LAUREL: "I didn't want flowery and cute, I wanted something stark, something bold, and something raw"

Confidently unfiltered and leading with heart - LAUREL reflects on a discography that bleeds self-progression and manifests beauty in life's harshest contrasts.

By Tom Adams December 2024

"It feels quite generic and they felt it wasn't very me..."

I'd always imagined feedback like this would be one of the most dreaded reactions you could receive as an artist, especially from your own label. But not so much for an artist like LAUREL. As someone fearless enough to have gambled on her music career by leaving school in her teens, to switching labels three times in just over a decade in order to make it happen, I quickly realised it would take considerably more than that to infiltrate LAUREL's artistic vision away from the one she has set for herself. As I looked back through her career in preparation for the interview, piecing together her musical achievements so far, it became clear they had all materialised because she'd stuck by how she'd wanted to do things. I think that is more characteristically Laurel.

As I loaded up Zoom on my laptop amidst a stormy Manchester December evening, I was met with a beaming morning sun shining through her Los Angeles house as singer, musician and producer Laurel Arnell-Cullen joined my call to chat to Amplifier. Born in the port city of Southampton and formerly adopted by London at seventeen, it's been four or so years now since she made the switch across the pond to live the Californian dream out in LA with her fiancé. In that time, she followed her debut album with two EPs, a mainstage appearance at Coachella with Flume, the release of her sophomore album PALPITATIONS, and a UK/European tour that succeeded the lot. Now, already hinting album three may not be too far away already, I was eager to take her right back to the beginning to uncover how she'd got to this point in her career, and to better understand the fluctuating reality of what life in the industry is really like.

"Oh god yeah, I had always wanted to do music since I was like four years old" she laughed. "I never had any other career prospects so it was pretty easy to know what I wanted to do. At one point I'd wanted to be Britney Spears, then a few years later I found Laura Marling, and then after that folk music so it was definitely more of an evolution but the plan was always music."

Despite always knowing she wanted to pursue a career in music, I never realised quite how intense early life would've been for someone wanting to put everything into such a pressuring industry, and from a young age. "When I was seventeen I released a song called 'Next Time' on Soundcloud which got me signed to Universal Music in a development deal, so I actually left school and moved to London into what was basically a label house they'd provided for me. It was honestly crazy! In hindsight, I probably wasn't ready for it because it was just really full on in an environment like all the time. I was doing sessions every day, I had no friends because no one had finished school yet and were still living back home, and I was in this new environment with just adults - basically forty-year-old men producing my music. I was there for three years and became quite uncomfortable with it all. I remember thinking I started to feel like part of the furniture and I wanted more direction. I also wanted to be managed by somebody that had more strategy, and I wanted to make indie music. When Universal moved to Warner Brothers I was able to leave. They asked me to move with them and honestly I look back and think what the fuck was I doing, it probably would've been amazing but I didn't so I left and released 'Life Worth Living' independently. That was when I signed to Counter Records shortly afterwards, which was a massively different experience to Universal because they wouldn't spend a dime on me. They were a much smaller team and it was basically them saying just give us what you want to release and we'll release it kind of thing. I didn't like that personally so I left and signed to Communion Records, so I've moved around a lot! It feels like I've had plenty of different experiences already."

Laurel was quick to explain how a lot of the major influences in the music scene had helped shape her own songwriting. Most prominently Lana Del Rey for her cinematic storytelling, as well as Florence + The Machine for how she's "made a whole world with her music", with Lorde, HAIM, and fellow singer and producer Ethel Cain each getting their own praise. "All these strong females are each doing their own thing with their music and not just making music if that makes any sense - that's what I'm most inspired by!"

Even by explaining how each of those artists have helped influence her music, she did however admit there wasn't actually a lot of direct influence when it came to making her debut album DOGVIOLET . Released back in August of 2018, the record was entirely written and recorded by just herself at her once home studio in London.

"It's funny, I didn't fully intend to make an album completely on my own, despite having written, produced, mixed, and even mastered it, it just sort of happened. I didn't find the people I wanted to make it with so I ended up doing it on my own which was interesting because it was an album with quite a lot of isolation to it. I think it's a beautiful thing because I was able to express my darkest thoughts, quite unfiltered, and not heavily influenced because I was so in my own thing. It was a hard album to make because I had no one to bounce off, no one to encourage me or suggest different ways of doing things, so I spent many hours alone going through things - that was really hard work. After releasing it I went through a lot in life and left it all behind so much that only recently I've rediscovered it again and looked back on it more in a wow that was an amazing thing I did sort of way. I didn't actually realise how heartfelt and raw it is until now because at that time that was just what was coming out of me. I think having perspective on what you do is so difficult in music and probably most creative arts because you make what you have to make in that moment without thinking about whether it's polished or not."

"I couldn't even find a name for the album! I'd fallen in love with this guy who is now my fiancé, and I was at his house and opened a book about flowers and the first word on that page said dog violet. He said it'd be a good name for the album and I was like okay… I'd really wanted an album name that sounded contrasting and captured the conflicting combination of ugly and beautiful because that's what life is. A lot of heartache and dark emotion often brings out beauty and so that was my concept, I just couldn't find the title for it. When I saw the dog violet it felt like the perfect concept of contrast."

The idea of contrast runs deeply through the core of LAUREL's discography. Following the release of DOGVIOLET, she explained how she wanted to experiment more with contrast in her sound too, by releasing music of a completely different style and genre to what she'd previously put out, even if this meant she'd be faced with in-house scepticism as a result.

"I felt really weighed down by the heaviness of my first album, and I remember touring it when I supported KT Tunstall and everyone in the audience was dead silent. I was twenty-two at the time, and I thought to myself I don't think I want to make music like this anymore. I want to feel euphoric, I want to be around people my own age, and I especially don't want to always be singing about how hard shit is. I wanted to feel good about it and it feel more of a joyful experience. I'd been listening to Sky Ferreira and a lot of 80s music and so I brought a bit of that kind of energy into the studio and it gave me the freedom to experiment and make the PETROL BLOOM EP. I remember after signing with Communion I wanted to release it and they actually said are you sure because it feels quite generic and they felt it wasn't very me. I understand why they said that because it was quite the departure from DOGVIOLET but I remember saying confidently that I was sure and nobody was going to change my mind."

LAUREL's PETROL BLOOM EP features her track 'Scream Drive Faster' that has since earned a remarkable thirty-eight and a half million plays on Spotify since its release four years ago. She seemed genuinely surprised when I brought that up. But it became clear the personal connections she'd built with people across her work were of far more value than statistical performance and individual accolades. Perhaps most notably of all, her friendship with American electronic producer Jeremy Malvin (aka Chrome Sparks).

"We've worked together for the last four years now and it's been quite the partnership! I usually write everything on my own, and then I take it to him and we produce it together so he honestly feels like the other half of my band - if I had one of course. I'll always remember the way it all came about. I'd wanted to meet a new producer and had been asking the universe to give me one that wouldn't dilute my vision. I was in New York on vacation, just on my way to a café and I ended up walking the wrong way down a street - it was a whole thing. I'd walked the wrong direction and I was getting confused looking around and everything, but then I heard someone calling my name from the other side of the street and it's Chrome Sparks shouting at me asking what I was doing here. I was like well why are you here and he said he'd got a flat tyre on his bike but his studio was just round the corner. I'd always meant to go by and check it out as we'd been friends for a while before so that's exactly what we did. We listened to some music and ended up writing 'Best I Ever Had."

I couldn't not follow-on from here without asking her about another influential producer she's worked with. Australian musician and DJ Harley Edward Streten (better known as Flume) collaborated with Laurel for the track 'I Can't Tell' from his 2022 album Palaces. In April 2022 the pair actually performed the song together for the first time on Coachella's main stage to thousands in California's Colorado desert.

"That experience was crazy! It had happened straight after COVID and I hadn't been on stage in two years and it was my first gig back. I don't usually get stage fright but it really hit me doing this one. I'm not sure if it was even about the number of people there - even though it was the most people I'd ever played to - but I think it was more that I wasn't used to it anymore as a result of the pandemic. Next thing I know I'm on stage to seventy thousand people singing a song I'd never really sung live before so it was pretty scary."

I wanted to jump to June of this year where LAUREL released her second studio album PALPITATIONS via Communion Group. The record felt far more PETROL BLOOM than DOGVIOLET and continued to showcase her blossoming indie-pop evolution. PALPITATIONS captures feelings of summary exuberance whilst making peace with life's imperfections - almost exactly the sort of self-progression she had described she'd been striving for post-DOGVIOLET. However, the creative process that went into making PALPITATIONS was in fact far from anything else she'd made up to this point.

"PALPITATIONS was actually a very slow album to make. I'd fully moved to LA by this point and was living around the corner from Jeremey (Malvin) and I would just go over to his studio and we'd write a lot there. I also wrote a lot of it in my house and in France too, and honestly some of the songs on the album had existed for five or so years. It almost felt like making a debut album again because it's one of those moments where you're pulled from everywhere to make this one body of work, but it was quite arduous. Every time I'm so up for it and then you hit the middle then you think when will it end! It's insane how much work there is to do when it comes to making an album. It wasn't like making PETROL BLOOM because for that EP we drank wine, we were in New York, and we didn't really give a fuck because there was zero pressure on us but then suddenly PALPITATIONS comes along and it's a full length album with a lot of experimentation so it's inevitably going to take a long, long time to make."

It wasn't just the musical side of constructing the record that, at times, felt like things were a long way off first anticipated. The album art features Laurel herself kneeling in a muddy puddle in a Californian quarry, shirtless and covered only by a baby lamb. It's undeniably iconic and further builds on her favoured concept of working with contrasting themes. But most of all she wanted something that represented her far more authentically than a lot of the misunderstood imagery people had previously associated her with.

"I saw this picture of this girl holding a baby goat and I thought to myself I wanna do that, I want that to be the album cover. Then literally a week later Eartheater publishes an amazing fashion editorial of her holding a goat and I was like fuck. She's done it now I can't do it. So I thought I'll hold a lamb instead, maybe a lamb is more biblical anyway. From there the idea just evolved further. I was also incredibly excited about being covered in mud - don't ask me why - I just wanted the album art to be really muddy. I was fascinated by this whole brutalist concept. I didn't want flowery and cute, I think a lot of people associate me with this singer-songwriter imagery of running through fields holding an acoustic guitar and I just hate that shit. I wanted something stark, something bold and something raw. So I called my label and described the concept to them: me naked and holding a baby lamb in a muddy puddle in a Californian quarry somewhere. They were just like right okay... they basically just ended up leaving me to it."

"But there was a concept. I find I'll always be gravitating to something first like the word dog violet for example, and then I'll find the reasoning afterwards. I already had this vision of the image I wanted to make. I wanted it to represent this angelic being that has this biblical connotation untouched by the human world, which is where I feel your heart is - hence the link to palpitations. It's the narrative that despite this angelic innocence, it's still having to come up against all the man-made brutalism in the world. It was shot in a quarry which is of course humans digging for natural resources etcetera, so the idea represented spirit and heart in such a brutal environment."

"But oh my god it was a nightmare finding a lamb, an absolute nightmare! It was January and of course there's no lambs in January - they're born in the spring. We eventually found a lamb from this Hollywood film rental place and went to shoot the cover for the album so we're all on set, ready and the photographer does a complete no show so the entire shoot gets cancelled. I was pretty traumatised by that. So we found a new photographer and set a future date for the shoot. However, by this point three weeks had passed and I had no idea how fast lambs grow, like zero idea. When I first saw a picture of the lamb it was absolutely tiny and then by the time we're shooting the cover… well you know how big it was because you've seen the album cover, it was massive! I remember being on set and them bringing this lamb out and I was like that's a fucking massive lamb, and so it was really heavy to carry as well."

Laurel then went on to explain how the album felt like releasing a personal diary with each song feeling like a palpitation of: grief, lust, euphoria, fear and anxiety all in one. These songs were once privately the soundtrack to her life, and then finally one day they're all released to the world and no longer just hers to keep. It was a subject she'd been vocal about before online but I wanted to ask if she'd found comfort in that as she'd grown as an artist over time.

"I think every artist has their own version of this. I often think I could never be a painter because every time you paint something you must surely get attached to it like you do as an artist making music, but then painters just give their pieces away and rarely see it again. Being in music is different but the same because you make a song that is solely yours, then suddenly you give it to people and often you'll never listen to it again. I listen to my songs on repeat before releasing them because it's fun and you've made this entire thing yourself that you should want to indulge in, but after it gets released I'll never listen to my music again. You then get other people's feedback, you get told how it performs statistically which then in-turn dictates how you feel about it, so yeah it's a really weird thing to process and it probably always will be to me."

By the time of the interview, LAUREL had concluded her PALPITATIONS tour and returned home to Los Angeles, still recovering from the unconventional quirks that come with a tour. Eight dates across the UK and Europe that began in Glasgow and ended in Berlin were inevitably going to return the adrenaline rush of performing again. When I asked about how much she enjoyed it, it was apparent the excitement from the tour was very much still with her.

"It was so fun! I remember the opening night in Glasgow and realising just how long it had been since I'd toured last. I was sitting backstage thinking, wait, how do you do all this again? I hadn't warmed up my voice, I hadn't had my vocal tea, I still had to get ready, I had to do my make-up. I can never remember the process of playing a show until the tour is properly underway and it becomes routine of knowing how long everything takes. I felt like it gave me a lot of energy as an artist again because we're all so pressured now to push everything online, which has always been awesome for me but it feels like a lot of output. But then you go on tour and you get an actual real exchange of energy back from real people that tell you stories of your music, you see people in the crowd cheering or crying or snogging their partner and doing whatever the fuck they wanna do. I think that truly feeds you as an artist and that's a unique feeling. I personally just really needed to see that as a self-indulgent thing of needing to be reminded I have a cult following from DOGVIOLET and that I should be proud of everything I'd done because it's so easy to move onto the next thing without processing the present first."

One of the ways Laurel wanted to bring an added connection with her audience on tour was experimenting with performing 'Only One' by physically walking into the centre of the crowd and intimately singing the track to her fans. She explained how her fiancé, Elliott Arndt of Faux Real, had suggested the idea to her not long before the tour's opening night.

"Elliott and his brother go into the crowd and perform a couple of songs there when they play live and people love it! I wasn't able to bring a lighting person with me for every show because of the budget, so I had to think what else I could do because lights are everything in a performance. It makes it a proper show instead of just watching someone play the guitar or whatever. Elliot suggested asking people to use their phone torches and utilise the room space by moving around a bit and I was like fuck it I'll try that! I remember that first night walking into the crowd and it was really fun for me because it changed things up, but the actual response to it was also massive. It was definitely the song every night that got the most videos and social media uploads afterwards. I was shocked at how well it went down actually but I think people just like to be a part of it and that was my favourite part too."

Right at the end of our interview, I was actually going to resist asking her about what might be next for LAUREL. But as someone who had already changed up her sound, been so open about the pressures of such an unapologetically relentless industry, and not to mention had just finished the cycle of an album and toured it, it felt like she'd earned a long break to herself at the very least. But apparently that's not very characteristically Laurel.

"No honestly I'm such a work addict! As I said, PALPITATIONS took me so long to make that I'd already started to become quite restless by the time of releasing it so I began writing for another record and I'm really excited about that. I actually want to start releasing it kind of as soon as possible and not wait so long this time. It will evolve of course but at the moment it's currently a fusion of DOGVIOLET, 'Best I Ever Had', 'Scream Drive Faster', and PALPITATIONS - bridging the gap between them all. I wanted to make something heartfelt, but I also loved the whole electronic element of my newer music so something in between will be my intention for sure... so watch this space!"