Having set herself up as one of the leaders of a new generation of ‘alt’ music, Cassyette has plans to dominate in 2024. And she is about to make her ultimate statement with the release of her new album ‘This World Fucking Sucks’.
“Baaaaabe, everything’s going mad. It’s hard to keep up sometimes.”
Cassyette’s diary is hard to keep up with. She’s going to America with YONAKA, doing her headline tour, featuring a show at the Scala in King’s Cross. And then after that, in a move no one could have predicted, she is going on tour with Canadian legend Bryan Adams. In between all that, there is also the challenge of releasing her debut album, the wonderfully titled ‘This World Fucking Sucks’.
“This year is going to be a mad one,” she laughs. But such is life when you’re one of the country’s most exciting and hotly-tipped artists right now.
Musically, anyway. The title arrived after a day throwing ideas around in the studio in America with Crosses production whiz Shaun Lopez (she also worked with Tylr Rydr and Olly Burden). “I was in a bad mood, on the first day of my period when I’m always grumpy and nobody should talk to me, and it just came out – it was perfect.”
“It was a really big thing for me, in terms of achievement, because I’m really not very good at focusing on stuff for that long,” she says. “The music industry moves more slowly than my brain does as well. I’m impatient, babe. I feel like people either think I’m crazy, or a bitch, because I’m like, ‘We need to do this now!’ I’m very direct, so I can get frustrated by having to wait, or keep doing something for too long.”
The album itself took a bit of time coming together as Cassyette was dealing with the grief of the loss of her father. Having lost him suddenly three years ago, she likened the finished thing to “opening your diary to the world”. Only, she found, she wasn’t quite ready, couldn’t bring them to a close.
“I’d been writing these songs since my dad passed, but some of the things I couldn’t finish,” she says. “I wasn’t dealing with things very well at the time. So I’d write things, and then leave them.”
During this period, Cassyette (naturally) spiralled, and found herself in a battle with drugs and alcohol. Cassyette managed to get sober, partly on instruction from her management team, who warned her that she could lose everything she had worked for—something her dad would not want to see.
“When I was in a really bad spout of my addiction, I couldn’t actually finish the songs because I was not in my right mind,” she says. “When I got sober, which is now a year and a half ago, I came back to them, and literally within 20 minutes, I’d finished them.”
Part of the problem was having to reengage with the grief.
“You have to put yourself back into the headspace,” she confirms. “So it was a lot to deal with. It was very emotionally draining, but in a really beautiful sense. It made me go through it again. Writing the whole album was like a therapy session that lasted a whole summer.
“It was hard – one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” she says, “but I came out the other end feeling refreshed.”
But come out the other side, she did, and there is an album to show for it. It is a record that traverses a spectrum, from ballads to rock club bangers to thumping nods to Berlin techno. This World Fucking Sucks is released on August 23 via 23 Recordings.
Catch Cassyette, Witch Fever and Harpy at the following:
April
1 Cardiff The Globe
2 Bristol The Fleece
4 Manchester Academy 2
5 Wolverhampton KK’s Steelmill
7 Glasgow SWG3 Warehouse
8 Sheffield Leadmill
10 Leicester O2 Academy2
11 London Scala