Writing of single ‘Night Drive Through’ last September, we described how Luce Rushton had decided to drop their TV Room moniker in favour of their own name, signalling a stylistic change in the process. The song was the first glimpse of a more intimate, searching sound, not so much a complete departure from the TV Room style as a deepening of its intentions and possibilities. Slinky, the debut Luce Rushton EP coming this June on Sad Club Records, promises to continue this movement. It’s a record which follows the travails of a young artist attempting to negotiate their own tricky interior within an already overwhelming world.
The EP’s title is a nod to both the positives and negatives of such an experience. “The word slinky reminds me of the feminine clothes I would feel so uncomfortable in and at the same time the word makes me think of how free and malleable my gender feels to me now,” Rushton explains. “I am more comfortable with both femininity and masculinity now in a way I never was before and there is a slinkiness between them.”
As new single ‘How It Works’ attests, Rushton approaches such ideas with a seamless blend of wry humour and earnest emotion. With its stripped back arrangement and air of bittersweet wistfulness, the track explores a the end of a relationship via encounters with sensory reminders of the now-absent person. “This song was originally written in 2017 when I walked past someone who wore the same perfume as an ex,” Rushton continues. “Sometimes breakups are so overwhelming that all your senses feel heightened in strange and unpredictable ways, and suddenly the smallest reminder of a person can set you off. When you are defenceless against the invisible and painful reminders of what could have been.”
Slinky will be released via Sad Club Records on the 6th of June.