Georgia talks about euphoria and pop songs as healing approaches in everyday life.
Georgia wants to take up more space. With her third album, she really dares, stretches out her arms and takes everything as if she could simply grab every piece of the world for herself in this way.
Being awake 48 hours straight, raving with strands of hair sticking to your face because you’ve been dancing so long that the sweat even reaches your face and the back of your knees. Salty-tasting euphoria – exactly Georgia Rose Harriet Barnes’ thing. But the 33-year-old now has to admit that this club escapism couldn’t quite be pulled through. At least the corona pandemic brought with it an official break in their tried-and-tested approach to everyday life. And left alone, old, unloved behaviors came to the fore again. And the constant self-optimization sonication on the Internet alone did not help much to somehow feel good about yourself. In conversation, the Londoner admits quite honestly: “During Covid and in the lockdown phases, earlier addiction behavior patterns returned to me. I’m still trying to understand and classify them. Writing new songs helped me with that. I am an unbelievably addicted person. And it’s funny, but a lot of people don’t really understand addiction. You get labeled as a junkie so easily, it goes much further than that word, which is only a small part of the definition.”
Georgia doesn’t like it when people talk about dependencies in a one-sided manner, but then limits herself when it comes to explaining herself. Again and again she interrupts herself in the middle of a sentence, readjusts the laptop in front of her that we are talking about. The inner struggle that she creates with herself is clearly visible. She shows her problems with addressing her addiction.
“Social media hasn’t helped me at all in the past,” she explains, adding a rant about how outrageous it is that musicians today have little choice but to play the TikTok game. But in the interview she wriggles around which addiction she is specifically dealing with. She still holds the escapism she summed up so fireworks on SEEKING THRILLS (released in January 2020) in one hand. “At the moment I want continuity and just a little bit of change for myself,” she says. But the change since the previous record from three years ago isn’t that minimal. Georgia heard Rosalía’s album MOTOMAMI (2022) and is still ecstatic: “I heard the record and that’s when it happened to me. So much space! I wanted that too.” After the musician repeatedly isolated her songs for herself and produced them within her own four walls, it felt like she was thinking too narrowly. More space is needed. And this not only spatially, but also in musical form. Their songs should sound like more and more and more.
“A really good pop song is simple, but it also has room to breathe”
In order to get a good breath, she let a second person into her usual one-woman show. US composer Rostam Batmanglij, Rostam for short (who already composed Haim, Carly Rae Jepsen and Clairo produced and starred in Vampire Weekend) had written to her online, mostly to celebrate her voice. She used the handshake via email and eventually traveled to him in Los Angeles. The warmth of the place, the distance to stuffy London, “where too many people are glued to each other everywhere”, helped her out of everyday triggers for the moment. Stretched her good humor and opened up spaces in her dance songs. The first single “It’s Euphoric” was written within the first 24 hours together. In a similarly pleasant, feverish state as she knew from dancing through club nights. She wanted more, addict that she is. “I also just love a really good, simple pop song,” and we agree that this means a really timeless track. One who does not need to say what is happening around you and who does not have to look at any (TikTok) trends. Georgia fans out ten different approaches on her third record EUPHORIC and knows how much she shows of herself personally in the superficially light-footed bouncing electro-pop songs. She tells of fears, of pain that feels so strong, and then again of the desire for lasting togetherness. At the same time, she wants to be clear: “I don’t see my music as a substitute for therapy”. Writing songs is a support for her, but that’s never enough to really get personal dilemmas under control.
Georgia is an exciting artist. She lets so many sides of herself flash, dialogue and collide, and then she blasts out Ibiza-appropriate booty shake tracks that make you want to day drink – with enough sunscreen on your face, of course. Her CV also underlines how well she understands the oscillating between simplicity and complex set pieces. When the Englishwoman isn’t working on solo stuff, she’s busy producing tracks for Mura Masa, Gorillaz, Dodie, Shygirl and even Shania Twain. Always looking for that sweet spot between crafting calls and throwing an idea of magic into that as well. The exchange with Rostam helped her: “I wanted to learn from him and expand my understanding of music. And my wish to him was always: Let’s get more space in the songs!” In fact, she now moves her arms in such a way that the laptop in front of her shakes again because she is trying to stabilize it with her legs alone .
The euphoria is back and it puts you in a good mood when you listen to it. Even when we get to talking about the topic that is both very engaging to us these days, she finds a positive approach. Because when we meet for an interview via Zoom, Tina Turner has just died at the age of 83 and we confirm that we hardly read any articles other than those about the career of the Queen of Rock’n’Roll. “My mother saw them live at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, it must have been amazing,” she enthuses, emphasizing how much she would have liked to have seen Turner live. “When I first heard her voice, I was so flabbergasted. And then she changed so much for women in music,” Georgia adds. “You won’t hear a story like hers again anytime soon. She was the daughter of a Tennessee cotton-picking family. That’s incredible, isn’t it? And then eventually she was playing two shows a night in Las Vegas. It’s a really tough job. But that would no longer be the case. The music industry is completely different now.”
But by which she also means that in Tina Turner’s time, artists and mental health were not talked about in the way they are today. The change in the music business would also appeal to you. And she doesn’t want such constant toil for herself either. Dancing a bit in the club and forgetting the time Georgia still wants to preserve herself: “I don’t want to waste my life. And that also means that I don’t always want to just work, you know?”
Georgia’s album EUPHORIC was released on July 28th – listen here: