Grandiose Love by Zoee

Seeds push up through the earth. Flowers unfurl. Vines grow long. A tall wave crashes upon the land. Breasts burst through clothing. A cup overflows. A couple on a picnic rug share an oversized strawberry. Welcome to the world of Grandiose Love: a world of abundance, where nothing can be contained. A world that bursts forth.

The second album from Zoee (aka art-pop artist Harriet Zoe Pittard), Grandiose Love was born out of a desire to create songs that, as she puts it, “encouraged me to think big and elaborately, instead of squishing myself down. When I was a kid I remember feeling bold and a lot freer in my body and my thoughts. Then as adulthood set in I could feel some of that childlike hopefulness and boldness start to erode.”

Zoee’s first album, Flaw Flower, released in the summer of 2021, was about her sitting in her flaws: introspection of an autobiographical, vulnerable kind. “For so long I was afraid to express myself, making music often feels scary. The voice in my head can be quite loud. Sitting in the vulnerability felt like the biggest way to overcome that.”

Grandiose Love, on the other hand, became a conduit for whatever might come out. And the album that emerged is part fantastical wonderland, part pep-talk, replete with realisations and mantras. Reach your sensual potential. It’s your life, you should grab it. Chase the rabbit. Hold your ground. Embark upon the unbeaten track. A bit like a treasure map, the songs contain buried instructions to herself to stop repressing playfulness and desire, to celebrate the erotic, to slow down and resist the pressure to always push forward, to quash the doubt that comes with being assertive.

The new album supplants vulnerability with unapologetic, punchy self-expression. “It’s got to be the opposite of minimising myself,” Zoee jotted down in the early days of conceptualising Grandiose Love, and a self-assured physicality runs through the album, starting with the voluptuous woman who reclines on its cover. “It was about growing into my confidence and not holding back,” she says. “The boobs on the cover art were an important part of that. It felt cathartic.”

And the songs within are tactile, sensuous, feelings-first: instinctual rather than intellectual, down to the way they blossomed out of improvised jam sessions with her band: bassist Kyrone Oak, keys player Laura Norman, and drummer Hiro Ama, as well as Bella Union mix engineer Iggy B and indie synth-pop artist turned film composer (or as Zoee likes to call him, “the Chord Lord”) Jeremy Warmsley.

Personal grief shaped early, now-discarded song sketches: Zoee had lost her father just as she was putting out her debut album Flaw Flower. Then at the beginning of 2022, the record label she was running made everyone redundant, forcing her to take stock of what she really wanted to focus on. “It gave me so much more headspace for music. I’d always had a job in the music industry, and it was always a balancing act. I haven't got anything else to lose now.” She began to meet with the band in the basement of a Soho pub. “That’s when the music started to properly take shape,” she says. “The initial grief period had subsided, and then it was grief, but turned on its head. You feel the grief, but you also feel gratitude for the present moment. That was the kernel of Grandiose Love: this outburst of joy. I’d spent so much time on my own writing ideas and I felt much more alive working in this collaborative way. It was healing.”

Most of the songs grew out of those jam sessions: tiny buds of ideas that sprouted instinctively. You feel that improvisation most keenly on The Secret Growing, the last track on the album and the first track the band did together as a jam. “It was really meandering and loose. I didn't want to prune it too much.” Overall, though, the album keeps to tight, immediate structures, retaining Zoee’s maximalist, theatrical pop, more polished and developed than Flaw Flower.

The Wave, meanwhile, borrows lightly from The Durutti Column’s Future Perfect and its marriage of dreamy vocal lines with a dance-leaning sound. But despite Zoee’s own background as a dance vocalist —she explains, “that’s not the space I’m trying to move in. People assume I’m doing hyperpop, but actually I really like Cate Le Bon”. And so on songs like The Wave, the band brings everything back down to earth, live percussion crashing into the chorus.

The Wave also contains a snippet from a book Zoee’s dad gave to her before he died: Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran, a novel about the 1970s gay scene in New York. It’s just one example of grief finding its way indirectly into the music. “Can you hear me?” she calls out towards the end of Visions. “I think of my dad with that one, but I don't put it into words,” she says. “Connecting with something bigger than myself. Maybe through grieving, I was trying to make sense of existing.”

For darkness loiters at the edges of Grandiose Love, whether it’s grief, or the unsettled undercurrent of The Rabbit — where attempts to feel positive and move forward are dogged by dread — or the album cover art, a surreal scene painted by New Jersey-based artist Diego Lozano that could be a blown-up section of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights. There’s an undercurrent of disquiet, a fear of indulgence or too muchness, perhaps. The perils of fantasy and excess.

And where better to turn to for a dance between light and dark than the offbeat, bombastic spirit of 1980s “weirdo pop artists” like Anna Domino, Anne Clark, Vivian Goldman, and Cyndi Lauper, as well as the eerie, gaudy poetry of Chelsey Minnis, the magical realism of Angela Carter, and films such as Poor Things and Picnic At Hanging Rock — art that builds worlds. “As a songwriter more and more I feel I am building fictional worlds,” Zoee says. “Worlds that are separate to myself. I relate more to a writer creating fictional works. The songs move through me and are not necessarily representative of my world but of things moving through my world. Or of worlds I can see in my mind’s eye.”

Grandiose Love closes with The Secret Growing, a song that takes its title and concept from the artist Hilma af Klimt and her spiritual group of women, De Fem. “It’s all about taking your time and trusting the process,” explains Zoee. “Allowing yourself to be in the ground and burst forth eventually.”

Words: Kate French-Morris
Cover Art Painting: Diego Lozano

Zoee is the art pop music project of London-based artist Harriet Zoe Pittard.

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