Jessica Winter on the road to creating her long-awaited debut 'My First Album' • Interview • DIY Magazine

There’s a spark of magic in Jessica Winter’s music. For the pop-pioneer’s fans, it’s in the brilliant lyrics, luminous earworms and rich genre-spanning musical landscape she’s crafted; but for Winter herself, her work hold a different kind of magic. “Sometimes my songs know [things] before I know them,” she reflects, her songs unveiling truths about her own life that only come to light once she’s out of the creative process.

This is the case for her recently-released debut record ‘My First Album’. Calling in from Portsmouth, where Jessica has relocated to for this summer, she’s talking to DIY less than a week before it drops. The LP itself is a gorgeous thing, which pulls from noughties nostalgia and the music that Jessica listened to growing up, as much as it sees her innovating via modern pop trends.

It’s a project that took two years to create, but it was only when she got to the record’s final song, the theatrical and earnest ‘To Know Her’, that she knew in her gut the record was done. It was also at this point that Jessica could pull out the clear throughline that threads its way through ‘My First Album’.

“The throughline is that [the narrator] is trying her best, and she’s just not quite getting it. She doesn’t understand, she keeps ending up in these situations that are a bit messy or sad, or she’s got heartbreak, or she’s distracted or she wants something and she doesn’t know how to get it; when she gets it she doesn’t know what to do with it, and she loses her mind a bit, and then at the very end [with ‘To Know Her’] she realises all she needed all along was what she already had.” In short, ‘To Know Her’ is almost a love story to oneself, built around lush, cinematic strings that enhance the song’s message: “If you can’t love yourself first, you’re never going to get there. So let’s start with the Hollywood moment for yourself.”

“If you can’t love yourself first, you’re never going to get there. So let’s start with the Hollywood moment for yourself.”

‘My First Album’ comes after over a decade in the music industry for Jessica – the title a tongue-in-cheek reference to the years the multi-hyphenate has spent writing for other artists (like The Horrors), collaborating, working on TV scores and beyond. “It feels like I’ve had a whole life of music,” she muses, on the record’s title. “And when it comes to my Jessica Winter project it’s been about five years, so it almost serves as a reminder to myself and to anyone that’s interested that it is actually my first album.”

Growing up on the South Coast of England, Jessica spent much of her early years between home and the hospital, having regular hip operations that required extended recovery, which ended when she stopped growing at 16 (it was during recovery that she discovered playing piano, encouraged by her mother). Her earliest forays into performance came in the form of theatre productions, after which she moved from Portsmouth to London and joined punk and metal groups, before forming indie band Pregoblin with Alex Sebley. 2019 saw the Jessica Winter project kick off, through which she’s already shared an array of brilliant and bold releases (including 2023’s stand-out ‘Limerence’ EP). As she reflects today: “I’ve gone through all the different genres and eras and guises to get here, finally finding who I am.”

Jessica’s entire, genre-defying musical journey has fed into ‘My First Album’, a project that’s a “shinier” elevation of her solo work to date, imbued with a confidence that’s grown over time. But, she explains, early memories were also key musical touchstones. “I was actually referencing and being influenced by the music that I first experienced as a child. So there’s an innocence in the name, and there’s an innocence in making the album, because I was going right back to my roots.”

These roots include growing up listening to the full gamut of popular music of the time: Korn, Kylie, Scissor Sisters, Robbie Williams, and “this album I didn’t know anyone else had called ‘Chilled Ibiza’.” This was a compilation that she would listen to every summer holiday. “There’s so many memories attached to the school summer holidays, listening to that album obsessively. I didn’t even know who the artists were, I just thought they were random artists at times, but now it turns out it was Massive Attack or whoever.”

You can hear these far-spanning influences throughout the record, from the euphoric Kylie-styled electronics of synth-pop belters ‘Aftersun’ and ‘Feels Good (For Tonight)’, through to the rocked up riffs of ‘All I Ever Wanted’ and ‘Got Something Good’, and the full-blown theatricality of ‘To Know Her’.

There’s an element of nostalgia from these evocative musical memories, which also comes through in the use of instrumentation; after a period of making music “via a laptop for quite a while”, Jessica made an active artistic decision to go as “warm and analogue as possible” to enhance the feel of ‘My First Album’.

“I’ve now built the confidence to just do it the way I do it, rather than having to listen to engineers telling me how to produce.”

The creative process for the project was similarly warm and collaborative. Recorded at a friend’s university studio in Portsmouth, Jessica would bring all her collaborators down on the train from the capital, taking breaks in between making tunes to go and watch the hovercrafts. She also carefully crafted the environment she worked on this record in. While the live instruments were largely recorded in Portsmouth, she’d then travel to Shed Studio in Brixton to work with producer Krinks, who she describes as “incredible”. Continuing, she explains: “[He’s] the only cis man I’ve actually worked with who hasn’t tried it on, which is quite amazing. I was really adamant to not bring in energies like that, because I’ve had so much of that, and I’ve now built the confidence to just do it the way I do it, rather than having to listen to engineers telling me how to produce. It’s just nice that by the time I got to the point of doing my first album, I’m at that point where I don’t take any shit at all.”

Every aspect of the record demonstrates a key moment in Jessica’s career, one that showcases over a decade in the industry, of grafting and genre-hopping and creating wildly creative music. There are big plans for taking the record on the road, with new musical pals joining her onstage and aims to imbue the set with theatricality (inspiration has come from the likes of Lynks, Scissor Sisters and Peaches).

But for now, she’s deservedly enjoying the moment of sharing her album with the world, celebrating its release at home in Portsmouth. “I’ve been working for 10 years straight, so I wanted to relocate just for this summer, because the album’s coming out, and then I can just enjoy it, you know?” Wherever you listen, you don’t need to worry; ‘My First Album’ is an eclectic triumph of a record, one that can be enjoyed from the South Coast and beyond.

‘My First Album’ is out now via Lucky Number.

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