For Jones, making an album is about presenting a whole story, whereas EPs are more like a theme you explore that stays contained in one space. “The full story doesn’t only have just one feeling,” she explains. “When I make albums, I try to incorporate the entirety of the story I want to tell, not just one emotion. That’s why a lot of my music speaks about pain and grief, but there are also sides of me that are very intimate, seductive, even celebratory. I want to present a complete body of work, not just a fraction of it.”
A sonic contortionist, Jones plucks elements from myriad styles and bends them within her own distinct production vision. With that ability also comes an awareness of where those more candid, unfiltered moments can live inside the songs. When I bring up the virtual club project, Jones immediately stumbles into an anecdote about the club simulator getting hacked by someone who, for some reason, inserted Crazy Frog into the room. “I swear to God, all of a sudden this big Crazy Frog object popped up in the middle of the dance floor, and then he did strobe lights, and it was just like, ‘What is happening?’ Everyone was completely chaotic. It was very fun, a very, very fun moment.”
For an outsider looking in, a balance between design and accident seems rather tricky to uphold, but for Jones it's almost like riding a bike. “It’s not that much of a challenge,” she counters. “I actually felt quite confident doing it at the moment, because a lot of those songs were written from a place where the fear of expressing myself, or expressing who I am, just wasn’t there anymore. It didn’t feel like a challenge in that way. I felt very confident about not hiding behind effects and actually going to that vulnerable place I’d wanted to reach for a long time.”
It was only a year ago where Jones found herself unshackled from the fallout of a long-term relationship breaking apart. “Last year I reached a point in my life, after a very big change, where I could create from a place that wasn’t constantly contaminated with fear. Before that, I think I’d been living in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight and survival mode, and in that mode you can’t really express yourself fully or create honestly. That’s what informed the album and the process of using my voice in a more unfiltered way, and really daring to say ‘Okay, this is what I want to say, and I’m confident in the message and the story’, if that makes sense.”