The visual world Erika de Casier has built around her third record, Still, is so cool and confident that, at first glance, it can feel a little forbidding. On the cover for the album, which was released in February, the pop-R&B maverick stands in a black leather, Matrix-style trench coat and a pair of bug-eyed black sunglasses. In the video for her Shygirl collab “Ex-Girlfriend,” she poses in a darkened, disused office building against a fading sunset, before crawling across the floor pointing a video camera at herself, her face appearing fuzzy behind her on a TV screen. (“There’s a reason I’m your ex-girlfriend,” she coos. “But still—you gotta be missing me.”)
So it comes as something of a surprise to find the Danish-Portuguese musician smiling and soft-spoken over Zoom, still basking in the glow of a pair of knock-out Coachella performances. “It was great! I was surprisingly relaxed about it all,” de Casier says from her hotel room in Los Angeles, where she’s holing up after her big weekend (well, weekends) at the Empire Polo Club. It turns out she spent most of her time at Coachella making a beeline for the other acts “who don’t really come to Denmark that much”: No Doubt, Doja Cat, Tyler, the Creator, Grimes. “Yeah, I was busy,” she says, laughing.
Not too busy, however, to worry that her 2 p.m. slot would mean nobody would show up. “It started as a small crowd, then luckily, all of a sudden people started pouring into the tent,” she recalls, breaking out into a wide smile. “So that was a nice surprise.”
De Casier is doing herself something of a disservice—really, it’s little surprise that festivalgoers quickly began flocking to her set. First, there’s the fact she delivered one of the most arresting albums of the year so far in the form of Still: an evolution (and elevation) of the sound she’s refined across her previous records, which blends the slinky R&B of Aaliyah with the smooth, sophisticated soul of Sade, then pushes it through a futuristic, bedroom-pop filter to deftly avoid anything that feels too nostalgic, or like pastiche. (De Casier’s ability to feel firmly of the moment is also reflected in her side gig writing songs for the breakout K-pop act NewJeans, whose fantastic second EP Get Up, released last year, had de Casier’s fingerprints all over it, and shot to the top of the Billboard album charts upon its release.)
Yet even if de Casier’s approach is modish, it always rings as authentic—a genuine homage to (and fresh twist on) the American R&B powerhouses she grew up admiring as a young girl, watching late-’90s music videos on MTV at home in Aarhus. On the subject of her album cover, she says, simply, “I really wanted it to feel natural, and most of the clothes that I m wearing in all the press shots are from my closet. I wanted it to be very me.” Very de Casier, perhaps, but with a slightly surrealist touch. She got the shot with her photographer Colin Solal Cardo by having him pretend to be a paparazzo, hence the fiercely crossed arms and disdainful expression. “I feel like there’s this chaos and I’m standing completely still within it, and very firm,” de Casier notes. “I really liked how that felt.”
De Casier’s music may also seem bold and assertive on the surface, but it’s an effect achieved through her willingness to be playful in the songwriting process; to take things as they come. “I think when I m making music, I always feel very confident about it,” she says. “I’m critical in my process, of course, but it’s a natural kind of criticism. I never say no in the creative process—it’s always, ‘Yes, let’s try it!’ Even if it feels a bit silly.”
It’s a free-form approach she inherited from her heroes. “The artists I really look up to are the ones with big discographies—and some tracks you like, some you don’t like, but you can hear, Oh, okay, this artist was trying some stuff out here,” she continues, after a pause. “It’s not the end of the world if everything you make isn’t amazing. I try to maintain that mindset, because when I try to be perfect in my music, it really ruins the fun of it.”
That sense of fun is also present in the sly sense of humor that courses through the record—from the almost comical directness of some of the songs (“Is it getting hot in here / Or is it just me?” she winks on album standout “Ooh”) to the title itself, which was a tongue-in-cheek nod to records by J.Lo and Dr. Dre, in which the word “still” was used to emphasize their totemic status and longevity within the music industry. “It’s meant to be kind of funny, because I haven’t been around that long,” de Casier says, grinning. “But I also called it Still because it’s a still image of where I was at the time I made it. I guess I feel more at ease and maybe more confident in the fact that it’s just music, and you can release more music later. Like, it’s not that deep.”
Now, she’s ready to take the album on the road. Fresh off her Coachella dates, de Casier is kicking off a European tour, which will see her translate the studied minimalism of the album’s visuals into a live setting—and channel the breezy, brash energy of the songs through her fashion. “I’m getting more and more comfortable experimenting a little bit with my outfits,” she says, noting that her Coachella outfit was a dress she brought from a thrift store in Los Angeles, before dressing it up with a corsage she brought over from Denmark and a pair of Miista boots. “But generally speaking, I like feeling a little more extra, but still feeling really comfortable.” Given de Casier’s ineffably cool but wholly authentic style, it’s no surprise that the fashion world is finally starting to come knocking: she recently performed at a Courrèges dinner during Paris Fashion Week.
But once her immediate European dates are up, de Casier is looking forward to returning home to “chill and create some stuff.” Given her laid-back approach to everything else, it follows that these two activities tend to intermingle. “I’m working on new stuff, and I’m already looking at the tracks from Still in a different way, with more love and care, and understanding them from a different angle,” she says. “It’s just the gift that keeps on giving.” De Casier’s loyal—and rapidly growing—fanbase will agree.
