Victoria Canal talks winning an Ivor Novello, playing with Coldplay at Glastonbury, and her debut album 'Slowly, It Dawns' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Anyone who happened to flick on the telly during Coldplay’s record-breaking Glastonbury performance back in the summer was in for a real treat. Not only was it the fifth time that Chris Martin and co took to headlining the legendary Pyramid Stage, they also brought along a whole cast of talented names to help them do it, including the likes of Little Simz, Elyanna and Femi Kuti; even Michael J Fox joined in for a glassy-eyed rendition of ‘Fix You’.

For one of their guest performers, though, their appearance really was a full circle moment. “I was looking up and seeing all these A-listers looking down at me and watching me go on,” Victoria Canal says today, nearly five months on from her turn performing ‘Paradise’ with the band, “and it was just more people in the crowd than I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a trip.”

Having spent a handful of her early years playing Coldplay covers in restaurants (“My identifier when doing cover gigs,” she told BBC Breakfast back in July, “was that I could do any Coldplay song”), it’s little wonder that the experience felt more than a little otherworldly for the singer. After dedicating much of her childhood to studying classical piano and opera, Victoria began to write music in her early teens before releasing a handful of EPs by the time she was 22. It was after an April Fool’s joke back in 2018, however, that she first caught the attention of the Coldplay frontman, thanks to a mocked up Rolling Stone cover reading ‘Victoria Canal wows Chris Martin at a clown’s birthday party’. A mutual acquaintance forwarded the cover on to the man himself and the rest, as they say, is history: Martin introduced her to Parlophone Records in 2021, and she signed with the label the following year.

“I was mostly just impressed at how many moving parts there are that, as an audience member, you have no idea about,” she reflects now of her Worthy Farm turn. “Those couple of days rehearsing with them and then doing the show, it was such a masterclass in how to put on an amazing show at such a high level for so many people. It was so inspiring to see, to just see it function at such a high level. I’ve done so many gigs in my life but never have there been hundreds of crew members around making sure every little detail is sorted and that everything’s falling exactly when it needs to. I felt like a very happy cog in the machine of making it happen.”

“Music is mostly such a brooding, sorta weepy experience for me, but I just wanted to test myself and see if I could have fun.”

Victoria’s appearance at Glastonbury hasn’t been her only pinch-yourself moment in 2024 either. Just a few weeks prior to her visit to the Tor, she found herself back on the red carpet at the Ivor Novellos for a second time; having received their Rising Star award in 2023, this year she claimed the Best Song Musically and Lyrically prize for her dramatic opus ‘Black Swan’.

“Wow, that’s crazy that also happened this year…” she says, remembering that it was, in fact, just a few months ago. “That was an amazing day and I got to meet Paul McCartney, which was just the dream of all dreams, and he was very kind to me,” she nods. “I got to perform at the ceremony, and it was just such a cool run in with a lot of people that I really admire, like Lana Del Rey and Paul… To hear them congratulate me and say that they liked my song was… it was just very exciting.”

Having rounded out the year with a series of headline shows across the US, UK and Europe (“The London show was my favourite show I’ve ever played,” she says. “It was my biggest headline show to date; I had a string section and a whole band and it felt really satisfying”), when we speak the singer is spending a few days at an artist residency in Normandy where she’s planning to get a little rest before her next chapter begins to unfold: the release of her debut album.

Set for release in January, ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ is not just the culmination of three years’ work for the singer, but a record that shows a wider breadth of her talents than ever before. “Definitely going on tour with Hozier was the catalyst for that,” she explains of her new, expanded sonic scope. “I think seeing just how varied his music is and how huge it could be, and experiencing those fans that are young, queer and very sentimental, I was really inspired by what my show could become and what my music could sound like. I took the pieces of what inspired me about his show in terms of the grandiosity and used it as inspiration for my own recording process and songwriting.

“I definitely wanted to keep the more intimate, singer-songwriter, bedroom style stuff that is so close to my heart, but I think the album is split into two sides,” she notes. “Side A is this much more confident, unhinged side, which did take a lot of inspiration from that time, and then Side B is the much more introverted, wounded, wiser side.”

Keying into the old school approach of splitting a record into two distinct sides, the album begins with the more carefree fun of ‘June Baby’ before moving into the sultry flirtation of ‘California Sober’ and the hedonistic rhythms of ‘Cake’ which, Victoria explains, represent the earlier phases of life. “To me, the flirty, sort of overconfident, naive side is emblematic of younger life. You know, you’re 18 or 19, you’re going out, you’re trying things for the first time, you’re trying to discover who you are and maybe overshoot.

“I think the main thing is that I just had fun,” she says of her approach when writing those songs in particular. “Music is mostly such a brooding, sorta weepy experience for me – and that is where my heart lies, but I just wanted to test myself and see if I could genuinely have fun and not restrict myself in any way. All the songs on Side A, I felt like they were just a result of me being like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to make whatever I want today’, and yeah, it did kind of flow; particularly the music and production elements. I think we were just having so much fun, so it felt easy.”

“[The album] is cyclical. You’re born and you live and you die and you’re born again.”

It’s in the album’s second half – around the existential lullaby-esque ‘Vauxhall’ – that things shift to a more reflective, introverted space. “I really liked the idea of bookending the album with ‘June Baby’ as Track One and ‘swan song’ as Track 12, sort of from beginning to end of life and basically a coming-of-age story,” she explains. “There does come a point where you wake up and you’re 24 or 25 and you’re like, ‘Oh jeez, what was all that?’ and ‘I should probably get serious now’. The rest of the album from there becomes more wise and more reflective and self aware, which is much more how I feel in my life now.”

While her debut mostly explores new territory for the songwriter, there are a few familiar faces within the track listing. “Those songs, they’re sisters and they deserve a long life,” she says of the record’s final two tracks, ‘Black Swan’ and ‘swan song’, which previously featured on her 2023 EP ‘WELL WELL’ and 2022 release ‘Elegy’ respectively. Did she always plan to include them on her full-length? “I did, yeah. I just felt like I didn’t want to leave them behind and they’re so representative of who I am and the deepest part of my soul. I wanted to make sure that they got their moment again; it feels really right to me.”

There’s something poignant about the fact that, through the writing of the album, it’s still the songs she wrote some years ago that speak to Victoria most now. “I think that’s part of the concept behind the album too,” she agrees, “that it’s cyclical. You’re born and you live and you die and you’re born again. Even within your life; maybe it’s not a literal death, but it’s an ego death or it’s the death of an idea of yourself. That’s also part of the reason I called the album ‘Slowly, It Dawns’, because it feels like a sunrise and eventually the sun sets but it will rise again. It is interesting, and it really is based on where I am in my life that I feel more like ‘Black Swan’ and that Side B energy versus like, confident, loud, unhinged Side A energy.”

An album of intense honesty that also celebrates the multitudes of the human experience – whether foolish and loud, or meditative and quiet – ‘Slowly, It Dawns’ aims to move away from the highly-curated snapshots of life that society seems so intent on projecting, to showcase it for the contradictory muddle that it can actually be. “I think that’s one thing that I just don’t see too much of online, particularly with really established artists that I follow, for example,” Victoria offers up. “It’s like, they can be this one thing, all the time, and it’s always energetic and it’s always happy and it’s always lively and they’re always performing and whatever,” she says.

“But, for me, I just find that there’s like… I call it the God and goblin complex.” Two halves of the same emotional coin, much like the two sides of the album. “I’m a fan of music and I feel like I’ve been searching for an artist to admit that they are both this and that, you know what I mean?” she asks. “I’ve decided I can basically be that person.”

‘Slowly, It Dawns’ is out 17th January via Parlophone.

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