The next chapter that Cilmi is referring to is , an electric, disco-leaning collection of songs that differed from the glam rock and Motown influences that coloured Lessons to Be Learned. In hindsight, she describes it as “a brilliant pop record”. But when the album’s lead single “On a Mission” was selected for her without her input, she became aware of the reins tightening on her creative agency.
“I was like, ‘What? So you’re telling me what my next single is?’ Like, I don’t have any creative input in this?” she recounts. “And I really didn't feel like a woman on a mission at the time. I was still a girl in a sense. I was only seventeen or eighteen, and I was exploring and writing in the meantime, but it never seemed good enough for the label at the time. It just felt like an arrow to the heart, because it felt like somebody was telling me what to do.”
The image built around persisted, with the expectation for Cilmi to be poised as a woman who had it all together despite being in her late teens. Mature, polished, and sexy. Meanwhile, she was trying to make things work alongside her image-moulding. She drew inspiration from Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, drawn to the propulsion of Italo disco. Although she was experimenting with these rich sources of inspiration, the label's preoccupation with how she presented herself was hard to ignore.
"It became increasingly more about how I looked," she says. "People were creating a new persona around me, more so than the music. It was about them wanting me to be this mature, sexy woman on a mission. At the time, that was very much what was doing well, and it just was not me. Everyone who knew me looked at those images like, what? I was always the dishevelled girl, not that polished, very sexualised image. It's the same old story. How many young women have been treated that way since the beginning of time? You turn eighteen and all of a sudden, you just know.”
By the time arrived, something in Cilmi had already started to give. "You can feel it ending before it does, like the end of a relationship," she says of that period. "I was coming off stage crying because I was so confused, doing these weird robot dances with two left feet, not really enjoying myself." She cut off her hair, ended a relationship, and left her management and her label within the same stretch of months, writing much of the album with the band she'd been touring with rather than waiting to be dropped. "It was scary," she admits, "but it was kind of what I needed to do."
However, taking this step didn’t provide immediate clarity or resolution towards a new path. "I did feel a sense of relief, and then panic," Cilmi says. For a moment, she went back to basics and turned inward. She went home, got help for her mental health, and dealt with a bad flare-up of OCD she'd had since she was a kid. Then, she went straight back into making an album because, as she puts it, "that's kind of all I knew how to do. I just felt like I had to keep on going." People around her suggested other paths. Go back to school. Try something else. "But I've spent so many years just working on this," she says. "Like, what else would I do? I can never quite imagine doing something else."