After racking up millions of Spotify streams with her earlier material, including this year's single "Electric Heights", UK singer-songwriter Phildel is unveiling another track from her long-awaited upcoming LP. The entrancing "Glide Dog" sees a searing, teeth-bared yet playful turn from her previous airy electronica, mixing bloody gothic fantasy with her pop sensibilities.
Phildel spent the last three years making Wave Your Flags; a powerfully emotional 11-track album re-enacting cycles of loss and renewal. In the midst of the '#MeToo' era, Phildel's impending album is a body of work emphasizing the importance of speaking up and finding your way in the world. The last few years have been a crucial period of transience for
Phildel and this is represented by the scale and adventure present throughout the new recordings, including the new single, "Glide Dog."
Phildel released her debut album The Disappearance Of The Girl in 2013, a dark and intimate suite of songs exploring the gothic fantasies that sustained her through an unhappy childhood. Though written in a vacuum, Phildel's intense piano and electronica music quickly spread to millions, sound-tracking ads for Apple, Expedia and Burberry;she was an inspiration to Mariah Huehner, author of the True Blood comic series, and her songs featured in the live shows of fashion designer
Henrietta Ludgate.
"Glide Dog" is out now, and the full Wave Your Flags album will be released May 3.
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It was one of the music industry's stranger stories: a young girl who'd grown up in a household where music was banned, her burgeoning interest confined to stolen moments at the practice room piano and a single dance music CD stashed in her desk at school.
Phildel Ng lived for the bulk of her childhood under the rule of an abusive, strict Islamist stepfather, from whom she only escaped in a separation that lost her the rest of her family too. From the experience came her 2013 album, The Disappearance Of The Girl, a dark and breathtakingly intimate suite of songs exploring the gothic fantasies that sustained her through an unhappy time. Though written in a vacuum, Phildel's intense piano and electronica music quickly spread to millions, sound-tracking ads for Apple, Expedia and Marks & Spencer; she was an inspiration to Mariah Huehner, author of the True Blood comic series, and her songs featured in the live shows of fashion designer
Henrietta Ludgate. The cult continues: her keyboard reverie Qi made it on to Spotify's Peaceful Piano playlist and has had nearly 70 million streams to date.
At the time of her debut,
Phildel was trying to bring the man who had abused her to justice: she took her story to the police, but there was no prosecution - her mother and sister closed ranks, and though the case remains open, there wasn't enough evidence to make an arrest. She had to make the devastating decision to cut herself off from her family entirely. Wave Your Flags is the story of that fracture and the self-repair that followed - a strong, sparse album of powerful songs re-enacting cycles of loss and renewal. The fairy tales are over. In a post-#Metoo era, Wave Your Flags is a work about the importance of speaking up and finding your way in the world - regardless of whether or not you are believed.
Phildel now lives in Brighton with her partner and identical twin boys. The album took three years to complete: "I wait till life events reach boiling point," she says. And there were several of those. When she failed to get a conviction for her stepfather, she became emotionally overwhelmed by the experience and, afraid for her own safety, checked herself into the A&E department of the
Chelsea and
Westminster Hospital.
A sense of strength and psychological decluttering permeates the arrangements in Wave Your Flags. Songs are clustered together according to their feelings - brightness versus darkness, organic versus electronic. The clearest sign of Phildel's changing perspectives is in the boldness of her sonic landscape. The Disappearance of the Girl was an impressive feat of arrangement: she used the Vienna Symphonic Library to score her work, then recreated it with a full orchestra. Wave Your Flags features the same programmes, the same hardware, but she made different choices. Sean McGhee worked with her on programming; Ben Jackson on synths. When it comes to synths, however,
Phildel is still the same girl she was in the school practice room, experimenting with the simplest melodies.
Despite the huge developments of the last three years, her previous songs still figure in her life. In recent months, more and more people have got in touch through her Facebook page to say that her 2013 anthem The Wolf - the archetypal song about her step father - has helped them process cases of abuse in their own lives. "With #MeToo, all this is coming to the fore now," she says. "That was one of my proudest moments, because I felt so empowered after writing that song myself."
As for
Phildel herself, on Wave Your Flag, the song Glorious is the conclusion of her struggle with the past.
"No matter what has happened to me, I don't need anyone to say that they witnessed what I went through - I am actually enough of a witness on my own," she says. "Sometimes it is beyond our power to have legal justice happen, and somehow we need to be able to resolve that within ourselves. For me, I had done everything within my power to gain justice. Now going forward, I'm okay."
WAVE YOUR FLAGS Tracklist:
- The Deep
- Electric Heights
- Oh Love
- Wave Your Flags
- Lamb
- Wild Sea
- Emblem
- A Great Wave
- Glide Dog
- Floods
- Glorious
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