22-year-old Lizzie Esau attends lectures so she can have word-perfect footnotes, breeze through tutorial questions, and hand in her dissertation proposal.
What her tutors wouldn’t realise is the extent to which they’ve inspired her latest songwriting and grounded her lyricism.
The touring musician, and concurrent final year Newcastle architecture student, has one internet tab open with her 8000-word dissertation and another with her recording software Logic, as she navigates between studio projects and sound bites.
“I know where my priorities lie, music has to take over,” the singer and guitarist tells The Courier with a quiet confidence inked across her face, painting the unfaltering determination she’s had to break through ever since her band formed and she gained a manager in 2019.
Unsafe streets and music sheets
With seven singles behind her, and an EP on the way, the North East based artist takes inspiration from everything that surrounds her. From student binge drinking (a prominent theme in her recent single ‘Bleak Sublime’) to the trials and tribulations of mental health, and even the pre-reading for her university architecture classes.
Esau can transport listeners into whatever world she decides to tap into, even writing songs that are about “absolutely nothing” according to the budding artist.
This fine balance between weighted and weightlessness is at her artistic core. “I want the music to be danceable, or to make you feel good, with some more hard-hitting things in there too”.
Esau’s reflection on lived experiences, and creative take on whatever she’s exposed to, has never been more apparent than in her latest single: ‘Stay on the Phone’, where Esau tackles the fear and danger felt when walking home alone.
November 11 witnessed the single’s release, a song kickstarted and guided by her university architecture lecture on urban planning and the fact that the streets we walk day and night were certainly not designed with safety in mind.
“Even yesterday I was walking to my car, and called my Mum,” the artist said, reeling off the countless times each of her family members have told her how to stay safe when travelling home alone.
Phone calls, modest clothing, befriending security cameras.
For the up-and-coming artist, none of this makes the cut.
“Why are we analysing that? […] Why was this the conversation rather than how not to be a creep,” Esau said with interlaced hands and undeterred gesticulation; a powerful body language echoing her pursuit of transparency on the topic.
“I like being political [… but] I don’t want to be a politician,” Esau stressed.
This has been true since her May 2022 release of ‘The Enemy’. A song that cast Esau in a fresh light from her previous lyrical musings, pushing her to discuss heavier topics like grappling with social pariahdom, aligning some of Esau’s former frivolity with her comparatively steely guitar licks.
Lyrics like “hypocritical barely analytical excuse of giving us a warning,” demonstrate Esau’s distinguished ability to make the unthinkable thinkable again — manoeuvring the static lip service that can surround such horrific acts of violence into a poignant three-minute message that calls listeners to action.
‘Stay on the Phone’ proves just how much the London-born, Ryton-raised, musician embellishes the mundane, turning PowerPoint slides and academic instruction into a formative listening experience for her fans.
‘It’s like rock but it’s got a bit of pop, it’s like pop bop rock’
In spite of clear inspiration from renowned indie artists like Wolf Alice and Beabadoobee, the singer likes to remain“as uninfluenced as possible”.
Esau’s sound is distinct in a whole different way, with herself and her band crafting a whole new self-titled denomination in music: bop rock.
This nomenclature perfectly summarises the fine line of Esau’s musical stylings. A middle ground between her floor-filling harmonies and incandescent percussive and vocal accents, alongside opaque screens of emboldened drums and walls of gas-fired guitars.
“I would never finish a song, or keep working on one, if there wasn’t a part of me in it” Esau said, nurturing everything she writes and sings down to its syllable with a depth that leaves your chin at a water-bound height. Audiences can feel this throughout Esau’s music, the sculpted lines and deadpan expression of ‘Shade of Green’ is a testament to this, with lyrics like: “It’s kind of half expected / From mind that's so self-neglected / To fixate on how it would be to live in a body that you see as more perfected”.
Singles like ‘What If I Just Kept Driving’ feel otherworldly with the amount the frontwoman invests into coating and re-coating her salted vocals and bibliographic sounds. “I always want it to have those layers that aren’t just in your face, like ethereal layers with the harmonies and the interesting sounds” Esau said.
The music-writing process behind Esau’s artistry can all be deconstructed in a single swipe.
The artist’s iPhone ‘Notes’ app is filled to bursting with hundreds of scattered lyrics, ideas and voice notes that fraternise with one another until everything falls into place. This stripped back process is something Esau has embraced, never resented, echoing it (though somewhat unintentionally due to monetary reasons) through the ‘live’ feel of her production, with first-take recordings and minimal overdubs and edits actually elevating and energising her work.
“It’s always the ones that don't take as long that I like the most,” Esau admits as any song that she puts on the shelf for over a few weeks rarely makes it into a fleshed-out demo.
Despite the clear-cut nature of Esau’s songwriting in a practical sense, it can simultaneously be an emotional odyssey. In Esau’s eyes, making demos is another way of baring your soul, “it’s quite private for me, especially at the start” the artist commented as her formative work is for her eyes only.
Her music is also healing and allows the artist to come to terms with things through this unique form of therapy — “I don’t know how else people deal with things” Esau confided.
Stereotypically the artist figures out the music loop that fits and just goes with it, letting the lyrics flow out of her. Rarely does it happen the other way round with pre-made lyrics, but song ‘Bleak Sublime’ is a glaring outlier to this as the words “just rolled out” Esau said.
‘I want to be memorable’
Since a young age music has been the love of Esau’s life, forming her earliest memories and driving her to push again and again at making it big, and already her career has witnessed these major milestones on the road to success.
“You can’t think ‘does anyone care?’” Esau said, reflecting on the shaky launchpad all artists have to tentatively stand on at the start of their careers.
In light of this, the young artist has seized every opportunity at her disposal, from working with first-class producer Catherine J. Marks to supporting well-known band The Amazons this October at Newcastle’s Boiler House.
“You can’t get opportunities in music twice sometimes,” Esau emphasised just how non-negotiable the music industry ‘timeline’ can be.
This awareness has paved the way for Esau to boast her most successful year yet. Her round-up of 2022 includes the release of four singles (and music videos), a performance at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend and breaking through into mainstream Spotify spotlight playlists like ‘New Music Friday’ with an impressive 517,500 streams across 168 countries throughout the year.
2023 will be no different.
As Esau gears up to co-headline a national tour with George O’Hanlon at the end of January, and as a new EP waiting in the wings with songs that cover issues of mental health and others about “how I hate everything in the world […] it just rips everyone to shreds,” Esau revealed to The Courier.
“It’s not necessarily life changing straight away, but all these things add up” Esau said as she reflected on how she’s ramping up her output as a musician like never before.
But when her microphone is unplugged and her plectrum stowed away again, the fans matter more to Esau than any hit single could. “It blows my mind that people care, but they do” she said with a genuine loss for words at how she can connect so deeply with so many — hearing them belt the words to the songs that only the four walls of Esau’s bedroom knew a few months ago.
Newcastle-raised Lizzie Esau is building a future for herself that knows nothing of the bounds of architectural sketches and construction safety regulations.
