On the Rise
Emmeline

Stealing more than just a block outline, the shadow stares back. Locking eyes with her umbrose doppelganger, the girl takes in the mirrored headphones, the notebook on her lap, the bags beneath her lashes. The beat blaring in her ears brings her back. She looks back down to her page.

Emmeline Armitage moved to London in the winter of 2021. Post-Covid-19, post-murder-of-Sarah- Everard, post-uni-finals, she was just another masters student from the North feeling dislocated in the big city. At times she felt on edge and alert, but writing lyrics became a means of escape.

Since meeting Fraser T. Smith at a gig – the legendary producer who has had a hand in hits for Stormzy, Adele and Dave – Emmeline regularly writes to beats he sends her on the Tube ride home. The outcome of her writing – more like “diary entries” than lyrics, she tells me – led to her first two EPs: Small-Town Girls and Soft Summer Nights and Satellite Navigation System. Three years later, escapism as it turns out, is a major theme of her latest mixtape Shapes, Shadows, DVDs.

Juggling a variety of jobs including podcast editor, record store sales assistant, non-fiction writer, rapper and even karaoke organiser, the 24-year-old Emmeline says she’s “working always, six or seven days a week.” But for better or for worse, this commitment to the grind has come to be expected for many creatives making their way in London and Emmeline has come to love the itching sense of urgency that permeates the pace of the capital.

“Everyone’s a slash these days,” Emmeline tells me. “You know, they’re a writer/performer/whatever; there’s so much talent and everyone’s trying to make it happen in the way that they can. I love meeting people that are pushing all aspects of their creativity at the same time and trying to see what works.”

Having grown up in West Yorkshire, one thing Emmeline misses is that Northern community spirit and generosity to others. In London, finding your people can be a difficult and long process for an artist from the North. “When you’re in, you’re in; but it’s hard for a newbie,” she tells me. But Emmeline is attempting to carve that Northern sense of community and now runs a music night for women and non-binary people in London – ESS Sessions – which runs once a month and helps young musicians develop their craft through workshops and sharing groups.

While the accountability encouraged by the group sessions is helpful for her musical craft, Emmeline notes that pushing writing at the same time as music is proving to be difficult. “They require quite different energies,” she says. “Music is spontaneous and fast sometimes and comes out when I'm in the mood. Whereas there isn’t a quick fix for writing—you kinda have to sit down and get on with it sometimes.”

She credits Manchester-based poetry collective Young Identity for encouraging her to take writing and performing poetry seriously. Emmeline describes initially being intimidated by the calibre of writers who “given five minutes in a corridor of a backroom of an old school would come out and write this thing that would make your jaw drop.” She says somewhat wistfully that she’s unsure if she’ll ever again be in an environment where she's “that constantly astonished by people’s writing.”

You’d think that the daughter of Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate – who studied her own dad at GCSE and has poetry acclaim in her DNA – would feel self-assured among other young poets, confident in her right to be there and importance of her voice. Quite the opposite actually – Emmeline confesses that she struggled with imposter syndrome while working with the poetry collective.

“I’m obviously proud to be his daughter,” she says. “But for years I really resisted writing and anything to do with [poetry], because the last thing you wanna do is the same thing as your parents.” For a while, Emmeline hid the fact that she was going to Young Identity from her parents. “They probably thought I was doing something much worse than going to a poetry group,” she says, grinning.

But does having a father in the public eye lead to self-censorship in her music? “A lot of the things I write about are about that problem in general,” she admits. “As writers we rely on metaphors and euphemisms and analogies because we don’t always want to say things bluntly and as they are. It's a really careful line to tread, to reveal enough that a reader is able to relate to what you are saying, and get meaning out of it, while protecting the privacy of others.

"I definitely tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to revealing things. A lot of my lyrics are the sort where you’d have to read them over several times with a fine tooth comb.”

A big part of her lyric-writing process is indulging what she calls her “shadow voice” – a stream of consciousness of words and references that encompass everything she has ever seen, read, watched, and experienced. “There are two parts of my brain,” she explains, “one part that’s experiencing the world in real life, thinking about my shopping list, what I'm going to have for dinner, what I’m gonna say next in the conversation. There’s another part of my brain that's thinking about the shape of the conversation, a particular word someone used that reminds me of a film that I’ve seen, that reminds me of a way that this conversation connects to a book that I've read.”

Her latest mixtape Shapes, Shadows, DVDs – released this week – weaves intertextuality into its auditory fabric. Lyrics in tracks like “If My Life Was a Movie Produced by A24” and “Can’t Catch Me Now!” leave easter eggs of film and literary references for listeners to pick up on. With many songs scored by the soft ruminations of a shadow brain that reinterprets dramatic events as if they were a film, this body of work finds the cinematic in the everyday. Emmeline is excited to reveal the playfulness of the words in the tape. The record is a tongue in cheek portrayal of Gen Z, their trend-faddy nature and their struggle with their own identities—their need for escape from the world and themselves. “I’m taking the piss out of ourselves as a generation,” she tells me.

Shapes, Shadows, DVDs sees Emmeline chart new waters. It's a record flush with collaborations with different producers and studios, demonstrating a stark deviation to her previous work, which was produced entirely by Fraser T. Smith. Though at times she felt “like a kid in a sweet shop” among the vast array of producers, Emmeline tells me it was hard finding a tether that connected all the songs—the very “spine of the record.”

The mixtape experiments with multiple genres; it starts in a more alternative, electronic space, then delves into moody, powerful bodily music. Later, it softens into meditative and ambient spoken word before switching to alternative trip-hop. Through it all, poetry punctuates each beat, with lyrics like “I’m Delilah in the eye of a bloodshot hyacinth” forcing the listener to envision surrealist and borderline psychedelic imagery. Her lyrical indulgence in vowels encourages her voice to elongate; phrases stretch out, mimicking the song of crying or screaming. The album appears to be a score of her growing pains as an artist, the tug of the past and the headrush of hurtling towards a future in an unstable world.

But this future appears to be bursting with new opportunities for Emmeline. She describes a moment last September, in which she supported Mike Skinner and The Streets in Margate (the two also share management). It was a stifling day, the sun beat down on the crowds and her friends had come down on the train to see her perform. After her set, she joined in the crowd to watch The Streets and Skinner invited the women at the show to crowdsurf.

“A guy next to me was like ‘you performed earlier didn’t you?’” she tells me. “I said ‘Yeah I did,’ and he went ‘right, you’re getting up in the air.’” She beams as she recounts the story—a “career highlight,” she tells me. After the show had finished, she describes running to the beach with friends and swimming in the sea, her body soaking in the seawater and success. Shapes, Shadows, DVDs emulates the thrill of trying something new, whether that be floating on a sea of hands at a gig or juggling multiple producers and genres, the record pulls the reader into new experiences. When “the credits roll”, you are left unpicking Shakespeare quotes from the song lyrics, itching with the knowledge that each listen, like sea salt stripping away dead skin, uncovers something new.