she has no dearth of topics to delve into.

“I’ve got a page in my notes that has 30 topics I want to write about,” Baxter says. “Ten years ago, I had a blog, and I found some of the old things I was writing about. It’s a really powerful way for me to communicate some of the time. I’m not very good at the whole influencing, face-to-camera business, so sometimes I like to be able to say things in a different way.”

Baxter hopes her writing can reach beyond her musical audience.

“It’s cool to pull that down into a different medium and share it on a larger scale, so other people can get an understanding,” she says. “Sometimes it doesn’t connect through the music for people – sometimes they just enjoy music because it sounds nice, which is absolutely fine. Music is meant to serve a number of different purposes, isn’t it?”

• Seven is out now.