Forest started learning how to play guitar at fifteen, initially for a crush. “He played guitar, and I was like, ‘He's going to love me if I play guitar,’” the Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter remembers. “And that didn't happen, which is totally fine. But I think I won the guitar game.”
Forest had always been creative, singing constantly as a kid, spending years in ballet, drawing and considering everything from visual art to movie makeup, but music arrived comparatively late. Once she knew enough guitar to fumble her way through writing a song, something shifted. “I was like, ‘Oh fuck, this is the thing,’” she says. “I finally found the thing that is going to stick.”
When asked about albums she keeps returning to, Panic! At The Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out was an early obsession, with its theatrics, teen angst, and emotionally charged choruses, alongside Chicago 90’s cult favourites Smoking Popes. By the time she began shaping her debut album, , Forest was pulling from the industrial bite of Snake River Conspiracy, or the way the Smashing Pumpkins’ and Elliott Smith can create immediate feelings of intimacy. “I love soft vocals over a heavy guitar,” Forest says – a similar juxtaposition that runs throughout .
It’s heard most immediately on “Vulture”, the opening track and emotional doorway into . It was one of the rare songs on the record where Forest knew exactly what she wanted to say. She describes it alongside “Bodies” as being concerned with “womanhood in relation to other people,” including “my relationship with my body” and the pressures projected onto it. “I really love the writing on it,” she says. “I loved how the production turned out. I think it was very well-rounded.”
There’s a darkness to “Vulture”, but Forest has always been interested in making ugliness and beauty coexist. It’s seen in elaborate corsets against lace on the album cover art, a swan cradled in her arms – yet the delicacy is interrupted by feathers splattered across the cover and a dark room that envelops her. “Writing about things that are kind of dark and a little bizarre and weird… that’s my forte.”
Two years ago, began in a Boston hotel bathroom. Forest was sharing a room with her parents while her father prepared to run the marathon when she returned from a night out with friends. “I stumble in, like, very drunk into this hotel room that I’m sharing with both of my parents,” she remembers. “My mother had a sleep apnea mask on and I was totally bothering her. My dad is running the marathon in two days, so he’s knocked out cold.”
Then she wandered into the bathroom. “I’m just transfixed on this swan,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, what a beautiful picture.’” She snapped a photo, not yet knowing the otherwise unremarkable piece of hotel art would eventually give her debut album its name. She began thinking about the story behind and an internet myth that a swan will dive to its death after losing its mate. “It’s not a real thing,” she clarifies, “but I was just kind of thinking about a lot of swan visuals, and I was like, ‘Wow, what a beautiful name for an album – .’”
What stayed with Forest was the idea of an animal whose existence is bound to another, only to lose it. “How tragic to be this animal and all you’re living for, really, is this other swan who you’re partners with,” she says. “You lose that one thing that you’re like, ‘This is what made it.’” She pauses on the thought. “It’s the tragedy of it all. It’s very sad and beautiful.”
Those themes ripple through : attachment and separation, beauty and morbidity, loneliness and solitude. The latter distinction matters especially to Forest. “I’m not a lonely person,” she says. “I’m a very alone person. I’m an only child. I'm a very ‘fester with my own thoughts’ type of person.”
Some of that solitude intensified when she left music school in Boston and moved to Los Angeles, convincing her family to let her try it for a year via a PowerPoint presentation. Three years later, she’s still there. “The first six months to a year was pretty rough,” she admits. “I was like, ‘I don’t have friends. I’m not in college. I can’t walk three minutes and see a bunch of my friends.’” Pursuing music without a clear path only compounded the isolation. “It was a really exhausting and rough time for me,” she says – an experience she eventually channelled into .
At 23, Forest knows the perspective captured on is unlikely to stay fixed. “It’s a topic that is definitely changing as I get older,” she says of writing about womanhood. “I’m having different perspectives on it as I’m getting older.” And yet “Vulture” is the moment she sounds most certain. From the finished production to its place opening the record, Forest never wavered on the song: “I was really strong in my convictions about that,” she says. “This is the song on the album for me. This is my song.”