She Drew The Gun: The ‘surreal journey’ that fuelled new album ‘Howl’

On November 15, Louisa Roach, aka She Drew The Gun, releases her fourth album to date in the form of Howl, a record that pushes her sound into new sonic territory and bares her soul like never before. Here she joins Headliner for a revealing chat about embracing vulnerability, creativity, and the ‘surreal personal journey’ that led her to where she is today…

“The whole of history is where my story begins,” sings Louisa Roach at the close of Howl, the opening track of She Drew The Gun’s new album of the same name. It’s a striking statement that directly describes the perspective she brings to what is undoubtedly her most ambitious and exposing record so far.

Over the course of her three previous records, Memories of Another Future (2016), Revolution Of Mind (2018), and Behave Myself (2021), Roach demonstrated a beguiling knack for threading different musical styles together with her incisive political and social commentary. From race and gender discrimination to capitalism, corruption and poverty, each record took aim at big subjects with a formidable degree of lyrical dexterity.

This time out, however, Roach’s stance has shifted, even if her targets remain the same. “I still talk about capitalist pigs and patriarchal power but it's a little bit more in the realm of the ancient and the awakening of a person,” she asserts at one stage during our conversation. Where those earlier works served as a document and critique of the times, her latest offering approaches its subject from a more conceptual angle.

This, however, is only half the story of Howl. What begins with a fresh take on the more pulsating, electronic-driven moments of Behave Myself, gives way around the halfway mark to a seldom glimpsed side to Roach’s songwriting. As we discover over the course of a quietly candid Zoom conversation, Roach explains how a tumultuous period of heartbreak and turmoil prompted, as she describes it, a “surreal personal journey” that would prove transformative in countless ways, both in and outside of music.

Lyrically and musically, the latter of half of Howl sees Roach make her biggest creative leap yet, detailing the devastation of a breakup to a backdrop of shimmering pop and emotive balladry. Evoking shades of Bruce Springsteen, Kate Bush, and Billy Nomates, it marks a major artistic divergence without losing a drop of the potency that has come to define Roach’s work.

Joining us over Zoom from her home in the Wirral on an Autumnal Monday morning, she is gently spoken and warm in her demeanour. Almost disarmingly so. The sharp edge of her fearless, confrontational style in song is softened slightly in conversation; the vulnerability she will go on to describe on account of making this album is evident her voice.

“A lot has changed for me, personally,” she says, explaining the origins of Howl. “I went through a lot of stuff in my personal life, some heartbreak… a bit of a dark night of the soul. That all came into the writing. One side is the heartbreak and the love songs, which is the most personal stuff that I've ever put on an album. And the other side is like the more socially conscious stuff. I feel like it’s captured this chapter of my life. A lot of different things went into making it.”

After an intense period of touring straight off the back of Behave Myself in 2021 and 2022, Roach found herself in the midst of personal crises. The breakdown of a relationship and the subsequent emotional fallout came to a head in a way that Roach couldn’t have anticipated.

“Behave Myself came out in September of 2021 and in the August after that I had loads of stuff going on my head,” she elaborates, speaking slowly and thoughtfully as she recalls the chain of events. “I was all over the place. Anyway, I went to a festival in Scotland and met someone in a bar. I walked over and this person just went, ‘Louisa’. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. I was like, ‘what’? And then she said, ‘I manifested you this morning’. She told me she was building a retreat in Portugal and I just burst out crying. She was asking what the matter was and did I need somewhere to go. I was like, ‘Yeah, I really need somewhere to go’.

“I had been carrying on doing gigs and stuff, but I wasn't in a good place,” she continues. “So I ended up going to Portugal that August, and at that point I didn't really have many songs. I did a lot of meditation and started doing this course called Working With Thoughts, which I thought would be good for stress and anxiety. Then some weeks into it I was told, ‘Now you're going to meet your inner critic’. It was like having an actual conversation with this inner critic that I put a form to. It was the start of this surreal journey that I'm still on. And I've ended up connecting with loads of past versions of me; I'm spending time with them and doing healing in that way. So yeah, a lot of surreal stuff.”

While the experiences Roach has undergone may have influenced Howl’s most intimate moments, she insists it was never a deliberate decision to make a more personal record.

“It’s like the song just wants to be written,” she says. “It's almost like the song already exists; something has sparked a feeling in you that just needs to be written about. I didn't set out thinking, ‘I'm gonna do a more personal record’. I just went on this journey and the songs came out at the time that they needed to come out. Behave Myself was definitely more of an outward looking album. And I still love to write direct political songs, but this was just a different phase of life for me. I don't know what the next one will be like either.”

As for how she is feeling today, Roach assures us she is in a much better place than she was at the outset of writing and recording Howl.

“I am definitely in a better place now,” she smiles. “A much better place. I'm focused on what I'm doing with the album and what's coming next. I suppose it is quite a vulnerable feeling to put yourself out like this. When you're putting a song out that’s pointed at someone else, like calling out the government or the psychos in control, it's a bit easier to do that. But I’m really happy with the songs, even if I do feel a little bit vulnerable putting out this many love songs. That said, it's not like those songs are all the same - they're all coming from different angles and exploring different parts of it.”

The recording process of Howl was also possessed of a more personal nature than previous She Drew The Gun records, with Roach working at home on the demos for the album with her son for the first time.

“He's got into music production, and we ended up working on the demos together, which previously I'd done on my own or with bandmates,” she notes. “It was just me and him, which was really nice. But I didn't have a set idea of what I wanted the album to sound like and I think that's why it sounds so eclectic. I was just giving each song what it needed at the demo stage, and then we went down to Margate to work with [producer, engineer] Ash Workman (Christine and the Queens, Metronomy) on the actual album.

“Once I had the demos it was clear it was sounding more poppy than the previous albums, so I thought I should probably work with someone who does pop. Obviously, it’s not like pure pop or anything like that, it’s very left of field pop.”

A decade into her career, Roach has now created four distinct bodies of work that have come to represent four very different sides to She Drew The Gun. From playing open mic nights as a solo act, Roach has taken the concept of She Drew The Gun and transformed it into a shape shifting entity, incorporating new influences, new sounds, and new members with every evolutionary step.

“It’s been 10 years since I started going out to open mics and just seeing how this thing would go,” she reflects. “Seeing if anyone would like any of the tunes I went and played. I suppose it's just all grown from there, slowly and gradually. And I'm proud of each album. Each one's got really good memories attached to it.

“With Memories Of Another Future I remember I was absolutely buzzing to be working with James Skelly [The Coral]. I was pinching myself. I was working in the studio, getting little sneaky recordings on my phone of what I was hearing and then listening to it as I was going to pick my son up on the school run [laughs]. It was just a dream come true.

“With Revolution Of Mind everything went really well and there was such a good response to it. And then there was Behave Myself – I just loved how that album turned out. Each one has got loads of nice things connected to it.”

And what about Howl? Has there been sufficient time since its inception to take stock of what it means to her?

“It feels like I’m really baring my soul,” she considers. “I've put everything that I've been through in the last couple years into it. It feels like it has this magic in it; I've gone on this surreal journey, and I've come out with this album, which documents that. But it's still got the political commentary, it's still got the political heart. I just hope that people can connect to it.”

Though each record so far has felt like a departure from that which came before, Howl truly feels, if not like the end of an era, then the beginning of a new one. It’s a sentiment Roach concurs with, although quite what the future holds remains to be seen.

“It does feel like the end of an era, but it’s not necessarily setting the marker for where it's gonna go, because god knows what it'll mutate into next,” she shrugs. “It's like Frida Kahlo, isn't it – I am my own muse. I'm the subject that I know best, so I'm gonna write about me. Everything's wide open.”

You can listen to this interview in full below.