XANA: “I’M ALWAYS MOST EXCITED TO WRITE A BRIDGE OF A SONG’
VOCAL GIRLS caught up with Canadian artist Xana to chat all things Taylor Swift, TikTok, and her debut album, ‘Tantrums’.
“I’m nervous, but the excited, butterfly kind of nervous,” Xana grins over Zoom. “I’ve been working on [the album] for so long, so it’s wild that it’s finally coming out!”. The emerging pop personality has been building her audience since the autumn of 2020, when the release of her first single, ‘Goddess’, introduced fans to her own brand of earworm melodies and open-chested lyricism. A string of follow-up singles culminated in the infectious ‘Kitchen Light’ going viral on TikTok; now, ‘Tantrums’ delivers the full-length confessional that Xana is dubbing ‘a collection of past loves that led to the loss of my god damned sanity’. “Some of it is retrospective, some of it was [written] as it was happening,” she explains. The record’s earliest instalment came when she was just seventeen; “I’m twenty five now,” muses Xana. “So [the album’s] been the last, what is that, seven years?”.
‘Tantrums’ kicks off with a restless, thundering energy on ‘I Did This All For You’ - one of the tracks Xana’s most looking forward to sharing with people. “I wish that I could be with everyone the first time that they hear it!”, she says. “It’s the latest song we wrote and made, too, so I’m excited for that one.” Equally deserving of its own listening party, the pulsing ‘12 Missed Calls’ emulates something of Halsey’s ‘Lilith’ as it narrates Xana’s struggle with cutting someone off for good. “When I was a kid I’d listen to a lot of Avril Lavigne and Eminem, The Little Mermaid and anything my dad would play,” Xana says of her musical influences. “He was a big fan of AC/DC, Aerosmith, Van Halen, all that kind of stuff, so there’s quite a mix. Then into my teenage years [it was] Taylor Swift, Halsey. Those people are probably my biggest idols. I’m a huge fan of so many people, it’s hard to narrow it down.” Ryn Weaver also gets a mention: “she’s incredible,” Xana gushes. “She only has one album out, but I listened to it literally for two years straight, every day! I love that album so much, so I feel like that definitely carved a little piece into me and my sound.”
Her being a Swiftie makes a lot of sense; as an album that ruminates over previous relationships, its greatest strength is its bridges. “I love a good bridge,” Xana grins. “I’m always most excited to write a bridge of a song - I’m like ‘alright, here we go: unleash it all!’”. Nowhere is it unleashed more than on ‘19’, the album’s closing track, which stretches to over six minutes and deserves every one of them. “‘19’ is-,” Xana mimes dramatically stabbing herself in the heart, laughing, “so I’m excited for everybody to hear that one! That’s one of my favourites.” Building to its gut-wrenching catharsis, the song’s lyrics agonise with the same bittersweet acceptance found on ‘Yellow’ and ‘So It’s Ur Birthday’. Elsewhere, ‘My Therapist Told Me’ rejects this for an anthemic temper tantrum of hurt and frustration.
‘Love Like This’ - lyrically reminiscent of Charli XCX’s ‘Every Rule’ - is another of the record’s standouts, though possibly an underdog: “I’m interested to see how people absorb that one,” Xana says. “I feel like it’ll be the song [which] people listen to and go ‘okay, yeah, cool’, and then kind of forget about it. Then if they come back to it again they’ll think ‘wait a minute, this is actually really cool!’. But we’ll see how it goes,” she shrugs. “That’s my prediction.”
After announcing the album’s tracklist on Instagram, Xana’s been asking fans for the songs which they’re claiming (i.e. pre-emptively choosing as their favourites). Alongside ‘I Did This All For You’ and ‘19’, she shares that ‘Cupid’ is one of hers. “‘Cupid’ is very special to me,” she says. “I had a really unique experience writing and creating that song.” The stripped back production and intimate lyrics provide one of the most tender moments on the album, as Xana deals with the fear of “loving something that could be taken from me”.
Speaking of things being taken away - did launching her career during a worldwide lockdown, relying solely on a digital connection with fans, impact the experience? “It was kind of interesting,” she explains. “My plan before the pandemic was just to write and record, release a few songs; I wasn’t planning on doing any live performances for the first little bit, so when the pandemic happened it didn’t really hinder my plans in that way, you know? There was a period of time where we couldn’t really get into the studio, but we could do remote stuff, so we were still plugging away and that was good. And then also TikTok became a thing - like really became a thing - during the pandemic, because what else was everybody gonna do at home?”, she laughs. “It was kind of weird - obviously the pandemic was such a strange time that I don’t know if I’ll ever fully process, but it didn’t really mess with my plans the way that you would think.”
Like a lot of new artists, TikTok has played a pretty central role in sharing Xana’s music. ‘Kitchen Light’, a giddy retelling of her first relationship with a girl, received tens of thousands of likes on the platform when she posted it with the caption: ‘if Taylor Swift wrote an explicitly gay song’. “I think at the start [TikTok] was a great tool,” Xana muses. “I was starting from nothing, and I was like, ‘I can reach so many people, and it’s amazing and so exciting’, which is still true. I feel like now, TikTok is a super great tool for artists and musicians, but I wish it wasn’t the only tool that the entire music industry is focusing on right now, you know? So that’s kind of what I’m struggling with right now. I still love TikTok, I still spend way too much time on it, and I love making TikToks. But yeah, I feel like we’re very quickly going down this rabbit hole of only [prioritising] TikTok, and I think that’s not gonna end well!”.
Happily, our long-awaited return to ‘normal’ could finally see her music swapping thirty seconds of screen time for the live shows they demand. “I don’t have anything set in stone just yet,” Xana says. “It is a lot of work to plan a tour, especially as an independent artist - I’m just kind of figuring this all out for myself!”, she laughs. “I can’t wait to perform. I think that all these songs are gonna be really fun live, so that will definitely be in the near future.”
‘Tantrums’ may have been years in the making, but the result has undoubtedly proved worth it. Confident, sexy, and packing an emotional punch that Swift would be proud of, it’s a debut that promises a very exciting future. “I have a lot of fun stuff coming out with [the album],” Xana grins at the end of our call. “I don’t know how much I want to say about that, but lots of shit on YouTube, that’s all I’m saying! There’s gonna be a lot on YouTube!”.
You can listen to ‘Tantrums’ here:
