Kyla La Grange: "My whole life I've been a bit obsessed with and terrified by mortality..."

"Hummingbird" is a glistening piece of electropop with a huge chorus, and for the video, La Grange hasn't held back - it's a heady brew of vivid imagery and celestial colours.

Watch La Grange's striking "Hummingbird" video below (requires Chrome for desktop or the YouTube app for mobile), and read our Q&A after.

Could you tell us a bit about the single, "Hummingbird"?

It's a song about feeling in limbo, about having too many choices and kind of feeling paralysed by fear that you'll make the wrong one, hence this idea of hovering - moving but not moving. I wrote it in my little music room at home, with my dogs skittering around my feet. Started with the main synth riff and the opening lines fell into place pretty quickly, but I couldn't get a chorus I was happy with for ages. Then I think one day when I was in the shower I just thought of the chorus lyrics and then fit them to the music after, which is strange coz I don't usually write that way round, I usually do melody first then lyrics after. Mike and Alessio (who have been my drummer and guitarist for years) added some live stuff later on coz I felt like I really didn't want it to just be electronics, it needed to feel a little bit more raw, so that was laid over at the end which I think worked really well.

What's your best fun fact about hummingbirds?

Most of them really like disco.

How did the video come together?

I'd had this idea for years, which I'd been developing with my friends De La Muerte Films, about painting a black horse with a white skeleton and filming it. When I was younger I used to spend a lot of time around horses and sometimes we'd do little fancy dress shows where people would paint stuff on their horses, and I always thought it looked awesome. A lot of my videos have contained death and skeleton imagery because my whole life I've been a bit obsessed with and terrified by mortality and I guess maybe the way I deal with it is to try and turn it into something visually fun or beautiful or twisted. I also love tapping into my my kid self when I make videos - I feel like so many music videos just try and be really cool or trendy or fashionable, which is great if that's what you're into, but when I make a video I want to basically act out my childhood fantasies of dressing up and transforming myself into something different, of creating a magical little world. We'd written this treatment and were going to make it ourselves, when Visualise got in touch and asked if we'd be interested in making it in 360 and VR. We jumped at the chance, coz it was just such an exciting new thing to try, and we knew it could just help us expand the concept and make it even trippier and more immersive. I've always been such a huge fan of fantasy and fairytales and anything that lets you forget you are an adult for even the briefest moment, and watching people's faces when they spin around inside the video gives me such a lovely, light feeling - it's like a little toy that makes people giggle.

How do the song and video link together?

Because the song is about the idea of limbo and being stuck, the video is meant to represent me battling myself. The death-fear is a common thread too, since I feel like that is often so paralysing, so the male dancer is painted like a galaxy to represent the eternal nothingness of the universe, and the horse is obviously a skeleton so that one is more obvious, ha. Throughout the video I'm either fighting with them and losing, or trying to work with them, or overcoming them. I guess essentially it's a metaphor for trying to overcome the things you're afraid of, which is kind of the message of the song, except the song is a bit more pessimistic. The song is like, 'yeah you won't ever get over these things', whereas the video is a bit more like 'well, if you work at it maybe you will get over them and ride off on a skeleton horse into a pink galaxy, so, in a way, do give it a go.'

What inspired the imagery and style?

It's pretty '90s I think, because I think with fantasy you want to tap into your childhood brain if you can. I was thinking back to when I was a kid and what I liked then, what kind of things I would have wanted to wear and the kind of characters I would've liked to play, so the list ended up being something like this: She-Ra, Philip Pullman, White Walkers, Jim Henson's Labyrinth, Christina Aguilera "Genie In A Bottle" era + Christina Aguilera "Dirrty" era, space and the fear of eternal nothingness, the film Legend, Gregory Crewdson, The Wizard Of Oz, weird kids, socially outcast kids, kids who acted out entire epic fantasy trilogies in their pyjamas, kids who played let's pretend games until they were much older than was acceptable, harpies, Hans Christian Andersen, and mood rings.

What drew you to VR as a format?

I love the sense of childhood wonder you have when you put on a headset - we're so saturated with technology these days that not many things can make you go 'oh wow!' anymore. I mean, actually I do say 'oh wow' all the time, I still haven't got over face swap, but VR is a whole other level.

The limitations were that we had to try and do as much in one take of each scene that we could, as we really had to try and avoid making too many edits. Because I hadn't ridden in ages this meant I ended up pulling a muscle in my groin coz we just did take after take, but it was good fun. The horses were amazing - so calm and professional. Better than most humans to be fair to them. The other limitation we had was that we couldn't watch it back in 360, so as we were shooting we kind of just had to plan how it would fit together without seeing as we went along, which is a bit scary.

Is VR the future?

I don't know, but I'm kind of sad it wasn't here in time for Game of Thrones because watching GoT in VR would be siiiiiick.

Do these tracks form part of a larger release or are they standalone singles?

At the moment I'm just working on standalone singles. I don't feel like albums should be made just for the sake of shoving a load of songs together. For me, albums should have a thread running through them - a narrative or a visual or sonic theme. The songs I'm writing at the moment are all really different to one another, so to me it makes better creative sense just to release them on their own. It still means all the songs will get released, just in a different way.

What are you working on next?

I've been doing some quite dancey stuff with has been really fun, and working with a couple of producers who have very different tastes and backgrounds to me, sort of as an experiment to make my brain approach things differently. I also have a super poppy pop song hiding away which I should probably put out at some point but I think I've got to be in the right mood first, ha.

What makes summer 2016 exciting for you?

I'm touring as a vocalist with Faithless again, which is really exciting coz I have learned so much performing with them, and then I've got more new releases coming soon, including a collaboration and a remix which are both pretty summery. Also I'm really, really excited about all the gardening I'm going to do.