Gretel on not rushing the process and trusting her instincts to create debut album 'Squish' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Maddy Haenlein had long dreaded writing her debut album. It had played on her mind for years, in fact. “Way before I’d even released my first song,” clarifies the 23 year old singer-songwriter, known mononymously as Gretel. “Even when I was having fun making my EPs, the idea of an album was weighing heavy on me.”

It’s not that she wasn’t excited to expand on the Gothic-inspired storytelling of her early projects ‘Slugeye’ (2022) and ‘Head of the Love Club’ (2023), nor that she wasn’t fussed about the album as an artform. Quite the opposite: she was terrified because these things matter.

“The way I grew up was, if there was an album that really spoke to me, I would cling to it,” she recalls, sitting cross-legged in her bedroom in West London. “I remember hearing [Wolf Alice’s] ‘Visions Of A Life’ and thinking: ‘this is everything I needed to hear’. So I had this notion that if my debut album could do that for someone else, everything would be perfect.”

These were the pressures secretly plaguing Maddy the last time DIY checked in with her, back in June 2024. At that point, she was tentatively testing the waters for this month’s full-length, ‘Squish’, with ‘Far Out’ - a ‘60s-inspired alt-pop banger created with long-time collaborator Mura Masa. Soon after, the pair headed in the studio and recorded a whole album together, only to discard it.

Maddy is keen to impress that their creative partnership remains very much intact. “I really love that guy and we work so well together, and I want to get back in the studio with him, desperately. But I think the thing is, when you’re so early on in your own process, and you’re working with someone that capable, it’s quite easy to use them as a crutch. He’s an incredibly good producer, and he can do anything. Which meant, ‘fuck, we could do anything!’”

Faced with limitless options, she found herself aimlessly ping-ponging in disparate directions, pursuing “creepy David Lynchian ballads” one moment and “B-52’s-ish punk-gone-electronic” the next. As fascinating as some of these moments were, she felt that lack of cohesion undermined her identity as an artist.

“I think when you’re writing your debut album, you do crave something a bit more defining,” Maddy justifies. “A bit more of a reflection of me, rather than a reflection of both of our - extremely broad - combined tastes. And so I knew that recording live was the only way that the Gretel project would ever be able to move forward, otherwise I’d be stuck forever.”

“I knew that recording live was the only way that the Gretel project would ever be able to move forward, otherwise I’d be stuck forever.”

With capturing the band set-up at the forefront of her mind, she reached out to frequent black midi collaborator Seth Evans, who was fresh from producing Geordie Greep’s as-then-unreleased debut ‘The New Sound’. “He had worked in the live scene for such a long time and he has such a good grasp of live energy and how to actually capture that,” she explains of her choice. He proved an important ally in the creative process too, uplifting Maddy when imposter syndrome crept in.

“Playing lead guitar on a lot of the songs on the record was a big moment for me, especially having been in the studio with producers before where it was assumed that the guy was the better guitarist. But [Seth] always said: ‘what are you talking about? You’re the best guitar player in the room’.”

With the lion’s share of material recorded in a five-day stretch at RAK Studios, ‘Squish’ is a thrilling document of its spontaneous gestation. From the grungy guitar textures and vocal acrobatics of ‘Unbloom’, to ‘Laurali’’s swirling shoegaze balladry and ‘Pick Your Heart Up’’s playful mix of swaggering bass and girl gang shouts, there’s an unstudied charm throughout that feels thrillingly genuine. Early reference points - including The Cure and ‘Mellow Gold’-era Beck - were swiftly abandoned, with Maddy committing to pursuing the emotional truth of each individual track instead. The result is a full-band indie-rock record underpinned by a strong singer-songwriter sensibility.

And within this framework, there’s impressive variety. Like a blissed-out hybrid of Florence + The Machine and The Last Dinner Party, ‘Darkness Be My Friend’ serves as a stunning two-hander, its lilting verses giving way to dizzying choruses powered by shimmering guitar arpeggios. The title track pairs punky guitars with soaring vocals, while anthemic single ‘Fire Blooming Trees’ was co-written with Hugo White of The Maccabees, and channels much of that band’s vim for a heart-racing chorus. For Maddy, the album marks a full-circle moment, taking her back to her early days channelling Nirvana and Nick Cave: “It’s funny, I think the stuff that I’m releasing now is actually more similar to what I was doing at the very beginning of my career. Sonically, I’ve come home.”

“The stuff that I’m releasing now is actually more similar to what I was doing at the very beginning of my career. Sonically, I’ve come home.”

Lyrically there’s a satisfying circularity too, with tracks like ‘Witch Hunt’ leaning back into magical realism and Gothic allusions. She grins: “That one’s about a witch getting burned at the stake by an original incel character, and she comes back and haunts his ass.” ‘Nervous Driver’, meanwhile, sees Maddy re-imagining losing her virginity, using religious imagery to cast herself as a corrupting influence. As per her great literary hero Angela Carter, this tussle between innocence and experience in adolescence remains a prevailing theme in her output as Gretel.

“The humiliation of being a young person is the worst feeling in the world,” she says of this fascination. “You go from this complete innocence and unquestioning faith in the world around you, to realising just how dark it can be. As young women, we’re being sexualised long before we think in that way. We’re taught to be agreeable but not too loud; to be unique but to not seek attention. Eventually you get to an age where you think ‘actually, fuck you - I want to be happy’.”

Similarly, Maddy comes out swinging on ‘Fire Blooming Trees’, which was written in the wake of the 2025 LA wildfires. As well as addressing her experiences feeling utterly overwhelmed by the rolling news cycle, the song unpicks the music industry’s intrusive attempts to shape her artistry. (“I’m an advert / I’m a whore,” she sings). “I think this album would have happened a lot sooner and a lot more easily had no one said any of that crap to me at the beginning,” she explains, citing “the constant comparison to other women in the industry” as an example. “The truth is, being in the music industry is like being in a toxic relationship.”

‘Squish’’s most powerful moment comes in the shimmering dream-pop of album closer ‘The Perfect Body’. A song as devastating as it is courageous, it draws on Maddy’s experiences of disordered eating; its chorus finds her ruing that “I’ve wrecked my body tryna be happy,” while later, she confesses: “I want a perfect body / And I want a religion / And I want brains / And I want to have children / That is, if I still can.”

As deeply painful as these confessions are, Maddy views the song as a hopeful gesture. “I’m choosing not to let body dysmorphia get the better of me anymore. It’s me saying: ‘I want to be happy and exhilarated, and I want to see myself like you do’. But yeah, I still listen to that song and I weep at the girl who wrote it.”

Ultimately, she believes that embarking on this journey of personal growth has resulted in a record she can truly stand behind. “You can never be happy with a body of work that’s a reflection of yourself, until you’re happy with yourself,” she explains thoughtfully. “It was all about being honest with what I was writing and trying to excite the person I was when I was 13.”

Now it’s complete, we wonder what she thinks 13 year old Maddy would make of ‘Squish’. “Oh god, I really hope that she’d like it,” she replies quickly, a pained look in her eyes. “Sometimes [I think] ‘is it loud enough for her? Is it popping off enough for her?’ Mostly, I just hope that she would listen to it and feel something, because that’s the reason I started writing music in the first place.”

‘Squish’ is out now via AWAL.

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