Hey I’m Darla Jade! I am an electro pop artist from Stoke On Trent and I have just released my debut EP Disconnect. In this EP, I bring a varied range of topics to the table including mental health, pressures of society, grief and self sabotage to name a few. It’s a very personal body of work for me, as I pride myself in always trying to bring as much honesty as I can to my music.
I started working on the EP without really realising it, as 3 out of the 6 tracks were written over 2 years ago in 2019. Throughout 2020, I released many singles, and it was at the back end of last year that I decided it was time for me to get an EP together.
“Disconnect”, the title track was one of the songs written in 2019, and as soon as I wrote it I knew I couldn’t just release it on its own, I felt I needed a plan for it, so I decided it would be great to revolve the EP around this track.
My music has a lot of light and shade to it and once I figured “Disconnect” was the title track it felt right to have a lighter and darker side on the EP with “Disconnect” being the crossroad into the darker side.
“Disconnect” came together whilst I was on a writing trip in Thailand, and it was written on my last full day there believe it or not! It’s all about falling in and out of an unstable relationship, but it is paired with an upbeat approach to keep it lively and energetic – I suppose creating the ups and downs of these kinds of relationships and how fast paced the emotions come and go etc.
The lighter songs on the project are “Slow Motion”, “Problems” and “Disconnect” – the topics here (in order of tracks) are, wanting to live in the present moment, helping a loved one through their tough times and the realisation of something unhealthy.
Whereas the darker songs on the project are “Pretty”, “Ghost In Me” and “Drag Me Down”. These tracks are a lot more raw and brutal, as they are about (in order), pressures of society, grief and self sabotage.
As this was my debut EP, I really felt doing the separation of the light and shade would really give a listener a truer representation of myself and it just made sense and fitted well with the tracks I had written for this body of work.
One of my favourite aspects of this EP, is that there are little nuggets in some songs that follow into the next. For example in “Disconnect”, it mentions a lot of electrical elements (‘pull the plug’, ‘wired in my DNA’ etc) and then “Pretty”, the following song starts with “so much noise, can’t hear you through the static“).
Another example would be going from “Ghost In Me” to “Drag Me Down”, as the latter starts with “haunted by my design“, there are little things like this scattered throughout that I feel no one will notice but me haha, but it certainly makes me happy that things worked coherently and lyrically throughout the EP whilst telling many different stories!
It was so much fun creating this EP and it’s taught me so much too, as I did the whole thing independently without a label or a manager. I feel it’s really given me the confidence within myself, as I now know I can pull this off, which is such a great feeling!
The full EP Disconnect is available now on all platforms here, listen to it below.
