The dark humour and defiance of Emma-Jean Thackray

In truth, you don’t even have to listen to her new album Weirdo to know she’s telling the truth. You can see it in the tracklisting – “Wanna Die”, “What Is The Point”, “Black Hole”, “Save Me” – and it’s right there on the cover, too: Thackray staring into the camera, a faceful of make-up but unclothed, in a bath with an electric toaster perched on the side, goading the water. It’s the representation of an album in which honesty, pain, defiance, and dark humour combine to recount the most testing of times.

Weirdo wasn’t always meant to be like this. It’s Thackray's second full-length release, following a string of EPs and her brilliant 2021 debut album Yellow – a project that further elevated her reputation as a polychromatic artist, as comfortable wielding a free jazz ensemble or conducting a classical orchestra as she is shelling out tunes from the DJ booth. This latest record began as a portrait of her neurodiversity and mental health – a powerful acceptance of her “weirdo” self – but morphed after the death of her long-term partner in January 2023. Leaden with grief, the following summer Thackray built a cocoon around her home studio in South London and spent a year forging music from tragedy. “I am the music that I make,” she says, “and that’s it. That’s just all of me.”

Even so, was there ever a time when it felt as though she wouldn’t be able to see this album through? “Yeah, because I thought I might not be here,” she says, pausing for a second. “That’s definitely where I was for a lot of time. But then I made a decision to be here, and it’s like, if I’m going to be here, I need to be myself, and who I am is music."

That deep excavation of self – and, ultimately, a celebratory embrace of it – is the guiding force of the album. There are two brief features: Reggie Watts’ slinky vocals turn up on “Black Hole”, and Kassa Overall helps to add a layer of jazz-club smoke to “It’s Okay”. But apart from that, Thackray did everything herself. Writing, recording, performing, producing, mixing; all of it.

It means Weirdo ends up being full, organic Thackray. Her records have never been hemmed in by genre borders, but it’s especially so here. There are moments on this album that sound like looping Afrobeat, others like gusts of spiritual jazz; splatters of muddy grunge go up against neo-soul grooves; the trumpet she fell in love with as a teenager, playing in brass bands local to her West Yorkshire home, intertwines with her impassioned voice. “I feel all of these ways, all of the time, at once,” says Thackray. “The Fela Kuti, or the soul, or the grungy, Nirvana-esque side – that's all in me, because that's all stuff that I love, and it just comes out all at once.”

Exerting total control over an album is something Thackray has done before – though, as she admits, she has always downplayed it in public. With Weirdo, however, a proudly solipsistic approach was the only one that made sense. “Because of the nature of what I’ve been writing about, I needed to put myself at the centre of everything, whereas before I’ve not really centred myself,” she says. “It’s just been about the music, and I just happened to be here, like some sort of vessel. But because this is such a personal record, in terms of content, I had to be like, ‘I’m in the middle of this. This is my inner world.’"

Doing so was a form of therapy for Thackray. “It was just about trying to follow my own needs for the first time in so, so long, only thinking about myself. And it was really important to do that,” she says. Without considerations such as which string players to hire or how to direct a percussionist, Thackray had the space to slowly rebuild her days. “I just had to think about myself, like, ‘Ok, I’m gonna wake up. What do I feel like doing? Do I feel like playing some guitar? Do I feel like going for a walk?’ It was just getting back in touch with myself and what I was feeling.

“I think it was all part of the process for me,” she adds, “just processing what happened and trying to heal.”

Bare-faced lyrics are certainly a hallmark of the album. “Wanna Die” does what it says on the tin – “I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times I do” – while on “Maybe Nowhere” there’s a perversely sober sense of reason: “Maybe I’ll join you / In the beyond / Why should I stay? / Just paying some guy’s mortgage anyway.”

It’s undoubtedly weighty stuff, but Thackray sees a dark comedy in the album’s contrasts. “Wanna Die”, for instance, sets those gloomy words against an unexpectedly peppy, jazz-punk backdrop. Same goes for the album cover, which, aside from the toaster, also stars a tiny rubber duck. “That’s the kind of sense of humour I have,” she says, “trying to bring both sides of life to something: the bleak and the silly."

There’s a sly absurdity in the tracklisting, too. The songs “Tofu” and “Fried Rice” sit next to each other; the former repeats the word “tofu” over a tangling beat, while the latter sees Thackray simply stating she’d rather eat rice than go outside. The next track, “Where’d You Go”, however, deals with the existential unknown of what happens when someone dies. It illuminates one of the weirdest parts of grief: how it forces us to grapple with the commonplace and the unfathomable as if they were equals.

“I just really wanted to show people every part of what was going on,” Thackray says. “It wasn’t just me questioning everything and being super cerebral.” And so, when for three months rice was the only thing she wanted to cook for herself, “every single day,” Thackray wrote a song about it. What might seem like a symptom of malaise actually “became a routine that was really nourishing.” “It was a way that I was taking care of myself, without fully understanding that,” she explains.

This is what sits at the heart of Weirdo: sorrow turning into strength. Once you’ve experienced the doleful pleading of the track “Stay”, the insomniac distress of “Let Me Sleep”, and the numbness of “Staring at the Wall”, green shoots start to spurt upwards. The penultimate track, “Remedy”, breaks into bursts of light, like curtains torn open, while the closing “Thank You for the Day” is a hit of disco gratitude.

“When I was writing [“Thank You for the Day”] it was because I wanted to get back to that place,” Thackray says. “I wasn’t in that place, but I wanted to get back to it. And I was like, ‘Well, I need to put that at the end, then, because I need to give people a sense of hopefulness at the end of this journey.’ It could be quite heavy for some people, especially if you’ve been through heavy grief yourself.”

Thackray likens the track and its placement on the album to a club night finale. “It’s an end-of-the-night dancefloor-filler, where you leave people wanting to go home to bed and wake up refreshed,” she says. “You need to do that with a DJ set. You need to take people on a journey and then, at the end, leave them with some joy and some hope.”

That’s the thing with Weirdo. Hope does eventually turn up, even if there are times when it feels like it never will. Even with that album art, there’s hope – hidden at first, but waiting to be found. Get your hands on a vinyl copy, open it up, and there on the gatefold you’ll see an image of Thackray in a towel, safely away from the toaster.

“That’s a big point of the record,” she says. “I got out of the bath."