TEXT ONLY VERSION

Cassyette has had one hell of a run-up to the release of her debut album. The Brighton-based artist, born Cassy Brooking, won Best UK Breakthrough Artist at the Heavy Music Awards in 2022, the same year she supported My Chemical Romance on their comeback tour. With a CV that also includes Download Festival, supporting Bring Me the Horizon and touring Europe with Sum 41, Cassyette has been winning over stadium-sized audiences. With her raspy, powerful voice, sense of humour and unforgettable on-stage charisma, Cassyette has built a strong fanbase. Nicknamed the Degenerettes, Cassyette’s fans support her at every turn, including on TikTok, where she has racked up millions of views.

Now, she is counting down to the release of her debut album, ‘This World Fucking Sucks’. A mix of moving ballads and heavier tracks, the record builds further on Cassyette’s unique sound and vocals to explore difficult and personal topics like the death of her beloved dad and her struggles with addiction. She says that crafting this album with her collaborators and close friends has been “cathartic”, and she’s looking forward to seeing it out in the world. “I’m so excited. I’ve been sitting on it for so long, so it’s strange that it’s a month away, but it feels really good. It feels like I’m on the home stretch now. It’s getting exciting.”

Navigating grief, addiction and joy with a deft authenticity, ‘This World Fucking Sucks’ isn’t nearly as pessimistic as its title makes it seem. We chatted to Cassyette about her journey to crafting this record.

THE SOUND

Cassyette’s sound isn’t faithful to any one genre, but one thing is for sure: it is distinctly her. “I found my sound through experimenting,” says Cassyette. That didn’t happen overnight: “Over the years, I’ve been finding what I like the most. The most important thing for me is to make sure my heart is in it. I’m a massive music fan anyway, so it’s nice. It’s a good opportunity for me, any time I make a song, to think about references. Loads of different references from loads of different places and genres. I hone in on little things I like from other places and form ideas that way. It’s come from years of experimenting with different genres.” Cassyette has also worked as a songwriter for other artists for many years, which she says informs her creative process when it comes to developing her own music. “I love going into sessions with other artists and writing their music and getting into their heads. Over time you build up that experience of finding the magic in each room you’re in with someone else,” she says. “It might strike a chord with me where I love the way we went about that process. Then I put all of the best bits into this project and filled it out. It’s about finding your integrity, all of the things that make you tick.”

THE COLLABORATORS

Over the years, Cassyette has maintained a core team of collaborators, who she met through doing sessions for other artists. “We naturally came together. We’ve worked together on everything I’ve released,” she says. “They’re all my best friends.” When we chat, she is living with Bambie Thug, who most recently took the Eurovision Song Contest by storm with the Irish entry, ‘Doomsday Blue’, a Cassyette co-write. The two friends write across each other’s projects and now regularly collaborate. Cassyette wrote some of ‘This World Fucking Sucks’ in LA, where one of her collaborators introduced her to the producer Shaun Lopez. Cassyette took some convincing to work with him: “I’m not closed off by any means, but I feel like, why fix a problem we don’t have? When you write music, it’s sort of like solving a puzzle. It’s constant problem-solving. You’re writing the music with this vibe and you’re having a good time and you want to keep that magic within something,” she says. As he had a co-sign from the group, she went for it, and they wrote the title track together.

She also wrote the moving track ‘Friends in Low Places’ with writer and producer David Stewart. It’s the only track that someone else brought her the concept for: “I had so many ideas for it. I then wrote that on my own and brought it to him. We made this song together,” says Cassyette. She’s passionate about working with other people, especially the ones that she’s close with: “I come from a songwriting and production background. I haven’t really needed much input from others, so when I have, it’s been the things that I can’t do. I’m a producer, but I’m not the best at it,” she says. “When you’re making music, you need to be able to look at it and say, yeah, that song we made was fucking shit. We’ve got a good balance and it’s always a laugh,” she says of her team. “Shaun really fit into the group. I’m a sucker for a sense of humour and I feel like it’s necessary when you’re making music, because it should be a really joyful experience.”

THE LYRICS

“I form all of the concepts on my own, the only one on this album that was a concept before I came into it was ‘Friends in Low Places’. The concept connected with me so much that I went away and wrote a load of stuff to it on my own. I guess there’s no right way of going about writing lyrics but for me personally, I need to feel it deeply. I need to be able to connect with everything that I put out and want to invest time into. Because I go in with that thought process, it’s easy for me to be cutthroat with what works on something,” she says. “I call it the magic, so if I don’t feel the magic, it’s not that deep, we’ll get rid of it. It might have been a good song, but if it doesn’t tick all the boxes for me, it’s not got my heart in it.” For Cassyette, that made who her core team was all that more important. “I had to make sure I was making the record with people that really understood me. When you go into those sorts of emotions, it is a really painful process at times. It’s totally cathartic, but the only way it can be is to be able to have space as an artist. Anyone else that’s working on it needs to fit themselves into what it already is,” she says.

Working through the loss of her dad, it was essential that Cassyette had her friends around her. “As much as we have fun in the studio, there are very emotionally heavy themes throughout this album, so tapping into those sides, there have been points while making this album where I’ve found it deeply difficult. Having my best friends there to talk it through, they’ve been on the journey with me,” she says. While she mostly writes lyrics alone, having them there helped to bring out an extra dimension in her writing. “I trust them, and they’ve always brought out beautiful things or pointed out things I haven’t considered. It has been crafted with the utmost love. That’s when you feel really good about something as an artist, when it has that magic feeling to it and it feels like you’ve got something off your chest. For me, that’s the nicest thing. Those are the songs that connect with people listening the most, when it feels real.”

THE ARTWORK

On the striking cover of ‘This World Fucking Sucks’, Cassyette sits with her blonde hair slicked back, wearing pink latex gloves and a bra while sucking black liquid out of a globe. After coming up with the name of the record, she was playing around with AI to generate ideas, giving it a reference image of her and inputting text about, well, sucking black liquid out of the globe. “It pumped out the weirdest fucking image, but there was something in it,” she says. She took it to her friend, Joseph Delaney, who she calls an “amazing photographer and director”.  He and his partner, Cassyette’s stylist Matt King, run a creative direction company called Sort Zine. Between the three of them, they managed to build on what the AI had brought them to bring her vision to life. “The image was kind of more the vibe of it that I was trying to get across,” she says. They re-shot it, and it ended up being very different to the version that the AI spat out. As a team, they also shot some extra content to go with the album. “People don’t really respond to music videos the same way anymore, so we shot visualisers,” says Cassyette.

THE TITLE

The title of the record really speaks for itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t agree with the sentiment that the world can be a pretty unpleasant place to be, but it “really isn’t that deep” says Cassyette. An older artist had told her she needed a working title while she was writing and recording the record, so she had been using the title ‘Under No Influence’, which she says in light of her sobriety rang true to her. However, it didn’t make sense to anyone else: “When you have to explain a title to people, it’s not connecting. I was like, oh fuck!” Being deep in the album-writing process, Cassyette didn’t want to think about a new title. It wasn’t until the album was fully formed that it hit like a bolt from the blue. Cassyette knew that she wanted ‘This World Fucking Sucks’, which she calls a “rant”, to be the title track. She says that they made it with Shaun Lopez in just one take. “I was in a fucking terrible mood that day, and Shaun dealt with me well. He was like, ‘just go in the booth and get it all out.’ I’m such a military officer when it comes to how the vocals sound. It was a vibe. I was showing the album in its demo form to my managers, and Dave was like, why don’t you call it that? You’re talking about that the whole way through the album. Sometimes the best things just click.”

THE FUTURE

Cassyette has had a whirlwind couple of years, and with the release of ‘This World Fucking Sucks’, it’s not likely to slow down anytime soon. “It’s been crazy. There’s been so much momentum, it’s been hard to have any space to breathe,” she says. Next, she’s hoping to slow things down as much as she can, finding time to “live and travel”. “I want to get back to writing. It’s important to make sure I’m indulging that side because it’s all that I care about,” she says. “I love performing it too, but there’s something in the writing that’s the most special part. The past year has been fucking crazy, and I think that being able to spill all my feelings on it will be really nice. I’ve got another project that’s going alongside this album that’ll be released soon. I want to live life and travel and try some different forms of collaboration. There are a few artists I’ve been talking to for a while that I want to get in the studio with, we’ve been trying to find time. It’s finding time.”