“[It] feels like a piece of me that I have had for such a long time,” Stella Gray said of her new EP my only feeling .
Offering ethereal sonic textures and vulnerable lyrics, Stella Gray captivated listeners with her latest electronica cut, Bottom Of Jack.
The single, which arrived last month, crafted a unique realm of pop-leaning aesthetics and gritty and cataclysmic atmosphere, a feat doubly impressive given the New York-based singer’s relative greenness in the scene.
Now accompanied by its broader tracklist, Bottom Of Jack joins the mesmeric tapestry that is Gray’s debut EP, my only feeling. The six-track collection spans the reaches of electronic pop, outlining a clear sonic direction for an artist confident in her craft.
Below, the Australian-born musician attributes a household item to each track on the EP, from disco balls to a box of tissues. Catch Gray’s full tracklist run-through below, and head here to listen to find Stella Gray on Instagram.
View this post on Instagram
my only feeling feels like a piece of me that I have had for such a long time that the world can now hear. The EP delves into a bunch of different emotions and feelings that feel very common to me.
I tried to go for each one with simplicity to grab a sense of relatability with who ever is listening. This one’s very exciting for me because its the first time I’ve released anything obscure or electronic/experimental.
Hello To My Head – a disco ball
The goal of this one is to have a boogie, so grab a shiny little disco ball and have one while you listen. In a nutshell, this one’s about paranoia.
In Stromae’s NPR Tiny Desk concert, he had two Hungarian choir vocalists sing for a small interlude. I absolutely loved this and wanted to incorporate some sort of similarity into a song.
I went to my producer Cyrus Villanueva and after looking through endless samples, we decided to make our own. This began Hello To My Head, and, after hearing how the layers upon layers of vocals sounded, paranoia was the feeling.
Bottom Of Jack – A bottle of Jack Daniels.
Need I say more. I wrote Bottom Of Jack back in 2021 and it was the first one I had done that had this interesting electronic texture to it.
This ones about disassociation. You kind of loose yourself and go to the last result and are in this odd middle of not really knowing what’s happening to your life.
The Puppeteer – running shoes
You’re going to want to run to the bridge of this one. The Puppeteer is kind of a part two to the EP’s first release Lying To Me.
I wrote it right after I moved to New York out of Sydney and was slowly coming to the realisation that no matter how far away I was, my problems were still there and I still felt like a puppet on someone else’s strings. This one’s about coercion.
RED – your best clubbing attire
You may get inspired to hit the town and make some bad decisions after this one so be prepared. RED is kind of the fun one on the EP, it’s about impulse.
We worked on this one the day after Hello To My Head and were on a high of using weird sounds. We put in a fire alarm that Cy found in his voice memos, and chopped a super pitched up version of me mocking a ‘Stitch’ voice, just lots of random little bits that would make a cool sound.
Its about doing something even though you know it’s going to bite you in the ass, but something just tells you to do it.
Lonely Little Life – a box of tissues
This ones upbeat but a little depresso so be ready. Lonely Little Life was the first song I wrote for this EP. I was sitting in my childhood bedroom at my keyboard feeling so incredibly lonely and sad, so, I wrote one about exactly that. This one’s very personal to me, I compare things in it that relate to things that I have done.
In verse one, I talk about “hair still being pulled back”, to summarise, my favourite movie growing up was The Princess Diaries and to make Anne Hathaway “pretty” they straighten her hair and give her contacts, of course I too had super curly hair and glasses, so, from a young age, I always felt ugly.
I got my hair permanently straightened and yet, I still wore it back, so, it wasn’t really about the hair.
Lying To Me – a car window
Main character time baby, relive your childhood music video games and stare out that car window. Lying To Me was the first track released off this EP and is definitely the most personal to me.
This one’s about betrayal and essentially reenacts my life narrative exactly as the events occurred. I wanted to harness the perspective aspect in creating this song, making it so that anyone can relate to it in any way, with any relationship.
