Art School Girlfriend, the musical alias of Polly Mackey, showed “Live From My Den” around her studio in Hackney, East London and performed a grounded, moody set full of tracks from her newest album, “Soft Landing.”
Mackey, who grew up in North Wales but moved to London at 19, said that her new record was inspired by being forced to find inspiration in the mundane during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of my previous music was very introspective, searching for how I feel by making music, whereas this was very much about — especially after being locked inside for so long –being able to find joy in your immediate surroundings,” Mackey told Variety in an interview following her set. “So there’s a lot of poetic lyrics. It’s very much looking out and looking up at nature and the people around you and small euphorias you find in your domesticated space, rather than the kind of youthful wanderlust of going out and searching for it. It’s about basically finding happiness closer to home.”
However, that doesn’t mean the music is any less moody — as evidenced by her tracklist, including “Heaven Hanging Low,” “Diving,” “Close to the Clouds” and “A Place to Lie.”
“I have this joke where I basically can’t write a happy song,” Mackey said. “So even if it’s in a major key, it will still sound quite dark. And I’ve definitely spoken to a lot of my queer friends about this and the idea that even in a lot of queer club music, there’s this happy-sad relationship that goes on and about … that even when you find the joy, there’s still the kind of shadow of everything you went through and the shame and everything. And about how queer music always tends to have those two parallels happening. And whether that is why I always write music that even when it’s trying to sound euphoric, it always has this kind of melancholic aspect of it.”
This season of “Live From My Den” is made possible by Hard Rock and in partnership with Fujifilm North America Corporation.
