Last spring, Tyson found herself in Los Angeles—and at a loose end. The musician and born-and-bred Londoner had initially traveled to the US to perform at South by Southwest. When the offer to crash at a family friend’s annex for six weeks arose, she decided to take it, renting a fancy car—“It was cheap, though, because it’s LA,” she says, with a grin—and meeting up with her close collaborator, musician Oscar Scheller, to start working on some new material at his home studio. Where in London, they’d usually try and squeeze in sessions between their hectic daily lives, spending back-to-back days devoting themselves entirely to writing unlocked something new. “Stepping outside of the daily grind in London allowed me to think in a different way,” Tyson recalls. “I felt inspired in a different way.”
The product of that time can be heard on Tyson’s new EP, Chaos, which arrives on November 15 via the independent London-based label LuckyMe. Across 10 tracks, she showcases the full breadth of her musical identity, flitting from the blend of soulful vocals and clattering two-step beats on the cheeky lead single, “Jumpstart,” to the clipped R&B groove of “Carousel,” on which Tyson sings of seeking joy and escapism in all the wrong places, to the rippling synths and trip-hop percussion on the mournful kiss-off to a lover that is “300Khz.” It’s an impressively self-assured journey through a range of genres made cohesive by Tyson’s starkly confessional lyrics and smooth-as-silk voice.
“I suppose my first two EPs were about a chaotic time in my 20s, and looking back on it and being like, whoa, maybe I need to maybe slow down a bit,” Tyson says. “And then this is the period that comes afterwards, which is—especially on 300kHz—looking at low-frequency behavior and realizing you need slightly richer energies around you. You have to have grown a bit to look back at everything that happened and other ways of living, and be like, That’s not really for me.”
In some ways, it reflects Tyson’s meandering journey to becoming a musician in the first place. Having grown up in a household filled with music—her mother is the legendary pop renegade Neneh Cherry, her father the Massive Attack producer Cameron McVey, her grandfather the influential jazz musician Don Cherry, and her sister the Brit Award-winning pop star Mabel—Tyson found herself resisting the pull of that career path by throwing herself into her studies, eventually completing a masters degree at Goldsmiths in London. While she was always dabbling in songwriting, briefly gaining buzz as part of electropop duo Panes, what convinced her to dedicate herself to music seems almost counterintuitive: after growing nodules on her vocal cords, she was forced to undergo an operation to have them removed and all but lost her voice for two years. “My life felt quite chaotic, and I think it was quite a therapeutic thing,” she says of returning to songwriting during that period.
And where in the past Tyson has maintained an air of mystery around her image, with this new project, she finally feels ready to step into the spotlight. Just take the music video for “Grunge,” released yesterday, which begins with the musician being tracked from a distance through the fuzz of a CCTV camera, before a close-up of her face slowly takes over the screen through a grid of glitching panels. She wears only a lick of lipgloss, or, in another shot, a childlike drawing of a flower over one eye. “I think I now feel a lot more comfortable and confident to take up that space,” Tyson says, smiling.
Part of that came via working solely with Scheller, with whom Tyson shares an almost cosmic creative alignment: They were born on the same day in different years, and have known each other since primary school. “The mixtape that I put out last year was me experimenting with working with loads of other people, which I loved,” she says. “But with this project, I kind of enjoyed it just being me and him in the studio. At the time we were making it, I was like, okay, I’ve done lots of stuff with other people, but what does my world sound like on its own?’”
That process of boiling her sound down to its essence—even if that essence proved to be something far more complex and wide-ranging than she initially expected—was the product of another major life change: the birth of her first daughter, back in June. While most of the material on Chaos was written well before her pregnancy (“The next record will be the motherhood concept album,” she laughs), the EP’s final song, “Glide,” a breezy ode to the wonders of companionship, points to the new direction that having a child has taken her in. “It kind of touches a little bit on that story of becoming a mom, which was a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be,” she says, noting that the song ends with a clip of her daughter’s heartbeat, and that she was pregnant when the promotional images were shot. “Even if you can’t see her, I think it’s important for me that she’s kind of been there with me throughout that whole journey.”
Another string to Tyson’s bow, if you will, is the Ladies Music Pub collective she co-founded in 2015 with the former manager of Robyn’s Konichiwa Records, Hannah TW. As well as operating as an independent record label, it also offers community meetups and a support network for women and nonbinary people, addressing the challenges that still disproportionately impact them within the music industry. One such challenge? The lack of resources available for mothers who are also working musicians. On that subject, it’s hard not to be reminded of Cherry, who famously performed her hit “Buffalo Stance” on Top of the Pops while eight months pregnant—with Tyson.
Unsurprisingly, the issue is something she and Cherry have discussed at length. “I think I’m probably in the luckiest position you possibly could be [as] someone who’s just had a child, given my mum did the same thing and we’re in the same industry,” Tyson says. She recalls being at a music festival this summer and jumping on stage to perform a song, then breastfeeding next to the deck. She goes on: “Sometimes I am like, Am I mad? What am I doing? So I feel so lucky to have someone right there who’s done exactly the same thing. She basically moved in in the beginning, helping us and just looking after me when I looked after the new baby. I’d like to, maybe at some point, record a conversation about motherhood with her—to just sit and talk to her about all of it.”
In the meantime, however, Tyson has plenty to be getting on with—not least continuing to build the visual world around the EP, for which she’s primarily collaborated with the creative duo Nothing Yet, and starting to think about bringing it to life on stage. “I haven’t played live for a really long time, so I’m a bit nervous,” she admits. But if there’s one thing she’s learned over the course of creating her latest—and best—body of work, it’s that artistic growth is born out of radical self-belief. On the song “Carousel,” which Tyson notes was the first track she wrote in which she felt everything clicking into place, she explored letting go of some of the more self-destructive habits that defined much of her 20s. “I think looking back now, in my mid-30s, and thinking about how other people tell me how to be, or how other people see me… maybe for the first time, it’s not feeling a need to change, or to apologize,” she says, breaking into a wide smile. “It’s just caring a little less, and feeling slightly more grown up—in a nice way.”
