Empara Mi Shines a Light on the Monsters & Masochists Within
Empara Mi X FAULT Magazine
Photography: Jemima Marriot
Styling: Empara Mi
Words: Charles Conway
Production & Photography Assistant: Lee Furnival
Special Thanks: Chloe Haddad @ Weller Media Agency
Singer-songwriter, producer, and artistic jack-of-all-trades Empara Mi graces our cover to mark the release of her sophomore album, Monsters & Masochists. The Guernsey-based artist has channelled her creative mania, through moments of suffering, loss, and love, into her synth-pop opus. Five years in the making, it is as much an audio-visual project as a collection of songs that are alternately catchy or haunting – and usually both.
The album kicks off with the dirge-like ‘I Can’t’. Mournful lyrics and sombre voicing, with off-kilter drumming reminiscent of Bloc Party’s ‘The Prayer’, are heightened by the track’s ghostly production. An award-winning music video, depicting a kind of reverse-baptism, scorns sentimentality with its symbol-laden, spiritual imagery.
‘Masochist‘ opens with taut, reverb-laden piano, its sultry tension cracked open by cavernous, industrial-sized electronics. The accompanying video embraces gothic horror imagery, centred on a vampiric, dagger-wielding Empara Mi, transforming it into a strobe-lit, contemporary dance piece.
As the title suggests, however, there are two faces to this album. ‘Sucker for Love‘ is a classic pop ballad, with earnestly powerful vocals which soar above and dive below glistening piano chords, thundering guitars, and organ-like synths. ‘Mercy‘ is an anthemic waltz, its lyrics rich with metaphor, which feels cinematic in scope while also serving as an utterly intimately portrait.
In quintessential Empara Mi fashion, the final two tracks defy all expectation. ‘I Lied‘ veers off into hip-hop, delivered with gut-punch attitude and a crunchy beat. At the curtain call, ‘Dragged Me Back to Hell’ is a swaggering rock-opera.
Empara Mi is, partly, at least, a brooding artist creating a darkly rich world from a shadowy realm of personal trauma and theatrical imagination. She’s also an ebullient interviewee, chock-full of chat, anecdotes, and an indefatigable passion. We sat down with her to discuss Monsters & Masochists, the thrills and dreads of production, and much more.
FAULT: Monsters & Masochists is out today – congratulations! How are you feeling, and is it different to your debut?
Empara Mi: Well, my first album came out during lockdown, which was the worst time to release anything! I was a bit disappointed: I really wanted to be doing shows. It ended up changing how I wrote this one [Monsters & Masochists]: I took a lot more time with it. I just thought, “What’s the rush? We still don’t know what’s going to happen when we get back to performing.”
I was determined to make this album more “live”. I took it to another level, getting an orchestra on quite a few of the tracks. Although we can’t get an orchestra every time we want to perform, we also have a lot of guitars and other organic elements. The result is that this album is a lot more me: very theatrical, very dramatic, very over-the-top!
After five years of working on this album, it’s been so long in the making that the run-up to the actual release became a little scary. But I’m really proud of it.
It seems like there is a deep spirituality running through the album. You’ve got songs like Closer to Heaven, and the aesthetics around the album too. But then there is Mercy, which feels like a kind of total rejection of the traditional, “capital-G” God. It’s almost like you’ve got this dark, sinful side, but without the other half. Could you talk us through your personal journey a little, and how it informed the album?
Coming from an Irish Catholic family, I often have religious themes in my music. I have a weird fascination with the idea of heaven and hell. I bring it up quite a lot. The obvious one is ‘Dragged Me Back to Hell’. That song’s a metaphor for anxiety and panic attacks and all that stuff. Just when you think you’re doing well, some sort of demonic goddess – the personification of mental torment – comes along to drag you back to hell. I like the idea that the pit of your anxiety, or whatever you call it, that’s your own personal hell that you’re living in.
On ‘Mercy’, that demonic, monstrous presence represents how I feel about the music industry. What I went through in the first part of my journey – let’s put it that way. The feeling that, basically, I can give you everything; I can be down on my knees, but it’s never going to be enough, and you’re still going to take advantage of me. ‘Mercy’ is about breaking free from that hold and praying, praying legitimately, that my audience and people outside the industry will accept me.
There’s a line on the interlude: ‘We too are monsters of our own creation // born only from the need of your validation’. It sounds like you’re talking about the nature of people, that they’re their own monsters.
Being a monster is something we control. We’re all in control of our own emotions, our destiny, whatever. Everybody goes, “I’m this, but I’m that”, and that they deserve to this, or they were justified in doing that. But really it’s that famous phrase: you’re 20% of what happens to you, 80% how you react.
I’m always trying to be the best person I can. I try to stay in control of myself. So, on the interlude, I’m basically saying that you can be one or the other [monster or masochist] or neither; but you are still in control of yourself. Life can throw everything at you. But you can still propel forward and be a normal person. You get to choose your own path.
The last line of it goes, “to find the light, you must return to the dark”, or something. I put the interlude right in the middle of the album, in the split between the two halves. It’s introducing the second part of the album, which gets quite dark. The idea is that if you want to get over something, you have to visit it and dive deep into it, feel it, and only then come out the other side.
Which part of writing the album has made you feel like a monster, and which has made you feel like a masochist (metaphorically speaking)?
I’ve experienced both – not even metaphorically! I’ve always felt like there are two sides of me. Sometimes I feel like I’m the bad guy, that I want a bit of revenge for all these things over the years. And I let that part – the monster – come out in my music. In real life, I’m a bit of a kitten. But in my music I’m like, “Oh my God, fuck you…!”
The other side of the album is more reflective. I’m looking at things in a different way. ‘Masochist’ is used ironically: I’m the victim, I’m hurting myself, I’m my own martyr. “Woe is me!”
I’ve found myself playing both those roles over the last five years, when lots of things have happened or things haven’t worked out the way I thought they would. I’ve had to decide to either say, “All these things have happened to me, why me?!” or, “I’m going to change those things.” And, actually, being a monster can be positive, in the sense of taking control of your life and everything.
The album’s pretty much split down the middle between anger and sadness or self-reflection. From the outside, you might listen to it and think I was absolutely bonkers. “Why is she doing half music like this, half like that?” But it’s an authentic record of all these different emotions that I was going through.
Do you find it easier to process things through music, presenting your vulnerability to the world?
If I didn’t then I’d have to talk to everybody about it! It’d be awful!
The scariest bit is my family and friends listening to the lyrics. And the dread while I’m waiting for their reaction.
I was shaking the other day after sending the album to my parents. My dad called and said, “I love this track.” And I was like, “Stop, dad, you can’t love that one!” I mean, one of the lines is about choking on dick. I hope he spits or he chokes on my dick. And I was like, “Dad, come on! That can’t be your favourite!” And he was just like, “I love it!”
So you never know what people are going to think. Which is why you shouldn’t care: it might end up being the opposite of what you’d expect.
With the more vulnerable stuff, my mum will look at me and say “We don’t need to talk about it, but it’s OK. We’ve lived, it’s fine.”
This Empara Mi album is as intricate and detailed as its cover art and the accompanying music videos. How much work goes into the creation of all of that?
With some of my earlier videos, at first I just thought, “Why don’t I just get a DOP [Director of Photography] who can hold a camera, then I’ll just turn up to the shoot and organise it all myself?” Then I looked into it and there’s like 50 big boxes with all the different cameras and the lenses and the equipment and I was like, “OK, no: stop thinking you can do everything. It’s not going to happen!”
On the music side of things, I can see how some people will think, “Oh, you probably just played a couple of things and pressed record.” And I’m there thinking, “If only you knew what I go through with every track from start to finish…”
When I start producing something, I know that I won’t get it right first time. I’ll hate it. You just don’t have the vision of what it will turn into by the end of the process. And that’s made even more complicated by the live takes, and the technical side of things. I can’t show anyone that stuff but it’s so much more complicated than people think. It really does take a whole village to do.
Then, at the end of the production stage, you still have to get the mixing done, and get the right mastering. It’s all these things, plus stuff that you might think are tiny things, that make all the difference. So it’s definitely harder than it looks. Maybe it shouldn’t be that hard – maybe it’s just me…!
I guess it depends what you’re willing to put into it. What’s your process been like on this album?
I mean, it’s been manic. The last couple of weeks have been the most manic of my life. I did this thing – which I didn’t even realise was possible until recently – where you can go and deliver your album to the distributor before it’s finished. That way, it’s visible on Spotify, but it’s unplayable, and you can do a little countdown. So that’s what I did.
But then I was looking at that countdown ticking down. It said 60 days and I thought, “I’ve got loads of time to finish the rest of the album.” But I’m also doing this Netflix programme at the moment, and that’s taking up a lot of time. I didn’t realise how quickly time was passing until the countdown said 30 days.
At that point, I hadn’t finished three of the tracks on the album. But I’m quite a fast worker, so that should’ve been fine. I’d already written them; I knew what I wanted to do, but they were still a twinkle in my eyes.
My process is generally pretty much the same every time. I’ll come up with the chords first, write it, sit there in my studio and produce again and again. I’ll probably spend, honestly, about a week on the drums. It’s ridiculous. Then I always stick in strings, that seems to be my next thing. I try to make it feel very atmospheric too. You don’t want it to have a tinny noise where it’s too synthy, and you don’t want it to feel too electronic. So I’ll dial back, give it a more organic sensation with my voice. Or put it through guitar ramps and just run it through different processes.
I finished ‘Dragged Me Back to Hell’ the night before it went live. Or, at least, I thought I’d finished it. I’d changed the production on it about 25 times, changed the swing of it, made it three-four instead of four-four. I rewrote the verses to fit the new time signature, then sent it off the night before release. Next thing I knew, I had people in New York ringing up, going, “I’m not happy with the strings. Do you mind just doubling the strings?” This was at 4am my time, and they wanted live players, and soloists. There was no way we were going to get it done in time!
In the end, I got the strings. I downloaded what seemed like a million samples to try and make it more organic. But I got it done!
There are obviously a lot of electronic elements, but there’s also a real presence to the album. I almost thought I was in a cathedral or a church or something listening to it…
Well, it’s funny you say that: I tried out about 40 different reverbs to make it sound like a cathedral…!
I love Valhalla as a reverb on my lead vocals. I love the ambiance feature on it; it’s really nice. It sort of changes based on how much you push the vocal. It feels like there’s lots of presence. But it doesn’t work for my harmonies. So I had to try so many different reverbs for the harmonies, and stuff like that, to get the right feel.
In the end, I found a cathedral reverb. It’s sort of this short reverb, I dunno what it is, but it feels very contained. You’re hearing the choir all at once, reverberating in the same way.
But I took my time with that. The easy way out is just going to a producer, like I used to, and asking them to finish it for me. But I knew that I’d just end up going back and forth with that producer a hundred times thinking, “That’s not what’s in my head.” So I thought, “Why don’t I just do it myself?”
It’s taken me a long time to get to that point. But I’m happy because my favourite songs are ones I’ve produced myself. Maybe that’s because I know how much I’ve put into them.
You’re clearly very detail-orientated but, at the same time, you have quite a maximalist, dramatic vision. How do you stay true to the latter while taking care of the former?
I’ve got one of those brains where I’m constantly telling myself that I must be wrong, all the time, and I don’t know why. It’s a very, very annoying trait. I feel like I constantly have to prove myself to myself.
So when I’m looking at other artists’ stuff, I’m like, “What’s wrong with me? Maybe I should be more normal. Why do I want to do all these weird things?” And that’s very distracting because it means you’re always second guessing yourself a bit.
But I have to say, there was something about bleaching my eyebrows and looking like a demon with blood coming out of my mouth. I’ve never felt more alive. This is me. It’s really hard to explain that to people, but this is what I’m into. Everyone finds it so weird that the only things I watch are horror films and cartoons. There’s nothing in between. I don’t like anything else, but that is exactly what I do in my music. So I can have appreciation for what everybody else is doing, but I have to get out of my head. I’d really be quite bad at doing the same thing.
When I first signed to RCA a million years ago, I told them that I would be the worst Taylor Swift you’ve ever met. I really like her stuff. But I would be so bad at that, and it wouldn’t have been right.
Sometimes I think about trying to go all mainstream and mass-appealing. But it wouldn’t give me the enjoyment that I think you need to have when you’re doing this. I mean, there’s no point if you don’t like what you’re doing.
Empara Mi, what is your FAULT?
That, I guess: second guessing everything I do. Self-doubt is like the biggest evil you can have as an artist: having the awareness to know that not everybody likes you and letting that affect what you’re doing. If I could take that away, I genuinely think I could be unstoppable.
Wait – maybe I should have said I have no faults? Yeah! I dunno what you’re talking about. Nothing’s wrong with me!
You can still change your answer…
No, if I said I had no faults, I’d go home thinking: “Oh God, everyone’s going to think I’m so arrogant…!”
So yeah, no, I think the voice in the back of my head is my biggest flaw. That evil little voice, the demonic presence there…