Vamilla, the project of Copenhagen, Denmark’s, Mille Justinussen, might be the most exciting act I’ve discovered for these pages this year. With the release of her debut album, You Are Freed, it seemed the perfect chance to get to know her a little better.
By Graeme Smith
With a gentle, spoken word and confessional opening called Movies and Stories, you can tell straight away that You Are Freed is an album that breaks the mould. As the progresses, it gets dramatic, drawing you into the story that’s to come.
“It’s funny, cause in the beginning I really thought this was a fictional story I’d come up with,” Mille says of the album’s tale, “but when I told my friends about it and referred to the ‘protagonist of the album,’ they were like ‘do you mean… you?'”
Lyrically, the album does not hold anything back. Tracks are raw, confessional, sometimes uncomfortable to listen to. That’s what makes it such a powerful collection, and a stunning debut. Visceral numbers like Sex as Violent to the Woman as Man is to the World and I Want My Own Daddy stand out due to their poetry, moodiness and sensuality.
“The album is about – spoiler alert – a young girl who watched too much TV and feels like her life has been wasted thus far,” Mille goes on to explain. “She then watches a lot of self-help stuff and gets tangled up in the internet and the modern world in search of meaning but finds herself worshipping her boyfriend and his idealistic views.
“She then becomes sceptical of the modern world and its consumerism, and falls deeper into this relationship, which takes a twisted sexual turn. At last she leaves, becomes depressed and yearns for a simpler life in the forest where she is consumed by a bear and turns into a butterfly spirit thing.
“And all this is very true in my life, except I haven’t been eaten by a bear… yet. However my boyfriend does remind me of a bear, and I guess you could say he, eats me (laughs)… and I have big butterfly wings tattooed on my back.
“The funny thing is though, I wrote a lot of these songs in my teenage years, and then they sort of came true afterwards. It’s as if I created this wonderland myself and then manifested it into reality. I should probably start writing happier songs.”
The album is not all hard edges, doom and gloom. As well as pushing boundaries, Vamilla locks into modern pop, giving us bright and catchy moments too. We’ve shared What Do You Want? before on these pages and it proves an early statement in the album, combining electro pop with a cutting message that pokes fun at “manifestation” culture.
Elsewhere, Poor Girl pushes the experimentation in an arrangement of overlapping, discombobulating layers. Somewhere in the Forest keeps pushing boundaries in a track that starts stripped-back and breathy before hitting an unexpected dance groove. There are moments that feel Grimes-esque as Vamilla channels a similar chaotic, electronic energy.
All the Things You See Around You bounces along with an ’80s synthpop beat. Bad News takes on the world’s constructs like money and race in a defiant number with a strong crescendo before It’s A Party echoes it with a soft and devastating moment. Furry Creatures is rousing. Everything Could Happen brings some pulsating bass and chanting vocals before fading out with the simple strike of a gong.
I asked Mille about the fluidity of genre across the album.
“I actually grew up in a home without music,” she says. “My parents are lovely and very academic and they enjoyed the quietness, with the occasional Christmas song. This means I wasn’t raised on a particular genre. So, when I discovered music, I kind of discovered it all at once, with my first big obsession being Radiohead – which I would say are also quite genre-fluid. Then I got into Grimes and Lana del Rey, and also fell in love with Let’s Eat Grandma, and then all of this got mixed with my love for Disney songs and Hannah Montana and such. But there was never a ‘right’ way of doing music presented to me, until high school actually, but it was too late by then, I had gotten too weird in general.”
I wondered if her self-confessed weirdness bled into her process. With the exception of mixing and mastering by Mads Kruse Bugge and Martin Messell, You Are Freed is a solo project in its entirety.
“I think when you work with someone, either it turns into a synergy or a compromise,” she says. “And whenever I tried working with someone, they have wanted to make it more ‘normal,’ so I have felt compromised. That’s why I decided to do it all myself.
“I think, when it comes to certain art projects as opposed to science (which should be peer-reviewed) the less people involved the better. Because art is often about a subjective truth, and science is about an objective truth, and this album is indeed entirely subjective, because every single sound came from my head. I love bands and big projects of course, and I hope to find the right people eventually, where our ideas can bounce of each other and we could create something even cooler. But for now I’m glad of the very unhindered expression of my personality that this album has turned into.”
The Mille we’re just discovering over here now has an interesting past. With the Avant Garde nature of her music, it’s a surprise to learn that she’s actually a winner of the Danish version of X Factor.
“I thought winning the X Factor would make it all easier,” she says. “I’ve been very close to giving up many times, and even pursued a career in IT shortly, before I was accepted to the Danish conservatory. The people I talked to either said I was too young or too weird or too old or too this or that, and no one really helped me with my music – until I met Pink Cotton Candy Records, of course. They were the first to truly respond positively to my music, and it was really like they understood what I was about, so a big thanks to them. I find it really hard to grasp that what I always dreamt of is actually happening.”
Mille’s future plans are, as expected, as out there as her music. “Part of me wants to leave society and start or join an alternative society in the woods, like a cult I guess,” she jokes, “but I also want to be a rich and famous popstar, because that’s been my dream for as long as I can remember. I’m hoping that both will be possible in a strange way.
“On a more practical level, I want to play more with music. A lot of time has gone into all the practical stuff, and I miss just playing and creating and, now that this album is out, I feel like I’ve been freed from that project, and I can finally do what I want.”
She ends the interview with a thanks to me, but really it should be me who’s thanking her. It’s innovators like Vamilla that keeps my job interesting and her debut, You Are Freed, is definitely an album of the year contender for me.
It’s out now, available to buy as a digital album on Bandcamp. You can give it a listen below.
