“Red” came as part of your EP , which came out just a few months after “Sick Twist”. Do you feel like the This is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes crossover was still present by this point?

That's weirdly an extension of the same moment, because I think it's possible that parts of it predate "Sick Twist". But was funny, because I was originally working on it with the intention of it being the next Water From Your Eyes album. I think that would have come after , or maybe . But I got too far on it, and I remember feeling unsure about it. I showed it to Rachel, and they were like, “Well, you kind of already made a full album.”

Sometimes with Water I'll do little demo vocal things, but on this one I got carried away and wrote the whole thing, and then I didn't really know what to do with it. As soon as I finished this album - I guess I never even really finished it - I abandoned it to make the album , which was actually the first album of what I would call the modern Lorelei era, where it's trying to be somewhat palatable on purpose, and trying to remove the alienation that comes with more experimental, dissonant stuff.

And then I put online without really saying anything, because I felt like it should come out. But by the time I put it out, it was very much looking in a different direction.

"Red" is funny. This wasn't intentional, but I realised some of these things really correlate with certain Water From Your Eyes eras. I ended up scrapping to work on , and the visual world I was in at that point really applied not necessarily to as a whole album, but definitely to "Red".

I was really obsessed with Francis Bacon, and when you're going through a serious phase with an artist who works in a totally different medium than you do, it forces your subconscious to do a certain amount of translation. And I think that more interesting things tend to happen if your art consists of mostly things that aren't literally applicable to what you do yourself.

"Red" is another one I forgot about for a long time, and it's way crazier than I ever gave it credit for at the time. I thought of it very differently while I was making it than I do now, looking back. But I think there's a parallel universe where Lorelei stayed on that path, and that was the thesis statement for the new Lorelei era. I very quickly jumped ship and went in a different direction, which I think has been a healthier mental workspace to live inside of. But it's kind of a banger. It's a crazy song.

It feels like you went all in with “Red”, playing around with a lot of vocal distortion and discordant textures. What prompted you to dial things back after taking that path?

I think I had a moment where I didn't want everything to feel so heavy. For whatever reason, that dance-music thing is really tied in with noise and a certain tonality in my head. When you're working on music, it becomes very much the soundtrack to your life.

I'm someone where listening to whatever music has a huge impact on how I feel in general, and when it's your own music, it can become this feedback loop, where whatever I'm working on in a moment totally defines my mental space. I wanted that mental space to be a little less serious and more fun. If I'd kept going in the direction of that album, I think it would have been much more exhausting. I realised I needed to tweak the project into something that would rejuvenate me, rather than weigh me down.

You said Francis Bacon was a point of inspiration for "Red". His work is known to be rather existential and unsettling. What influence did you take away to bring into the song?

I tried not to think about it too directly, and more just dive into that world. I had particular paintings printed out on my walls, it was on my computer desktop background, I was reading a book about him, watching every documentary I could find, and really not thinking about music, but letting the music be informed by that space. There's no literal "this sound is this part of the painting", you can't think about it too closely.

At some point, I was on this whole tip where I would download the highest-quality images of different paintings I could find, then import them into Audacity as raw audio data, time-stretch them, and try to make music based around the digital noise. There are some crazy things that can happen if you import a JPEG as raw data into Audacity and put an echo on it and then turn it back into a picture. It separates different parts of the colour scheme.

I actually did that for a Lorelei album or single cover one time. There’s a bunch of music that disappeared at various points that I don't even remember, but at one point there was a Lorelei song on Bandcamp called "No Face", where the picture was a bear with echo put on it turned purple, with about ten of them stacked on top. It was pretty crazy.

It's really neat to be able to exist in a visual art space and reinterpret it in that way. You morphed it to practically work in service of the music.

You just try, there are always new ways to engage with art, and if there's something you're really drawn to, I think it's important to explore it in as many different ways as possible, ranging from the practical to the totally absurd. It's not like any of the paintings sounded better as noise because they were great paintings. But it's kind of indulgent, to the point of almost delusion. It's just creation mechanics.