For A.A. Williams, making music has always been about much more than sonics.

It is about further understanding herself. Figuring out how thoughts and feelings can be best transferred through vocals and instruments is one thing, but figuring out why you feel, or felt, a certain way allows art to take on a whole new position in your life.

And when it comes to her new album ‘Solstice’, a new strain of thought appears to have been discovered. On the surface, it is an record of immense and intense beauty, a mesh of post-rock, post-metal and tranquil pop that ebbs and weaves through the psyche with patient glee. But dig deeper, and you have the realisation of what it means to lose your way and find yourself whilst everything around you continues to move. It is finding your place in the world, but knowing that the world doesn’t slow just because you’re lost.

Like the changing of the seasons, you have to change as well, and there is nothing you can do to stop that.

To find out more about the project and where it slots into other parts of her life, Rock Sound caught up with Williams.

What does it mean to you to be in the position that you are now with this album as the guiding light?

Williams: I think when you first start making music, it is just a shot in the dark. You don’t know if what you’re doing is good, bad, ugly or if anyone’s going to care. If it’s remotely relevant to anybody but you. So, the first EP was very much dipping a toe in the water and testing. Is this worth pursuing? Is what I’m trying to do of any value to anybody else? And I didn’t think remotely about what kind of music it was. I happen to enjoy tremolo guitars and heavy stuff, but I also like folk music and classical. I just made some songs, you know, and that was it. And so, as I then went into making ‘Forever Blue’, there was definitely all of that stuff going on in my head. Should it be heavier? Should it be quieter? It feels like whatever I’m doing here, nobody’s quite satisfied with it. It’s not really sitting in either camp, and for some reason that’s problematic. It took a long time for me to go, ‘You know what? Fuck it. I’m just going to do what feels authentic to me’. If people don’t like it, that’s totally fine. I know what I’m doing is not everyone’s bag. But then some people have been in since the beginning, who understood what I was trying to do, and have fully embraced it. That’s been a really cool thing to see grow, because I have got braver from a writing point of view, but also from a personal point of view.  I’ve definitely learnt a lot about myself in a really good way. Not just good things, either. You learn bad stuff about yourself, too. You learn your limitations or your flaws, as well. We have got to try and grow and improve and be better in all senses, and it definitely feels like that’s happened. And within that, I’ve created a kind of strange public document of it.

RS: What was it like when you started to realise something bigger than you might have anticipated starting spilling out as this record grew in stature?

Williams: I’ve never had an issue presenting vulnerability in this music. I’ve never had a problem with just being straight about how I feel about things. That goes for most aspects of personal life as well. Maybe I was a little bit more guarded and a little bit more afraid in the past, but I guess music was a solace. It was a place that I could express that stuff in a different way than just sitting down with someone and saying, “Hey, I’m struggling with this thing’, because that is somehow harder than writing a song about it and putting it out in the world. And I think the thing to remember as well is these songs take a seed from personal experience, but they’re not completely autobiographical. My life and my experience are a starting point. I amplify and explore that so it can be presented in a simple, comprehensible way that’s approachable for others. They can listen to it and relate to it in their own way because all of our experiences are going to be different. If it were just for me, I wouldn’t put it out.

The thing is, I’m not going to write a song as I’m feeling bad about something right now. It’s more looking back and saying, “How was I doing when this was happening?’ It’s a really interesting process trying to condense how you feel about something that’s ultimately quite complex. It’s a good tool, I think. But it really does force you to look at these feelings head-on because you’re staring at them for months, and then really zooming in on them in a very, very clinical fashion. You didn’t know how you felt about it before, but through this process, now you do.

RS: Can you pinpoint a place where you realised what it was that you were unfurling?

Williams: The thing is that a while back I realised I didn’t really recognise myself in a way that I remember doing. I often don’t have a good relationship with myself, but it was particularly not good at that point. This loss of self, which had happened over such a long period of time that I had not noticed it at all, and then suddenly becoming very aware of it, was horrible. Like, how can I have let this happen? You blame yourself for it, and that sucks too because instead of trying to think about how you’re going to deal with it, you beat yourself up over it first. It’s like no, no, no, no, no, hang on. And the process of writing little by little was really just kind of thinking, well, ‘This is fine. This is where we are. It’s not good, but that’s where we are’. It’s a process of How are we going to understand how we got here in the first place so we don’t do it again, and how are we going to consider getting out of this situation and trying to make things better? It was a case of processing and understanding the how and why.

It’s very easy to think about how you feel, but then get bombarded with stuff, get a quick fix from social media and your phone, and then avoid everything else. All of those are the feelings that are a bit more complicated and a bit more personal, and maybe involve looking in. And maybe that looking in isn’t very comfortable. But that’s perfectly regular, normal stuff. It’s just that I don’t think a lot of us do it very often, and so writing songs does force it a bit. But I think that also people quite often ignore everything so much that they don’t realise that shit happens to them either. It’s a good thing to remind people to have a look.

Rock Sound: It’s also important to realise that these processes are just part and parcel. The world doesn’t stop turning, the seasons don’t stop changing.

Williams: Exactly. This is why the record is called ‘Solstice’. It is that slow fucking glacial pace at which this stuff happens that you don’t notice it. But it is so slow, and the world keeps going, and you keep going on, and you don’t realise these things are changing. It’s like you are trying to get healthier and you’re going to the gym. You’re not going to see a change every single day, but a year later, you might go, ‘I see the change that I was looking for’, but it takes all that time. There isn’t a quick fix, but that does give you an excuse to avoid the stuff that you actually need to sort out.

I think it’s important to highlight that the songs are not all negative. There is optimism and hope and joy in there. But the record is really dealing with those extremes of emotion, the beautiful positive and the horrible negative. But the thing is, those two extremes are linked to each other. You know, they need each other to exist. And even though they feel miles away from each other at the time, I feel personally like I’m on this very slow glacial cycle between these two things. It takes years and years and years to get from one to the other. A really slow pendulum between the two, and I’m not sure that that’s exclusive to me. I feel like we’re all kind of on these journeys. It’s just that they’re so slow we don’t notice.

RS: There’s a moment where you realise that even though that journey is extremely personal, there are other people who want to be a part of it. And you’ve found a team and a label that understands and appreciates that.

Williams: That’s such an important thing, and that’s definitely something that I found with Reigning Phoenix. I have never really had much of a relationship with my label before for various reasons, but I have never been so involved in it in my life, and it’s wonderful. It’s a lot of work. But it’s just amazing to have a label that wants to take care of your entire vision. To have the kind of care that’s taken to make sure it aligns with everything else. All of this stuff, which frankly, no one’s ever asked me before. It’s really nice to be seen as something more than a robot that makes records. To be considered to be an artistic human being who is part of a team. It isn’t just about me. It’s about my label, my management, my agent, and all of that working as a whole to gradually grow the profile of a project.

RS: And it’s clear just how much that also relates to the audience and community that you have been building, too.

Williams: It’s such an honour to perform to people in real life, and I’m not sure that anyone ever tells them how important they are, because I think there’s just an assumption that they’re just a bunch of numbers and tickets and whatever. For me, you can see how your music affects people in real time, in that space that you’ve created for them, which for me is a quite intimate space. I’m really grateful for that because it means people can be in this slow little world with me for like an hour, and ignore the rest of life, just long enough to feel whatever that music makes them feel today. And it could be different than how it feels for the record. It could be more immersive. It could be more emotional. I see every version of emotional people in my crowds, and it’s beautiful that people feel that this is a space they can come to and safely express themselves however they want. I love that very much. And it’s not something I’ve set out to create by any means, but I’m very glad that it’s happened, and very glad that people have just done it naturally.

RS: How do you go about summing up this period of your career, with this set of songs and these sorts of shows, and compare it to how you felt about A.A. Williams as a project in previous processes?

Williams: I am amazed that I have ended up feeling so confident and so bold about certain things. I’ve never shied away from being emotional in records. I’ve never shied away from being vulnerable. But I think being quite clear-cut, even if it’s a bit poetic, can feel pretty uncomfortable for people sometimes because it’s pretty to the bone. There’s no making it shiny or nice or tempering it in any way. It’s like this is how it is, so this is how it is. I’m not going to make it nice because I don’t need to dress it up for you. So, I’m pleased that I feel bolder in the way that I present things. Maybe I feel more flexible and freer to express other parts of myself, which I’m really grateful for. I certainly think I feel more confident on stage. I think my singing is more confident, and that is partly because of physical practice. The more you do a thing, theoretically it gets better, right?

I never really sang before I started making music like this. So if I listen to my voice on the EP, I sound like a little mouse in comparison to where I’m at now. So, I’m really pleased with how that’s come out. And I think a lot of it is just a combination of the physical freedom that I get from practising and the metaphorical freedom that you have when you release music. Then when people get behind it and enjoy it, that pushes you to want to do more and be better for them.

So I’m going to keep doing that, and I want to keep making it better, improving, and presenting new things. And I’m really excited to get writing more and keep doing this. It’s going to be fun.