Holding On To Yourself: TAAHLIAH on debut album Gramarye

By now, everyone who’s anyone knows Glasgow groundbreaker TAAHLIAH and her exemplary contributions to the world of Scottish music. If you're in any way involved in the Glasgow club or dance music scene, her slick production and celestial compositions will undoubtedly be on your sonic radar. Not to mention her otherworldly approach to live performance – an expert blend of creative lighting and visuals, contagiously fun go-go dancing and (of course) an always spectacular setlist. 

I felt the impact of this approach for the first time last year when I reviewed TAAHLIAH’s Ultimate Angels show at SWG3 for this very mag. It was a show that ran on the pure euphoria of the audience, a show which celebrated the joy of the crowd (and dance and club culture as a whole) just as much as it celebrated the artist performing. A few weeks prior to this hometown show, TAAHLIAH performed at the Southbank Centre with the London Contemporary Orchestra as part of the 2023 Purcell Sessions. This event, unbeknownst to her at the time, served as a turning point in the DJ’s artistic direction as she began writing her upcoming debut album – Gramarye.

Following her ethereal and award-winning 2021 EP Angelica, Gramarye (a folkloric word relating to magic and necromancy) sees TAAHLIAH at her most vulnerable both emotionally and musically. As well as going full-throttle on the LCO-inspired orchestral elements, the album also brings in live drums, ripping guitars and swelling bagpipes – exciting additions to the TAAHLIAH soundscape that we’ve come to know and love. TAAHLIAH also sought out vocal and piano lessons for the album, giving it an intimacy and personal edge that was not afforded to Angelica. 

“I’m not in a crack den, by the way,” prefaces TAAHLIAH, whose voice echoes around an empty room in her boyfriend’s new flat as she tries to find a place to set down her laptop for our chat. She’s wearing a slogan tee which reads ‘What exactly is heterosexuality and what causes it?’ and I feel immediately at home. 

“The anticipation of this album definitely feels bigger than that of the EP,” she begins. “Not necessarily due to the scale of the project, it’s more about the perceptions that people have of you as an artist. But I’m excited at the prospect of releasing a piece of work that can speak for me and what I’m interested in and that displays how I’ve grown as an artist. I’m excited to move on from a world that is conceptually not what I’m about anymore.

“Angelica was a project that was created in my bedroom,” she continues. “And I think you can hear that. There’s obviously intentionality with that approach but, as with any dated work, the artist falls out of touch with it. I think the success of Angelica kind of spearheaded me to look in different places. Gramarye feels more internal than external.”

TAAHLIAH no longer guards the door that leads the audience to her innermost thoughts, feelings, regrets and desires as she explores new territory on this album. The intimate nature of songs like Cherish and Hours really drives this internal feeling, led respectively by cavernous vocals and the tactile clicks of nails against piano keys. Lyrically, one of the most candid songs on Gramarye is second single 2018, in which TAAHLIAH expresses the deep frustration, anger, nostalgia and (eventually) bitter acceptance that we feel around that one relationship we all had as a teenager.

“That’s a very pathetic song,” she laughs. “But I think the patheticness of songs like 2018 (and then the acceptance of the patheticness) is really what this album is all about. The first song I ever made for the album was Angel and it lived in a very different world than how it exists now. It’s a very soft, light blue kind of song. Kind of like the sky right now, actually.” She turns her laptop around to let me see the wispy clouds that blanch the fading cornflower firmament. “But the first phrase I wrote down was, 'The world is hard but I’m soft like an angel'. It was originally an Instagram caption that I came up with, half asleep in my bed. The focal points of that phrase – the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ – are what the album’s journey explores. The intimate, pathetic, ‘soft’ moments really aid the more sassy, preposterous, ‘hard’ songs.”

Album cover art for TAAHLIAH's debut album Gramarye.

As TAAHLIAH mentions here, Gramarye is also very brutal and maximalist when it wants to be. Hard-hitter Eylvue (pronounced ‘I love you’), for example, could very well be the most boisterous love song you’ve ever heard. A thumping kick, squelchy synths which explode like firecrackers, and an unidentifiable audio snippet from an old-Hollywood movie of a conversation between lovers.

“That song was conceived because I wanted to make a song or sound that evokes the same sense of electricity one feels when falling in love,” says TAAHLIAH. “That’s where the electric-sounding patch comes through, and the forceful kick which I used to emulate being pelted with feelings of lust, passion and angst. And anxiety, in my case. The title is also spelled like that because I didn’t want to just call it I Love You. I didn’t like that as a title, and it’s not representative of how I feel about who inspired the narrative of the album. This album is all about feelings, and I wanted to play around with different ways of representing love.”

The influence of that London Contemporary Orchestra performance on the massive sound of this record is undeniable. The first time she had ever worked with live instrumentation, this show allowed TAAHLIAH to hear her music in a different way and broadened her perspective. “It really expanded my horizons in regards to how genre-less things can become when you combine those electronic and acoustic elements. The power of strings is always something I feel quite enamoured by. And I really enjoy playing with the undefinable, there’s kind of something for everyone on this record…ish. It just kind of blew my mind, I was like ‘Woah, these songs sound even bigger with these things that I thought were a hindrance’. I sometimes think about what would have happened if I didn’t do that gig.”

For me, one of the greatest pleasures of listening through this record was hearing TAAHLIAH’s own voice sprinkled across the tracklist. She employs past and frequent collaborators Sophie Thornton (naafi) and Tsatsamis to lead the vocal charge (as well as new collaborators such as Morven Kemp (Pearling) and Dev Hynes, (Blood Orange)) but takes a brave step towards being more present in her work. “I’ve always been told that I have… what’s the word…” she hesitates. “A voice with potential? It was always something that I was interested in exploring. But I think that perhaps my grievances with my gender at the time kind of stopped me from investigating that. I had a lot of fear.

“We’d be in the studio and the people with me would be like, ‘How do you want this sung?’ and I’d sing what was in my head for them. They’d say, ‘You can sing, why would you not sing on your own tracks?’ and I’d be like, ‘Do you want me to jump out a window?!’ But eventually, I asked my label if I could get singing lessons. It took me a long time to even feel comfortable singing in front of my vocal coach. It’s still something that I’m kind of grappling with, because I want to tour a lot of the songs from this album, and I think that would involve my voice. I’m not there yet, I’m still looking for where my voice fits in.”

The closing double-act track of Holding On / Let Me Go begins with a croaky bagpipe drone, over which Tsatsamis and Thornton layer their impassioned embellishments. TAAHLIAH is a masterful composer here, simultaneously designing an intricate arrangement and giving the first half of this finale space to breathe. The latter segment of this song, though, wraps the album up perfectly. A hopeful, countrified track which concludes TAAHLIAH’s journey on an optimistic note, complete with heavenly slide guitar.

“The message I want to get across is that what I’ve been through has made me the person that I am today – and that’s someone I really like. The lyric at the end of that outro song – ‘And I’ll keep holding on even if you let me go’ – is not holding on to that person or that relationship, it’s more about holding on to yourself, understanding who you are and taking that forth into wherever you go.”

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Gramarye is released on 18 Oct via untitled (recs)