Tyson on her new EP Chaos and finding her peace

After breaking through with a suite of insular, after-hours confessionals that captured the tumult of being a twentysomething, Tyson is approaching her creative practice with the self-assuredness and all-conquering love that comes with motherhood

When Tyson joins the call, her first concern is the noises coming from next door.

Her three-month-old daughter is cooing loudly. Balancing the demands of releasing a project alongside a case of “baby brain” is a challenging task, Tyson tells us, but one she is embracing. “There’s this version of you at work, you as a creative person, and the version who raises your children,” she says. “But to do all of those things and then not let anybody change who that person is, is a tall order. I’m trying to integrate the creative life with who I am as a mother. Not becoming small pieces, but keeping it all together.

When we speak, Tyson is gearing up for the release of new EP, Chaos, which was recorded in a five-week burst while in LA, with her longtime friend and collaborator Oscar Scheller, known for production work for the likes of Shygirl and PinkPantheress. Despite the impressive multitasking, Tyson seems the opposite of a chaotic person. She’s softly spoken, pokes fun at herself often and has a soothing air about her. So the title? Just something that “clicked”, she says. The EP plays out like chapters from a novel inspired by her life and the small moments that thread it all together. “I sometimes imagine that each song is a character,” she says. The lyrics, she thinks, are some of her most mature, too. “The person in these songs knows herself better than others I’ve written,” she says. “I spent years giving myself away… I won’t sink down, down, down to your level again,” she sings on 300kHz (Low Frequency) – a mantra reflecting her new perspective. 

Born Tyson McVey, she has long spent time and energy rooting herself. A fixture on London’s underground scene since the mid-2010s, she has spent years carefully building out her unique strain of hushed, late-night confessionals, spinning her soulful vocals into leftfield R&B, icy trip-hop and after-hours downtempo. She’s also co-founder of the label Ladies Music Pub, and her tracks include collaborations with fellow scene auteurs like Dean Blunt, Coby Sey and former S4U vocalist Albertina. If her 2021 album Pisces Problems was an emotive reflection on a period of her 20s marred by “self-destruction”, then the guest-laden follow-up, Sunsetters/Daybreakers, laid the groundwork for the burgeoning maturity of her new era.

Chaos explores “pisces problems in their 30s”, and the themes of where her head is at now. She is more self-assured, has a deeper well of self-love to draw from, and is soaking up the undeniable impact of motherhood in her life. “It comes off the back of me being quite sad for quite a long period,” she says. “Looking back on it, I feel proud of those themes in the songs, because I’m happy that I’ve managed to grow more of that self-love. Being like, not everything you do is perfect, but the important thing is how you feel about yourself through that journey. That’s something I’ve worked on a lot in the last few years.”

Chaos is partly inspired by the zaniness of the west coast, her habitat at the time. Take the track Alien Romance; it’s all sexy and luscious, dramatic and dark. On it, Tyson’s vocals are stacked over grainy percussion and synths that sound like tuning in and out of frequencies on a radio. This is her in playful mode: as much a student of Sugababes’ Freak Like Me as it is Laid Back’s White Horse. Interlude Brainfreeze (Tinkerbell) is even quirkier. Its name harkening to frozen margaritas drunk in the studio, Tyson muses on unexpected life changes over icy, stuttering beats, while its languid mood comes in like a hot flush of liquor. Though she dances between genres on the EP – see the scuzzy, guitar-laced Grunge with Wu-Lu, the soul-infused Angel Dust and the playful, poppy closer Glide – her sweet, soulful vocals are the through-line. It’s precisely this characteristic that often sees her categorised as R&B – and maybe unfairly so. “The music my voice sits on can make me sound totally different,” she says. “I like messing with the production because my voice is quite soft a lot of the time, and I need something to switch it up.”

Tyson is an artist born into musicianship. Literally so; she’s the daughter of Neneh Cherry and producer Cameron McVey. Viewing her mother’s famous 1988 Top of the Pops performance, you’ll see Tyson as the baby bump shooting her mum to stardom. Her sisters Mabel and Naima are also musicians, her brother Marlon a songwriter. Don Cherry and Eagle-Eye Cherry are other, more distant relations. In among all of that, Tyson has remained slightly apart – less interested in fame, by her own admission. “Around the time my mum’s career blew up, she was pregnant and had very little time off after she had me,” she says. “So I very much grew up in the middle of her fame. I think the combination of those two and my personality – classic middle child, always quite shy – means I wasn’t that interested in being in the limelight.”

She grew up between London, Spain and Sweden, and anecdotes from childhood reveal she initially pushed back against music. She remembers how, as a child, her sister Naima would grab her hand, with both of them promising the other that they would never do music like the rest of the family. Music would find her anyway. Tyson recalls tentatively finding her voice obsessing over albums like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, using the melodies and physical sensations – the air moving through her body – to soothe herself for comfort. “The main thing was the feeling of singing, and the happiness that I felt from being OK when I sing. There was a lot going on in my family at the time; we moved countries a lot and things weren’t always super straightforward at home. And I think that’s when I discovered that singing makes me feel safe.” 

She tried her hand at other things in her teens: an anthropology and politics course at Goldsmiths, waitressing and bar work, research at a creative agency after her master’s. In 2014, she emerged in the London scene as part of the group PANES with band member Shaun Savage, but the development of nodules on her vocal cords led to a pause in her career, during which she returned to Sweden, going through extensive vocal training to regain her voice. It was only in 2020 that she returned as a solo artist with Moonlight Mixtape, supporting her career by nannying until the end of 2022.

“It’s such hard work. Being an independent and more ‘underground’ artist in the UK particularly, it’s really difficult to survive in London unless you do certain things,” she says. “I had a couple of experiences when I was in PANES which made me be like, I really like making music, but I don’t want to be in the major label world and making things that sound mainstream.”

She continues: “I don’t make the kind of music that’s gonna take over the world, like massive, global-selling records. But what’s scared me is having to change myself because I want to make certain numbers. So I’m happy I went away and did other things. [But] I came back to music because I want to do this more than anything.”

It’s apt that Chaos ends with Tyson looking outwards to the future. “What a gift to reach out and touch your skin,” she sings on Glide, closing with the echoing sound of her daughter’s heartbeat. It’s a track that beckons this next stage of her life: “I wonder what the next sort of creative journey is going to be like now that she’s here,” she ponders aloud of her daughter, smiling. “I am really excited about sharing my life with her. I was ready to be a mother for a really long time, but the most important part was sharing. There’s so many beautiful things that I want to share with this person – music being one of them.”