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Cassyette: “In order to evolve and for the scene to have culture, it has to have a bit of everything”
Cassyette has plans to dominate 2024. Having set herself up as one of the leaders for a new generation of alt. artists, she’s about to make her ultimate statement with debut album This World Fucking Sucks. We joined her on tour with Bring Me The Horizon to find out about the self-exploration that went into it, and how she wants to help drag music forward…
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photos:
- Gobinder Jhitta
“Baaaaabe, everything’s going mad. It’s hard to keep up sometimes.”
Where to begin with Cassyette’s diary? It’s date-spaghetti. She’s all over the place: going to America with YONAKA; doing her own headline tour, featuring a show at the Scala in King’s Cross. After that, in a turn that no bookie would ever let you bet on, advising you not to throw away your money, she’s going out on the road with Canadian radio-rock kingpin Bryan Adams. Then there’s the small matter of releasing her debut album – the immaculately-titled This World Fucking Sucks. And because she’s still not doing enough, after that there’s even more stuff that she’s not allowed to tell us yet. And at some point, while all this was coming together, she was involved in writing Doomsday Blue, the weird, dark alt. banger that’s sending Bambie Thug to the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden this coming May.
“This year is going to be a mad one,” she laughs. But such is life when you’re one of the most exciting and hotly-tipped artists in the country right now.
When Kerrang! meets up with Cassyette, she’s in her dressing room at Bournemouth’s International Centre, midway through her hours-long prep for showtime. At 7:10pm, she’ll hit the stage as part of the supporting cast on Bring Me The Horizon’s arena juggernaut alongside Bad Omens and Static Dress, invited personally by Oli Sykes over dinner at his Church – Temple Of Fun bar and restaurant in Sheffield.
Right this minute, she’s in a massive dressing gown that, when she popped to catering earlier, had people “looking at me like a mad granny”. She’s also wearing an alarmingly expressionless gold mask that gives the appearance of Leatherface (her suggestion), or The Office’s Dwight Schrute impersonating Hannibal Lecter (ours).
“Babe, it takes me hours to get ready,” she says, checking the time on her phone. “It helps keep me calm before the show. Otherwise I’m bouncing off the walls and getting really stressed out.”
Even keeping things focused and in the box until gig o’clock, Cassyette buzzes the buzz of a star. Friendly, loud, talking in a voice the size of Essex and charmingly possessed of a laugh that could grease machinery, she’s an immediate and likeable character, punctuating every other sentence with “babe”. Tangents come as standard, a by-product of going a mile a minute, while poignant depth and The Point often appear out of nowhere, as do genuinely unexpected bits of personal trivia, like a previous life a cheerleader, or briefly thinking as a teen that her future might involve being a jockey.
Everything in Cassyette World is impulsive, and full-on. Often when she works, when she writes, the framework of an idea comes into focus quickly, tumbling out, details to be sharpened up later. Holding up her iPad, she leaves it to K! to have the casting vote on which make-up look she should go for tonight. Tomorrow, and every other night, she’ll have something new – an outfit, a fresh bit.
This is how This World Fucking Sucks – a record that traverses a spectrum, from ballads, to rock club bangers, to thumping nods to Berlin techno – came to be.
Musically, anyway. The title arrived after a day throwing ideas around in the studio in America with Crosses production whiz Shaun Lopez (she also worked with Tylr Rydr and Olly Burden). “I was in a bad mood, on the first day of my period when I’m always grumpy and nobody should talk to me, and it just came out – it was perfect.” The techno burst of Sex Metal and bouncing single Ipecac likewise came in a rush, their essence immediately captured before they vanished forever into the air.
As an impatient artist with a very drop-and-go approach, however, wrangling songs into an album and having to sit on them, rather than blasting them out as and when, was new territory.
“It was a really big thing for me, in terms of achievement, because I’m really not very good at focusing on stuff for that long,” she says. “The music industry moves more slowly than my brain does as well. I’m impatient, babe. I feel like people either think I’m crazy, or a bitch, because I’m like, ‘We need to do this now!’ I’m very direct, so I can get frustrated by having to wait, or keep doing something for too long.”
Another thing that made progress uncharacteristically slower than normal was that much of the music deals with grief. Having suddenly lost her father three years ago, Cassyette began using songs as a way to articulate and process her emotions, likening the finished thing to “opening your diary to the world”. Only, she found, she wasn’t quite ready, couldn’t bring them to a close.
“I’d been writing these songs since my dad passed, but some of the things I couldn’t finish,” she says. “I wasn’t dealing with things very well at the time. So I’d write things, and then leave them.”
During this period, Cassyette says that she “spiralled”, drinking too much and using too many drugs. Between then and picking the songs up again, Cassyette managed to get herself sober, partly on the instruction of her management, who warned her that she could lose everything she’d worked for. And that’s not what her dad would have wanted to see.
“When I was in a really bad spout of my addiction, I couldn’t actually finish the songs because I was not in my right mind,” she says. “When I got sober, which is now a year and a half ago, I came back to them, and literally within 20 minutes, I’d finished them.”
Part of the difficulty was having to re-engage with the grief, and let it back in, in order to open up.
“You have to put yourself back into the headspace,” she confirms. “So it was a lot to deal with. It was very emotionally draining, but in a really beautiful sense. It made me go through it again. Writing the whole album was like a therapy session that lasted a whole summer.
“It was hard – one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” she says, “but I came out the other end feeling refreshed.”
Cassyette’s father sounds like a brilliant man. An impressively multi-talented athlete, he’d competed for Great Britain in a range of events, from track to, eventually and quite unexpectedly, bobsleigh. He also played a part, she says, in discovering moustachioed future British decathlon legend Daley Thompson.
“My dad was an adrenaline junkie,” she smiles. “If he could have been onstage, he would have fucking been. I take after him that sense – I love extreme sports as well.”
It was her old man’s influence as a pole-vaulter that nudged Cassyette toward the sport as a teen, a feat for which she would go on to win regional titles. He also encouraged his daughter when she showed an aptitude for music from a young age, as well as impressing on her the importance of discipline and not being lazy. Go for it, kid, but when you do, go all the way.
This is why Cassyette has dug as deep as she has to navigate her grief. On the song When She Told Me, for example, she goes back to the moment she found out she’d lost him.
“That was the most awful moment of my entire life,” she sighs. “My mum told me on FaceTime, because it happened in Barbados. My eyes literally flipped upside-down. My vision was physically altered, and it stayed like that for 15 seconds. I didn’t know until months after, it’s a reaction your body has where it’s about to die. My stress level went up so high, it flipped [my brain’s ability to process vision].”
Revisiting that conversation while writing the lyrics, Cassyette wanted not just to have an outlet, but to engage with and break down the experience, to process it. In doing so, she wanted to be able to lessen the difficulty of the memory, and to plant something more beautiful in its place.
“I found that moment so, so traumatising,” she says. “I’m an innately happy person, so I wanted to get through it, because I want to fucking get happy. I don’t want to be living in that shit. I wanted to think about the moment and work through the moment. That song is about every single feeling I felt when my mum told me my dad had passed.
“Going through writing that song was so powerful for me, because it made me come out the other end,” she adds. “And from that, I’ve made something beautiful. And I truly think that is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever written.”
Elsewhere, Four Leaf Clover reflects more fondly. It’s about the person you miss, rather than the trauma of loss.
“It’s basically like a play on lucky and unlucky, because he was such a beautiful person, and four-leaf clovers are so beautiful as well,” she says. “Originally it was a poem about him. There’s a line in it, ‘So I collect white feathers,’ because that’s a spiritual thing. Feathers are connected to death. If you find white feathers, it’s because a spirit from somewhere else is trying to connect with you. Since he died, white feathers just fall around me. I get it all the time.”
Though there are moments of naked and unambiguous pain, Cassyette wants This World Fucking Sucks to be taken as something joyous. She hopes that the songs about her father can provide some comfort or help with untangling the complex emotions to stop them being a weight. But she’s keen to stress that the whole thing is meant to make you feel good.
It also underscores her desire to create something fresh and exciting and new, musically. Using the term “nu-gen”, she feels that even this might be limiting for the buffet of what she does.
“Some of it is so pop, but then you have heavy stuff, electronic stuff, weird stuff – I just do whatever,” she laughs. “The good thing about making nu-gen music is, you’ve got the goth kids that love that, and the people who like properly hardcore music. Then there’s the ones who like fucking weird techno shit. I wanted to put a little bit of everything in there.
“I was talking to Oli Sykes about it this morning. He was saying that some people don’t like it when you put out experimental things. But in order to evolve and for the scene to have culture, it has to have all that.”
This is just how Cassyette is, though. As well as her own thing, she’s an in-demand songwriter and collaborator. Previously, she made a name for herself as a DJ, working at notorious London fetish club Torture Garden. As with a vast array of new artists who share in common ideas what they might lack in common sound, moving forward and trying new things is her very nature.
“When you are a visionary person, you are also someone of evolution,” she enthuses. “Again, I was literally having this conversation with Oli this morning. I was saying to him, ‘I want to have different hairstyles, I want to have different make-up, I want to make different music. I want to never be told I have to be one thing.’
“I said how genre names aren’t always the right way of describing things,” she adds. “And Oli went, ‘Well, yeah, that’s why I called this tour NX_GN.”
NX_GN is the perfect place for Cassyette. Perfectly complementing the headliners’ approach to creating a bigger picture from whatever tools they might fancy, she’s also a snugly-fitting counterpoint to Static Dress’ impassioned post-hardcore, and the slick heaviness of Bad Omens. All three are extensions of different strands of the main event.
At a sniff over 4,000 bodies, making it roughly a fifth of the size of The O2, where the tour will be appearing twice at its climax, Bournemouth is a relatively intimate night for this caravan. Cassyette’s turn is a massive triumph, however, vindicating her decision to focus largely on as-yet-unheard album tracks (“A lot of people are seeing me for the first time anyway, so it doesn’t matter”), as well as discovering a good half of the people here are more familiar than first thought when she busts out older hit Dear Goth.
It’s a similar thing when K! catches up with her a few nights later in Sheffield, albeit on a much larger scale. Being Bring Me The Horizon’s hometown, the Steel City’s near-15,000-cap Utilita Arena is unsurprisingly rammed. Cassyette’s look and outfit are different – as every night – but the effect when she steps out is much the same.
“Babe, that was so wild,” she says afterwards. “It’s been crazy doing these arenas. After Bournemouth, the venues got massive. I don’t soundcheck or set anything up myself, so the first time I’m standing on the stage or seeing the crowd is when I walk up the stairs for the show.”
And how’s that?
“It’s absolutely mental!” she hoots. “I’ve played big shows before – Download Festival, we did the Sum 41 tour, we played a stadium with My Chemical Romance. So I know what it feels like. But as much as you think that once you’ve done it, you get used to it, you don’t. It feels like you’re experiencing it for the first time over and over again.”
Naturally, Cassyette processes and expresses all this in a very Cassyette way.
“Do you think about you being in your own body, as one human being?”
Sure, why not.
“I mean, do you ever think about the dialogue and chaos in one person’s head? When you’re looking at, you know, 20,000 people – it’s just an obscene amount of thoughts and years of life experiences all in front of you, in one go, partying to your music. That’s sick.”
And how do you calibrate yourself to that?
“You realise how insignificant your worries and everything are,” she answers. “If I’m feeling anxious, I’ll go outside in the night and look at the stars, or if I’m by the beach where I live in Brighton, I’ll look at the sea. It’s all so vast it can make you feel insignificant.”
Even so, Cassyette also feels that part of her connection with people when onstage comes down to being human, remembering that, “We’re all just fucking sacks of skin.” She recalls one occasion at a festival, sick from insane heat, having to puke behind a monitor. Another time, on a massive tour, having nervously guzzled “two fucking massive bottles of Evian” right before hitting the stage, when nature called before the show was up she had no choice but to, ahem, be human about it right there.
“You’ve just got to go on,” she laughs at the memories. “That’s what I put into this: blood, sweat, tears, piss… everything.”
Indeed, even if by the time Sheffield comes around Cassyette is battling a nasty bout of flu that will see her having to bow out of the second of the two nights at The O2, she’s someone who’s hard to stop. And as the personal depths of This World Fucking Sucks show, she’s also someone unafraid to dig deep to get to what’s important.
“It’s made me grow, in many ways,” she says of the road here, when we catch up a week after the tour. “I think it’s made me stop being such a self-hater, which I have been in the past. I also think being sober has helped, too. It’s grown me as a person.
“With this album, it was a big thing, but I think when you set your mind to something, or give yourself a challenge and then rise to it, it gives you confidence as a person. I’m more confident, and I’m proud as well.”
What it also shows about Cassyette is a more complete picture than you might have seen so far. Just like when the conversation gets heavy, she’s not a downer, still with a glint in her eye, still at the centre a person who likes a laugh and a wow-moment. Take the album’s title: a bratty statement of catharsis that, held up to the light, is actually a so-funny-it’s-good thing.
“‘Sucks’ is such a shit word, and I just find that so funny,” she beams. “It’s the little things in life that make you smile. This album, as sad as it is, I want people to have a good time when they listen to it. Or I hope they can connect and feel happier after they’ve listened to it. The title is tongue-in-cheek – I’m not a crazy-serious person.”
And what’s the next mountain? Or, indeed, the next bar to vault over?
“That’s what all the bands on this tour are all asking, babe,” she laughs. “What can we do next? What’s the next step?”
No idea. As she says herself, though, it’s going to be a mad year. Bring it on.
Art direction: @aledsavedlatin
Styling: @iammattking
Glam: @martinaderosa_mua
Wearing top by: @emilialunney
Wearing skirt by: @chopovalowena
This World Fucking Sucks is released on August 23 via 23 Recordings. Cassyette’s UK headline tour starts tonight. This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the magazine.
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