Black Honey's Izzy B Phillips on autism, sobriety, and the band's new album 'Soak' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Izzy B Phillips - frontwoman of Brighton indie mainstays Black Honey - is not one to waste time. When DIY rocks up, slightly late (thanks, TfL), to a London hotel for today’s interview, we find her sipping on a latte while playing around with an Omnichord; the vehicle, she tells us, of all her writing of late. “Since that video of Damon Albarn playing ‘Clint Eastwood’ on one went viral, these are really expensive,” she laments. “And the batteries are doing my fucking head in - I have to change them every four days.”

And that, quite frankly, is the least of it: as well as creative directing campaign concepts and fulfilling press commitments in anticipation of the band’s expansive fourth album, ‘Soak’, she’s also juggling shifts as a tattoo artist and sketching out ideas for another exciting TBA project. Really, though, this packed diary is entirely unsurprising: anyone who gives an interview as far-reaching and full as this [if only we had the column inches - Ed] is hardly a one-track mind.

“I know categorically that, for me, this is our best piece of work,” she nods, referring to bandmates Chris Ostler (guitar), Tommy Taylor (bass), and Alex Woodward (drums). “And I know that everyone says that about whatever they’re working on at that time, but the relief you feel when you’ve gratified a part of yourself that you hadn’t touched yet… that’s huge.” Indeed, ‘Soak’ comes in the wake of a series of big shifts for Izzy, both personally and professionally. Since the band’s last LP - 2023’s ‘A Fistful Of Peaches’ - she’s received a long-awaited autism diagnosis and fully embraced sobriety, while tattooing and writing with other artists (including, most recently, Savages’ Fay Milton) have opened up different avenues for her unbounded artistic expression.

Characterised by newfound clarity and self-acceptance, then, ‘Soak’ marks something of a line in the sand for Izzy; lyrically candid and relatively light on concept, it’s an album as much defined by what it’s not as what it is. “I think I have been on that journey, where I became something for other people,” she muses, citing the cowboy character work of the quartet’s early output and the “Debbie Harry sketch” of her signature bleach blonde, dishevelled-glam look.

“When I came through there were a lot of tests to see if you were a ‘real’ artist: ‘how much do you know about Neu! and the krautrock scene?’” she says witheringly. “I knew about all that shit, but then I’d perform this idea of femininity - lipstick, hair, lashes - for men. That was the identity the world wanted from me; it was something I did to survive… this was a time when people were still asking me how it was possible to have platonic relationships with my bandmates.”

She reflects: “I kind of created a fantasy band - a fantasy realm and a fantasy identity - and now I feel like I’ve spent a while deconstructing that. Or at least seeing what’s real within it. [Black Honey] is this perpetual tug of war between fake and real.”

“[Black Honey] is this perpetual tug of war between fake and real.”

— Izzy B Phillips

In place of the stylised aesthetics of albums past (which took cues from the likes of Tarantino and Wes Anderson), here the band play it as straight as they ever have. Of course, cinematic reference points still abound - namely Kubrick, Tim Burton, and Danny Elfman - but, rather than escapist fantasies of outlaws and lovers, ‘Soak’ resides in an all-too-familiar landscape of dystopic news cycles, doomscrolling, and distinctly unromantic addictions.

It was the prowling ‘Carroll Avenue’, Izzy explains - a relative outlier on the record - that proved the keystone of this about-turn. “Loads of Black Honey [has been] me going ‘I’m in a Western movie, but really I’m Izzy B. Phillips from Crawley,” she begins. “My version of this fantasy Americana was a view of life through the lens of consuming film: it [was] about the Hollywood glare, the lights and sparkle and allure of this realm.”

The track in question, though - named after the historic LA street on which she was staying when she penned it - sees her reflect on this fantastical film set and, ultimately, “burn it all down”. She pauses, glancing into the middle distance to recite its lyrics: “Old Hollywood signs kept romance alive / From Calloway Drive the star killed the stripe / And the cry turns to silence, bled out in the basement / You can’t blame me now, this is our entertainment.”

It’s a sense of disillusionment or inevitable cynicism that has, in the past few years, become endemic; it’s hard to be whimsical when the world’s horrors are being livestreamed in real time, and our brains are exposed to a lifetime’s worth of input in a week. “Everything is burning up,” says Izzy simply, “and it’s all too much.” And yet, we can’t seem to look away: ‘Soak’ (and the album’s cover) and ‘Psycho’ (and its video) speak to this idea of compulsive consumption - a sort of forced voyeurism - that leaves us simultaneously overwhelmed and uncomprehending.

“It’s a collective illness that we’re all going through,” Izzy nods. “I feel like my brain is in overdrive trying to process this bombardment of information, but then at the same time it’s addicted to going: ‘if I just look at so-and-so’s holiday snaps, I’ll escape from it’.” The result? A reality that’s far more surreal than any big-screen flick - one in which we’re desensitised to violence, paralysed by fatigue, and increasingly narcissistic. “We live in a movie that nobody else will ever see,” she shakes her head, laughing at the irony of her old ‘Corinne’ lyrics. “If that’s the case, then what the fuck is this? This is a terrible plot.”

“People do a great job of making you feel that you’re wrong or naughty or bad for being different, but being different is very important.”

— Izzy B Phillips

In paring back some of that thematic or aesthetic artifice, on ‘Soak’, Izzy’s also dropped the act on a personal level, too. “There’s definitely an unmasking,” she asserts, considering how being sober has informed her songwriting on this record. “I think it has the most drink and drug references of any Black Honey album, which is interesting. I was constantly trying to create a soundscape that felt like a woozy dream state, or being on medication - something really out of focus. I wanted it to be like an explosion, but underwater; a complete immersion of senses.

“It was such an unconscious thing,” she continues. “At first I was annoyed: I thought ‘I’m sober, why am I writing this? It’s so annoying, so counterintuitive. It’s not the messaging I want to project.’ But actually, so much of that was about trying to access the states that drink and drugs can take you to.” ‘Insulin’, for example, takes its title from a hormone that alters the functioning of your body and mind, and the bright pop-rock of ‘Drag’ becomes increasingly distorted over the track’s three minute runtime. ‘Psycho’, meanwhile, nods to “the little twinkle in someone’s eye when they decide to fucking send it… that evil demon, that destructive voice.”

And in emulating these intoxication-fuelled fugues on her own terms, she’s acknowledging - yet ultimately asserting control over - the substances’ lure. “It’s who you let drive,” Izzy shrugs. “There’s a fucking demented toddler driving my ship all the time, and I’ve had to go: ‘get off the reins, sit down, chill out, fuck off - I’m driving’. And that’s how I have to deal with life, because if I don’t, then it’s a deregulated mess.”

‘The relief you feel when you’ve gratified a part of yourself that you hadn’t touched yet… that’s huge.”

— Izzy B Phillips

Having been diagnosed with ADHD aged 14, it wasn’t until last year that she knew she was autistic. Much as the milestone did throw up some questions (“now I don’t trust myself very much to communicate well”), it also helped Izzy connect the dots of her identity to form a clearer, more cohesive picture. “People do a great job of making you feel that you’re wrong or naughty or bad for being different, but being different is very important.”

She leans forward, excited, her mind already five steps ahead of the conversation. “There was this scientist who studied the behaviour of bees. Obviously we know that bees mostly communicate by doing that butt-wiggle dance. And there’s a certain percentage of bees that didn’t conform to the traditional standards of butt-wiggle dancing; they didn’t have a typical communication style, and didn’t follow the same pattern of work that the ‘typical’ bees did. So they studied these neurodiverse types of bees, and they found that they were flying in seemingly abstract directions and finding new resources of pollen for the hive.

“The hive has to be diverse for it to function: if you design an environment that supports that, you will get the best out of everyone. Never has a metaphor spoken to me more deeply. I feel so unsupported in the institutional framework that I’ve been cultivated in, and I’m now unpacking all of the frustrations of that and realising: ‘oh for fuck’s sake, I’m just that bee. And that’s allowed’.”

Album closer ‘Medication’ digs into this experience most directly; stripped-back and sincere, it features a crescendoing synth section bound by multiple vocal layers - as if, we suggest, Izzy’s different sides are all coexisting, quite literally, in harmony. “I love that,” she smiles. “Or maybe each of the harmony splits is the multitudinal voices in your head, or the textural dynamic of how broad a feeling can be.” When neurodivergence in women (who often mask it better than men) is still so often overlooked or misattributed, her visibility is invaluable. “It’s trending on TikTok to be autistic right now,” she says. “I hate that people might think that of me, and that’s why I don’t really say about being autistic… even though I know it’s important, because the talking I have done about it has helped other women figure out their potential autism.”

“Another well-known female artist said to me once: ‘people just wait around for women to disappear. And you have to refuse’.”

— Izzy B Phillips

Black Honey are now four albums and over ten years into a career in music; does ‘Soak’’s lowered guard come from a sense that the band - and Izzy specifically - no longer need to prove themselves, or convince people of their worth? She laughs, citing the very opposite. “I’m so traumatised from my journey in this industry as a woman… the chips on the shoulder become gouges, which become limbs missing; that’s kind of how it feels. But yet I still feel hungry to do it.

“I’m not stopping; I feel so defiant in that respect. Another well-known female artist said to me once: ‘people just wait around for women to disappear. And you have to refuse’. That really sits in my brain rent free. I’m at that point now where it feels like [people are thinking] ‘okay, you’re in your 30s - what’s your relevance?’.” We segue into cosmetic surgery, Madonna, and the insanity of X Factor’s ‘Over 25s’ category. “Patti Smith is the fucking outline, right? You just carry on making art and showing up for your work.” She grins, red lippie intentionally imperfect, omnichord peeking out of her bag. “I thought I’d grow out of my dress sense; I thought I’d become a normie and wear beige. I don’t know why I thought this, but I was convinced…”

‘Soak’ is out on 15th August via Foxfive.

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