Sienna Spiro: "When I created my first project, I was very much in denial of who I was, my sound"

Ordinarily, when you are wrapping up a conversation with an artist about their debut album, you wish them good things – that the record lands, that it travels, that it runs and runs. With Sienna Spiro, that wish feels almost redundant. In many ways, it has already happened.

Here is a young artist who looks as though she has wandered out of some dream collision between Nancy Sinatra and Priscilla Presley, and sings with the bruised grandeur of Etta James. Before the release of Visitor, the world is already Sienna’s. Her global breakout hit, ‘Die On This Hill’, has galloped through half-a-billion Spotify plays, while further singles – ‘The Visitor’, ‘You Stole The Show’ and ‘MAYBE.’ – have all gone north of a hundred million.

The record drips with the grandeur of another age – the late-1950s and early ‘60s dreamworld of Capitol Records at its imperial height. There are other ghosts in the room too – the emotional sophistication of Marvin Gaye, the righteous fire and stillness of Nina Simone, and the intimate, piano-lit honesty of Carole King. Then you discover it was recorded at Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles, among vintage microphones, old consoles and retro gear. It all makes perfect sense.

You can almost taste the tape warmth, the room sound, the ghost of peak Capitol allure coming off the record.

“I took so much inspiration from the room itself,” Sienna confirms. “The reason the cover is orange is because in there, it’s kind of a burned orange, which really influenced the songs. I had live musicians play in the same space for the whole album. It made for a really cohesive feeling.”

Spiro is doused in this stuff. The sonic world of the record feels less like homage than inheritance – music absorbed early, obsessed about, and eventually returned in her own shape. Her father’s pop music became her pop music: Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, the great voices, the grand arrangements, the songs built to last.

“It feels so real and human,” she says.

That may be the key to Visitor. For all its vintage glow and studio romance, it never feels strained. Then you look at the people gathered around the record. There’s Larry Gold, whose fingerprints run from Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr. to The O’Jays, The Delfonics and Patti LaBelle.

Also listed as a composer is Peter Rotter, with Frozen, La La Land and Pirates Of The Caribbean in his orbit. And then there is Sienna, stepping up to the microphone and delivering these vast, old-soul vocal performances – many singers would do it take-by-take – in a single pass.

“I can’t believe Larry agreed to do it,” she laughs. “It is such a privilege. I love putting strings on my songs, but I don’t think I realised how good strings could be until I heard his scores. They genuinely change a song completely. He’s very old school. He doesn’t send them to you before they get played – he scores it all on paper, and the first time you hear it is when it’s being recorded.

“I loved that. I love to sing a full song all the way through. Originally, because I was lazy!”

TRYING TO RUN AWAY

Sienna is coming into this record off the back of a sold-out US tour, taking in intimate rooms with real mythology attached to them – The Bowery Ballroom, The Troubadour – complete with backstage photographs with her players looking like the coolest cats in Christendom. Catching a moment before it explodes.

“One of them is my friend Eddie,” Sienna explains, “who I’ve been playing with since I was 16 at music school. We’ve been doing everything together; it’s been a really special journey. Back then, Eddie was super quiet and shy, the whole school was talking about him, but I never saw him. Until I saw him play.

“He’s originally a bassist, and I was just, ‘I have to work with him’. We ended up doing these little shows together. We did the Camden Club to like three people, and The Roundhouse, which is opposite that venue. So, we had some really crazy experiences, and now we’ve been across middle America together.”

Sienna lit the fuse on 2026 with a knockout performance of ‘Die On This Hill’ on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – a version so commanding it brought the room to its feet and left Fallon visibly flabbergasted.

“When I was standing there,” she explains, “I felt very present, but I felt very out of it at the same time. I felt I was someone else in my voice.”

What’s the evolution of her sound?

“I grew up singing jazz,” Sienna outlines. “I used to copy all of these artists that I love. When I was super young, like six, I would listen to Frank Sinatra, and I tried to throw my voice the way he would. I would also try Beyoncé, but that didn’t really work. I used to sing in pubs, when I was super young, ten to 12. I had this singing teacher called Sonia, and she would do these open mic nights at pubs – let me sing and kick me out after, because I was  so young.

“My first EP (Sink Now, Swim Later) was my first body of work. I always want everything to be part of a project; I don’t really like loose songs. But when I created my first project, I was very much in denial of who I was, my sound. I denied the thing that felt the most authentic to me, and I tried loads of different sounds. But I was just trying to run away from the thing I wanted to do.”

EVERYTHING IS TEMPORARY

For a long time, Sienna admits, she parked the songs altogether. In truth, there wasn’t even meant to be a debut album. She imagined something looser – an EP, perhaps, or a mixtape. But the reaction to the songs changed everything. As listeners began to find them, and believe in them, Sienna began to believe too.

The title, the concept, the emotional world of Visitor suddenly felt too substantial to be tucked away. It deserved the full architecture of an album – a record framed with real intent, opening with the voice of American poet Nikki Giovanni and closing on the haunting idea of impermanence. What had begun as something looser revealed itself as a complete world – one with its own emotional barometer.

“There’s a big theme of impermanence on the album,” Sienna explains. “Like the temporary nature of life, this theory of people leaving and moments ending, and feeling temporary in yourself, your body, your identity. And learning to let experiences happen and matter without trying to make them permanent. That was a whole process. I learned so much from making it, especially from that last song. The tender sadness of knowing everything beautiful is temporary, and we should love it more, because it won’t last.”

• Visitor is out now.