24.07.15
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Across Georgia Barnes’ life, London has acted as an incubator for her sound, a platform for her creativity and a playground for her hustle. But up until recently, she hasn’t been the focus of the operation.

Having spent years as a session musician for other artists, 25-year-old Georgia is now on the promotional trail for her own eponymous debut album. Her lifetime spent collaborating and providing for the passion projects of others has built her a naturally collaborative spirit – hoarding sounds from all over the world in the hope that her own concoctions become a little more unique.

After last summer’s Come In EP, Georgia Barnes’s cocktail of grime, electronica and pop received a flurry of attention from the right kind of music websites. Having studied ethnomusicology, her London is one defined by pluralism. While Georgia is a solo artist, her album is comprised of a thousand tiny collaborations with the world of sound she’s experienced through both travel and study.

  • © Juan Jose Ortiz

  • © Juan Jose Ortiz

It’s an ethos which is impossible to miss on Move Systems, the lead single from her forthcoming album. “It was inspired by Brazilian hip-hop which happens in the favelas in Rio,” she explains, “Really raucous beats with often female MCs over the top, totally killing it. I remember watching this little clip of an artist and it was really distorted. The beats were loud and kind of like” – her excitement while emulating the sound is audible, infectious – “boom-ka-dap-budu, and she was dancing, and it just looked like such high-energy stuff.” Barnes’s take on the Brazilian heat is a force to be reckoned with. Chunky beats clattering off of a distinctively London flow (“I went to meet Sheila / She was a dealer”), then a chorus which catapults from the pavement into a dreamy, ethereal melody. “I was trying to relate it to what me and my girls would do on a night out,” she explains. “Being a bit naughty. Trying to move the system.”

For all Georgia’s unselfconscious charm, there’s an almost confrontational fearlessness on show, born out of the self-belief integral to any young creative trying to get by. “From quite an early age – 19, really – I’ve been playing for bands. Up until this point it hasn’t all been roads to success. Sometimes when I was in the studio those frustrations came out through the music. Perhaps that’s why there is this sense of … I wouldn’t say anger, but there’s a punchiness about it”.

  • © Juan Jose Ortiz

Georgia speaks about music with an unfiltered, unrehearsed vigour. Names and references flow off her tongue – Missy Elliot, Fever Ray, Oneohtrix Point Never, Joni Mitchell. “I could do a whole interview on records,” she laughs. It’s a messy web of influences, and such a patchwork amalgamation could easily materialise in a record with little in the way of cohesion. But Barnes somehow pulls it off.

With such a modern, magpie-like approach to building sounds, I tentatively ask if she’s ever written anything as traditional as a love song. She replies immediately. “The song Heart Wrecking Animals, that’s a love song really. As a songwriter, you can’t really avoid love as a subject”. The song she is referring to is a glassy, drumless ballad which sounds like Hudson Mohawke taking on desk duties for Kate Bush. It’s honest, a little schmaltzy and brilliantly performed. It’s a far stretch from the gloves-off sparring of Move Systems, or the album’s deviations into clanging London grime and warped post-punk, but it’s another necessary shade to the self-portrait. “It’s all a reflection on me really,” she says. “That’s why I called the album Georgia.”

Georgia is released 7 August via Domino Records