On the Rise
TaliaBle

"I didn’t want this to be my only world because it easily can be," she tells me. Tottenham, she says, influenced her tone, her unapologetic, raw and real attitude, but it was getting out of her local area that shaped her into the artist that she is today.

TaliaBle describes trekking all over London for gigs, keen to get her work out into every corner of the country’s capital. But she had never envisioned that one day she would be regularly making music, never mind making music that was described as ‘ground-breaking’.

It all started when she interned at Keep Hush, a music members club and streaming platform. TaliaBle worked as a camera operator, and through Keep Hush, was enveloped in the thriving grime scene of 2019. There, bathed in the brand’s signature green lighting, she filmed grime and electronic sets regularly. The energy was infectious and TaliaBle got growingly obsessed with the visual aspect of live events. She started to see patterns in some of the shows she saw, similarities in sound and stage design.

“I remember thinking if I ever did that, I’d do it differently,” she tells me. “I wanted to be outlandish. I wanted to be a spectacle.”

On 11 July this year, in North London’s The Waiting Room, this spectacle was achieved. At TaliaBle’s release party for her EP All Desires Trouble Us, she stands on stage wearing a white balaclava, her name painted in red onto the fabric on her forehead, maroon and crimson buttons sewn onto her cheeks. She grips the mic tightly to her lips and unleashes a scream.

Behind her is a painted backdrop; pink tinted trees twisted into the landscape and both the water and sky the same shade of Brat green. Yellow birds soar into the background. The walls are ornamented with the red balloons and TaliaBle’s artwork is strewn across the walls. A man constructs colourful balloon hats that crown the audience and the gig goers’ tongues are stained blue from the free sweets at the entrance. This is not just live music; this is an experience.

When TaliaBle launches into the final track of the EP— "Dudette"—she steps into the audience and a mosh pit erupts around her. An anthem of queer expression, the three-minute track was inspired by a section of Led Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta Love" and creates a similarly addictive hook. Its frenzied energy and a pulsing beat that simultaneously encourages headbanging and twerking. "That song transcends many different methods of dance," TaliaBle tells me. Cameras flash and a woman in the centre of it is frozen in time, as she whips her hair, her blonde and red braids make a Fibonacci’s spiral of her head.

This moment encapsulated all that TaliaBle intended the track to be. "'Dudette' is an anthem for unyielding strength within women," she tells me. "It is saying what I am and what I represent. Tomboy, queer, gay. I’m a woman innit and I'm bold with it. It's about owning your stride."

Striving towards self-confidence is at the root of TaliaBle’s music journey. "I literally just wanted to make one song," she says, somewhat incredulous of her own success. "At the time, I didn’t express myself and open up about how I felt, so I wanted to hear myself say how I felt. It was a growth thing for me."

In East London, at a Keep Hush event, she started asking everyone around her if they were a producer and could help her make a track. Eventually, she stumbled across Will, the doorman, who later became Karl Brinaj, her hardcore punk producer. Will, recognising her raw talent, encouraged her to keep recording music. Making tracks was no longer a therapy session for TaliaBle but an exercise in experimentation. A few years later, her debut EP was born and released via PRAH Recordings, the sister label to Moshi Moshi Music, and home to the likes of Hiro Ama and The Umlauts.

The opening track “Live” was the first time TaliaBle screamed on a song and pushed her vocals into new territory. "It was mad," she says, chuckling. "I thought I could only do it once, like it was a magic trick. It unlocked a different genre for my music as well; it wasn’t just rap anymore. After the first lockdown, I went to Will’s straight away after leaving my ex’s house and a part of it was about that. Like a failing relationship and friendship."

Considering the refrain of the song, I ask her what it means to live it up. "It’s about breaking out of the constraint or hold of anyone else," she explains. "You can’t limit me ever; I think that’s what it’s saying. It’s what I was learning: you can’t let anyone keep you in a certain stage of your life. I was giving a lot of energy to people who were leeching my energy. At the time I was at CSM and navigating that scene. You can choose to tango with the clout or you don’t. It’s a choice."

Her time at Central Saint Martins (CSM) university massively influenced TaliaBle’s presentation of herself through its teaching of fashion communication and promotion. Reiterating punk’s DIY spirit, TaliaBle’s costumes are handmade and often made in collaboration with other CSM students. For her first few gigs, she constructed costumes for other people to wear on stage, each of which illustrated lines from her songs. TaliaBle took on the role of a narrator on stage, and as she observed how the costumes created characters out of the people that wore them, she began to take on a new role herself. And so, her own unique ‘character’ was born: ‘TaliaBle’. This new persona wore a mask and revelled in performance art, eager to escape any confines suggested by the category of ‘musician’.

"I learnt so much about myself from being on stage and performing," she says. "That’s my favourite part of music. The stage element. It marries the visual with the music for me. And it’s about experience and creating a feeling in the room. It is chaos: a bunch of different ideas at once."

A lot of TaliaBle’s ideas come from a love of surrealism and poetry. She cites Caleb Femi’s poetry collection Poor as a major inspiration as well as André Breton’s line 'the names of the cities have been replaced by names of persons who have been rather closely related to me,' from his Surrealist Manifesto.

The track "Pandora’z Spit" repeated demands 'come make me feel safe'; I ask her who or what this imperative addressed to? "I think it is the art, the passion," she confesses. "I feel like most artists are trying to find home, safety, yourself in all these arts and stuff, when there's so much emotion and so much turmoil that you’re giving out. It’s a mad yearning for this passion."

Her favourite track on the EP "Metal Club" was apparently also the hardest to write. "I rewrote it so many times," she says. "Nothing fit the song. It was so chaotic." I ask her about the clumsy piano notes at the end of the song and she describes the moment Will’s fingers stumbled over the piano in a moment of exasperation as a "happy accident". When Will asked: "Do we keep that?" she responded with "Yeah that’s kind of hard." This is typical of their creative process: the duo throw their ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

Their attitude to making music resembles punk deconstructivism, the breaking down of a constructed structure in an act of rebellion and relishing of chaos. The demolition of categories makes space for fluidity, and this is what TaliaBle is fighting for.

"We’re not one thing ever, in whatever way you wanna take it," she says. "Gender, art, who you are as a person… categories always separate people."

Though she now recognises the deconstructivist punk traits in her work, TaliaBle never went into music with the intention of being described as punk.

"I didn't see myself as being punk until I started performing and people started saying punk to me," she confesses. "I showed up as myself and people called it punk so that’s the word that I’m using. People compare me to Rage Against The Machine, Death Grips, Slowthai, Rico Nasty—all great people that I'm influenced by. To me, punk is just an attitude and it's changing.

“A part of what I do is expressing feminine rage—that’s something I’m trying to normalise. We don’t normally have spaces to let it out. At my release party, people were screaming their heads off. Some people really need that, people like me, Black, female, nonbinary. Mosh pits have always been a male dominated space but I’m trying to disrupt any space that is dominated by one thing."

As youth culture continues, punk is taking new and exciting forms. TaliaBle represents the fluidity of the new generation of punks, the carving out of spaces for people who perhaps have been previously made to feel excluded from the emotional release offered by mosh pits. Though she demands art to ‘Come make me feel safe’ in her EP, it seems that TaliaBle’s unapologetically abrasive music has already achieved this for many people like herself. In the joyous images of her release party, one thing is clear: not a single person in the space feels the prick of fear.