LARAbEL - On Our Radar Q&A: "I’ve always been someone that needs space to think"

Can you tell me about recording your upcoming EP Squiggle?

It was a long process because it was in my boyfriend’s studio. We had a lot of time to play with the sound, which is something I’ve never really had the opportunity to do before. I think that helps bring my sound out more.

In the last four or five years, I did a lot of gigs in Dublin, and then in the last year-and-a-half, I started playing with the band. Then I moved to Wicklow and decided to quiet down and get my head in the studio. I’m used to not being so detailed and just hoping for the best, but it’s given me the space to sit down and think about what sound I really want.

In your single, ‘Playground’, you speak of your own relationship to escapism – can you tell me more about it?

As a kid, you always want to run away from things going badly. I was always lucky to have the sea around me. For the whole summer, I spent every day at the water, even if it was shit weather. As I became older, I realised I still had a tendency to escape, and that was what the song was about.

I was also trying to comfort the person I was with at the time. Maybe they were worried that I wasn’t able to deal with things, so I think the song was my version of a love song. Being like: ‘I’m okay, I have this thing that I did when I was younger that I can still do, but in a different way.’

I’ve always been someone that needs space to think. I’m very bad at talking about how I’m doing at the moment – it can be quite hard to understand my feelings. It would take me that space and probably a lot of alone time – which has led to songwriting. I guess it’s really therapeutic for me.

Do you think being from Donegal influences you as an artist?

Definitely – more than I’ll probably ever understand myself. A lot of people there say I have ornamentation in my voice, and ornamentation is used a lot in sean-nós – I actually never learned a sean-nós song. But I was surrounded by it, without realising.

With women from Donegal, a lot of their vocals are quite haunting, and I think it’s down to the landscape and the way it makes us feel.

LARAbEL's new single, 'WESTCOAST' is out now. Her Squiggle EP is out on August 8.