Blue is the New Black
When asked where the melancholy in her beautiful, downbeat songs comes from, singer-songwriter A.A. Williams casts her mind back to primary school.
“I think I’ve always been like that, to be honest,” she says. “Everyone has it to an extent, and for me it was prominent for quite a long time. Your average child falls over in the playground and screams and shouts, and dinner ladies come running. But I would literally run off and hide in the toilet to try and fix it myself, so I didn’t show it to anyone. It’s an odd choice of action for a five-year-old, but that was how I was. I couldn’t bear anybody noticing me.”
A.A. Williams is fast gaining a reputation for writing introspective songs that spiritually align with metal. She signed to noisy label Holy Roar and released a soulful self-titled EP last January, without ever having - a clutch of string-augmented songs with massive crescendos that take her gothic death gospel sound to the next level. Rather than being riff-heavy, they are emotionally heavy, and deeply confessional. Since those early days, she’s been trying to figure out why she is the way she is.