North London’s Eaves Wilder has unveiled her debut album, Little Miss Sunshine, a dream-rock odyssey of an artist emerging unafraid to shine in her own light. Stream now via Secretly Canadian.
An escapist creation born within four walls, Eaves wrote and arranged the record in the creative haven she’d made in her shed, later co-producing the project with Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, The Killers, The Horrors, Black Country, New Road, Sorry). The result: music of both emotional and elemental magnitude, and her most expansive output yet.
The path to Wilder’s debut album began, paradoxically, with a period of silence. After a run of acclaimed singles and a debut EP, she stepped back from music entirely. Unsure of her place in the world, she found herself envious of things that knew theirs – mountains, trees, the sun. Things that simply were, unquestioning in their existence. It was this very feeling that led to Little Miss Sunshine and Eaves new-found need to create music that would make her feel tectonic, elemental and BIG.
In embracing nature, she also wanted her music to be gloriously, naturally messy, like earthquakes, storms, rivers carving new paths. A kind of wildness that has no concern for being neat or palatable – the way women are often pressured to be. In embracing that chaos, Wilder found not only her sound, but the courage to exist fully, on her own terms.
That spirit comes roaring through on lead single ‘The Great Plains’, an achingly mellifluous track which sees Eaves interrogating her earliest memories spent idolising her older sister – “she used to play quietly and she was very demure, whereas I was so aggressive” – and in lyrics such as “no-one blames the clouds for rain/so take me as I am, tears down my face.” The music video, directed by that very sister, Dora Paphides, sees Eaves loose and luminous in the open countryside, heavily inspired by Little House on the Prairie.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE | TRACKLIST
1. Hurricane Girl
2. Just Say No!
3. Everybody Talks
4. Mountain Sized
5. The Great Plains
6. English Tea
7. Ropeburn
8. LA
9. Daisy Chain Reaction
10. Summer Rolls