FEATURE: Spotlight: Ezra Williams — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Colette Slater Barrass

Ezra Williams

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THE incredible Irish artist Ezra Williams…

PHOTO CREDIT: Colette Slater Barrass

is someone who has released one of the best debut albums of the year with Supernumeraries. Actually, it might be one of the best albums of the year – regardless of whether it is a debut or not. Williams, formerly known as Smoothboi Ezra, has released a debut album that is so mature, interesting, open and powerful. I think people get an impression of what Irish music should sound like. Cities like Dublin having a distinct and narrow vibe. The truth is that the music coming out of Ireland is so eclectic and varied. For a few years, Williams has been honing their songwriting skills that speak about what it is like for someone on the autism spectrum to form close and lasting relationships. Go and check out Supernumeraries when you get time. I am going to get to a couple of reviews for the album later. First, and for those new to Ezra Williams, The Lunar Collective’s interview from March gives us some more insight and detail regarding their music, career trajectory and debut release:

“LUNA: I want to start off by asking about your time as a musician so far: When did making music begin to feel like a meaningful outlet for you, and why does it continue to be meaningful?

WILLIAMS: Music was always a meaningful outlet; even just listening to music was an outlet. I started writing music properly — songs that I actually wanted people to hear — when I was 14, and from the get-go it was always quite meaningful for me. It was more for me than it was for anyone else.

LUNA: Has that changed now that you have been putting out music? Do you still feel like it's mostly for you, even though you have an audience who wants to hear it?

WILLIAMS: It still definitely is mostly for me. I feel like if I was trying to write for someone else, it wouldn't sound the way I wanted it to. A lot of my songs happen the way that they do because I write them for me.

LUNA: That's so good! I feel like you get to, in turn, put out art that you're actually proud of because you're not trying to please anyone else. I love that you have a good relationship with your work. How do you balance wanting to share these parts of you with the world but also prioritize your own mental health and privacy when it comes to releasing these really vulnerable pieces of work?

WILLIAMS: I don't know if I have reached a balance yet. A lot of the time I want to release songs, but with some of them I don't want to explain what they're about when it comes to me. That's why a lot of the time I'll give very vague descriptions of what the songs mean or why I wrote them. Then I'll have my management being like, “Is there anything else? Do you want to talk about it a bit more?" And I'm like, "Nope, not at all!"

LUNA: Yeah, I feel like as an artist, there's all this pressure put on you to divulge your full life story with your discography and explain every single moment of your life, which is kind of inhumane if you think about it.

WILLIAMS: It does feel like that sometimes.

PHOTO CREDIT: Colette Slater Barrass

LUNA: Especially with the nature of your music and how introspective it is, it can be hard to hit that balance of preserving yourself and separating yourself from the “artist self” that you have. Kind of going off that, how do you deal with self-doubt when it comes to sharing your music?

WILLIAMS: What helped me a lot is listening to my friends’ music and hearing them talk about their music. I realized how you [can be] to yourself. I have so many friends who will play me something and they'll be like, "Oh, this is going nowhere, it sucks." And I'm like, "This is the best thing I've ever heard in my life." I'll write a song and sometimes I'll spend too much time on it in one go, and then I'll annoy myself with it or I'll end up not liking it anymore. Then I'll spiral into this thing of [thinking] it was terrible to begin with and that it was so bad. A lot of the time, I have to take a step back and then go back to it at another time. Sometimes if there are songs that I worked really hard on but I don't like how they turned out, I will do something with them later on because I know that I might feel different later, or also that, just because I don't like it doesn't mean that someone else won't.

LUNA: Definitely. I love that you don't immediately scrap a song if it's not what you want or necessarily envision. It's like, "I can come back to this later."

WILLIAMS: I do that with a lot of my songs. That's why loads of the songs on my [upcoming] album are actually songs I wrote a while ago. A lot of them are songs that I decided to scrap a while ago and then came back to.

LUNA: What's the process of revisiting those songs like for you? I imagine some were written a couple years ago as opposed to recently.

WILLIAMS: It's different every time, but for the album that I just made, from the moment that I decided I was going to start writing an album I wrote all the names of every song that I had in my phone and my Notes on sticky notes, and I put them on my wall. Then I organized them based on which songs I liked and which songs I didn't like, so that if I had a moment of inspiration, I could go look at my wall and be like, "Okay, I'll work on this song, or I'll work on this song." And that's how I did it”.

I do not normally bring in other publications’ ones to watch features when doing my own. That said, as The Guardian spotlighted Ezra Williams earlier this month, I thought it was worth dropping in what they had to say about an incredible artist. They are definitely going to go a very long way and release a lot more wonderful music. I am quite new to them, but I am already an intrigued fan. Go and follow Williams on social media when you can, as they are someone with a distinct and amazing sound:

“As an introvert growing up on the coast in County Wicklow, Ireland, a teenage Ezra Williams would steal their brother’s iPod Shuffle and jot down “little poems”. These later became songs, culminating in their first single, 2018’s Thinking of You – a wistful bedroom-pop track that only migrated from GarageBand to SoundCloud’s public sphere for the benefit of their mum, who wanted a listen. After that: “I just kept releasing things. That was it.”

Influenced by artists such as Elliott Smith, Frank Ocean and Fiona Apple, Williams’s soft indie rock is rich with layers of meaning. Their shoegazey 2020 single My Own Person drew in fans after featuring in the coming-of-age Netflix hit Heartstopper, with its gentle melody and heart-wrenching lyrics (“But I wanna start feeling that I can be myself”). “Some of the song is sarcasm relating to the fact that society thinks the trans community is constantly confused,” Williams, who identifies as non-binary, explained.

Now 21 and an art student in Cork, Williams is diving deeper still into themes of desire, alienation and uncertainty. Their forthcoming debut album, Supernumeraries, examines burgeoning or faded relationships amid a considered blend of heady, echoing harmonies and contemplative guitar-strumming. In Williams’s capable hands, intimate details and closely held desires – such as Until I’m Home’s “You smell like a home that you love and you know/ Wish I knew what it smelt like to you” – become resonant and universal”.

I am going to come to those reviews soon. Before I get there, NME spoke with Ezra Williams recently. Back in March, NME opened by saying that Williams is operating in different career cycles. This one they are in now is this growth and progress from a promising artist. Exploring and revealing different facets of their personality, it seems that Williams is writing music that is what they heard in their heads years ago. That said, when it comes to a few of the songs on Supernumeraries, some of the tensions and questions posed during the pandemic (and whey were thinking of these songs) have issues that have since been resolved:

“In the coming months, Williams will fully close out the last seven years of their life with the release of their long-awaited debut album – with details to be revealed soon. The record details old relationships and friendships; situations growing ever distant in the rearview mirror of the 20-year-old’s life as they continue to shed those stories and let go. “A lot of them are 2020 situations – they’re not even things I think about now,” they explain. “Writing and making this album for so long has definitely helped me move past what the songs are about.”

The record ends with a reimagined and re-recorded version of Williams’ 2019 single ‘Seventeen’. Where the original features minimal layers, the artist’s voice taking centre stage over a finger-picked melody, this take completely reinvents the song, splashing drums and a bass groove underpinning effect-laden stuttering vocals. Returning to that track was prompted by Williams’ friend and producer Jacky O’Halloran wanting to make his own version of it. “He sent me the backing track he made and it was really cool, so I was like, ‘Let’s work on it together,’” Williams says.

They squirm slightly at the memory, admitting the lyrics are “not as good as I remember them being”. “It’s kind of weird singing about hoping they will be better when you’re 17 when you’re almost 21,” they note wryly. Looking back on that time and knowing things did work out OK, though, brought them some peace, but they admit: “I wouldn’t wish being 14 to 16 on anyone ever.”

‘Deep Routed’, the recent first single from the upcoming album, shares William’s feelings on something that has become part of their life since then – dating and relationships from the perspective of an autistic person. “Not understanding social cues and sarcasm and all those things are definitely way more difficult when you’re trying to date people,” they explain. “I wrote it after a first date when I was feeling scared of relationships and intimacy.”

That track isn’t the first time they’ve detailed their experience of autism in their music. Their 2021 EP ‘Stuck’ also shared a view of life through that lens, while Williams’ songs have always dealt in other highly personal stories. Songwriting, for them, has helped them become comfortable with everything that makes them who they are – even if they might need the perspective of someone else to help them get there.

“Music has definitely helped me understand myself more but, when I was younger, I’d write these songs where I didn’t know what they meant,” they say. “I’d show my mum and she’d psychoanalyse me through these songs and be like, ‘It means this’. It was like I’d have to get a second opinion on what I was feeling. That still happens to this day”.

Let’s finish up with a couple of positive reviews for the incredible Supernumeraries. The Line of Best Fit wrote about an album that is soul-searching and revealing. It has a lo-fi, almost homemade feel to it. Making the music seen rawer and more personal, one can understand why Ezras Williams is being talked about as a remarkable young artist to watch closely. I am definitely keeping my eye out for them and where they go next:

“It is a record of vulnerability and introspection, making it unsurprising that it was written and mostly self-produced by Williams, with help from close friends along the way. To set the scene: keeping the circle small, they recorded the album at various friend's houses and at the bottom of their parent’s garden in Greystones. Here, Williams brought together a 12-track showcase of songs written throughout their life, engaging in the breakdown of both romantic and platonic relationships and the deep-rooted feelings they were left with in the end. Supernumeraries comes from a place near and dear to its creator, with each track acting as a small piece of their past in song form.

There is a tactile quality to the song titles which is highly intriguing on first listen. With names like “Skin”, “Bleed”, “Babyteeth”, and “My Nose” all being things that make up the human body, it is slightly unnerving, yet makes this an album full of experiences familiar to all. The title Supernumeraries stems from the excess of teeth Williams had as a child, due to a condition called hyperdontia. After holding onto these teeth for a large portion of their childhood, they are now nowhere to be found. This realisation later became the inspiration for the record- a depiction of something that was once part of you, now being erased from your reality.

Williams leads with a heavenly tenderness on “Skin”, bearing a similar sweetness to the vocals of Clairo. The blend of their soft vocals with the DIY quality the lo-fi production successfully delivers gives their music a classic yet modern feel. Full of emotion and sentimentality, they demonstrate a deep attachment to the past through their lyricism, using speech to connect the dots between the past and present.

Expanding on the meaning behind “Skin”, Williams voices that; “This song is about trying to start dating again after heartbreak, the comparing of new people to past and accidentally falling back into bad habits from previous relationships.”

At its core, Supernumeraries is a record of love. Although not in its most typical form, they share conversations on both the ups and downs experienced in romantic and platonic relationships and the anxieties and strong feelings tied up into these connections. As someone whose queerness, gender identity and neurodiversity play a significant role in their expression as an artist, they are actively contributing to a space which champions love stories from outside the binary”.

The final thing I want to quote is a review from NME. Big fans of Ezra Williams’ work, they discussed this artistic and personal transformation. They feel, although Supernumeraries, is personal and confessional at times, it is never singular in its sound and feel. You get plenty of variety in a very special and remarkable debut album. Williams is proof that some of the most interesting and impactful music is coming out of Ireland:

“On their debut album, Ezra Williams embodies the idea of transformation as much as they sing about it. The 21-year-old is a master at communicating the inner monologue, layering deeply personal observations on desire, tenderness and frustration over soothing, mid-tempo guitar songs. When honesty is served up as nakedly and directly as it is on ‘Supernumeraries’, it can stop you in your tracks.

Over the past year, Williams, a Country Wicklow native, has overhauled both their sound and artistic identity. After emerging in 2018 with the peppy ‘Thinking Of You’, the Irish songwriter began uploading their acoustic tunes to SoundCloud; four years later, their breakthrough single ‘My Own Person’ soundtracked a key scene in Netflix’s smash-hit LGBTQ+ drama Heartstopper, nudging Williams towards the mainstream. But they were still figuring out who they were: earlier this year, Williams scrapped their previous alias of Smoothboi Ezra in order to represent the more confident, full-bodied sound of their new music. “I hated having to explain [the name], an inside joke that I had when I was 14,” they recently explained to NME of the decision.

‘Supernumeraries’, then, skips the friendly hello and dives straight into Williams’ ever-expanding and colourful world. Its 12 tracks are intimate and diaristic, but the album never feels one-note: Williams is at turns hopeful, liberated, confused, and anxious. “I don’t care about being on my own / Actually I do, but I don’t want you to know”, they sing on ‘Seventeen’ over a soaring pop melody, before letting out a lung-shattering scream. Here, Williams unpacks what it means to face up to loneliness, shifting into a confrontational voice that they embody easily.

A folkier softness is highlighted on ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ and ‘Beside Me’, which glide along at a gentler place than much of ‘Supernumeraries’; they’re tentative songs but with a purpose, both of which contemplate what it means to not have – or need – the right answers for everything. This level of soul-searching is reflected elsewhere, too: ‘I Miss You(r) Face’ adopts a hushed vocal, as Williams hums along to the breezy melody, as though they are deep in thought.

One of the most refreshing things about the record is how, much like their transatlantic peer Leith Ross, Williams is uninterested in finding any kind of solution to the big, endless questions of young adulthood – they have started to make peace with their growing pains. Williams may often sing about the gap between who they are and who they want to be, but the giddy, occasionally uplifting atmosphere of ‘Supernumeraries’ gives them ample space to work out their next steps as an artist”.

If you are looking for a terrific new artist to follow, then I can definitely recommend that you follow Ezra Williams. Their music might be new to your ears or unfamiliar but, before long, you will fall under its spell. They are a brilliant young artist with many years in the industry ahead. Supernumeraries has rightly been getting…