It’s 1PM and Tallsaint has just finished heating up some tomato lentil soup. While we’re talking on the phone, her boyfriend quietly passes her a chunk of white bread. She’s just got back from the hairdressers, and now she has a bob. She tells me she used a photo of Dua Lipa for reference, and now she can’t stop swishing her hair around, watching it glint in the mirror.All of these things sound like very ordinary things. The Leeds-based musician – now 28, real name Louisa – has a familiarity about her. She could be your mate from uni, or that person you share a smoke with at work. The music Tallsaint has created from this world isn’t ordinary though. Specifically, she has a knack for taking tiny intimacies that all of us can recognise – the feeling of warm skin on skin, a fleeting emotion someone might conjure up – and zooming in on them, blowing them up into a bright pink world of warm synths, heartbeat electronics and lyrics glistening with imagery and vulnerability.
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The reason we’re chatting is because she’s got a new track out, “Hard Love”, premiering above. Like much of her music before this (she’s released three songs, “I’m A Woman (After All)”, “Touch” and “Warm Skin”) this one is preoccupied with human connection – in all of it’s unsettling, euphoric and multifaceted glory. “Keep you around me, keep you around me, put your eyes on me,” she sings, her voice in layers, like layers of skin or emotion, the soft keys and beats building up into a crescendo. The result sounds like part diary entry, part thumping warehouse club-pop track. She takes the small and personal, and makes it huge; transforms a bud into a swirling blossom.But what else is there to know about Tallsaint? Who is she? What's the deal? Here's all the info I gleaned from our conversation, which lasted approximately the length it takes to prepare and eat some soup, plus a little bit more.
SHE WAS IN TWO BANDS BEFORE SHE BECAME TALLSAINT
SHE HAS A BLACK AND WHITE CAT CALLED PJ HARVEY…
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… BUT SHE'S ALSO A FAN OF THE OG PJ HARVEY
1999, 2000 AND 2001 WERE MAJOR YEARS FOR HER
“HARD LOVE” IS ABOUT WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE IT’S ABOUT
MUSIC IS A WAY TO BE VULNERABLE. IT'S HARDER IN DAY-TO-DAY LIFE.
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