Tatyana It's Over (Black Ice)

Don't come closer, because I might hurt you boy / You don't deserve it, I treat you like a toy." So sings 28-year-old South East London musician Tatyana on "It's Over", a sad and squelchy electro-leaning earworm about desire, loss and grey-area relationships. Much of second album It's Over is like this: bright, weird, danceable electronics paired with lyrics about frustration, anger and confusion. This notion of 'dancing through the pain' is a dichotomy that Tatyana leans into regularly. It's part of her personality: "I think people are afraid of being hurt and I'm the opposite," she says, simply. "I'm like, hurt me, because that's where real life happens. You can never protect yourself from everything." If you've heard Tatyana's name before, it's probably because she released a debut album back in 2022, Treat Me Right, co-produced with Metronomy's Joe Mount. Looking back, Tatyana describes this debut record as more of a collaboration, as opposed to a full portrait of herself as an artist. For It's Over, Tatyana took control of every aspect of the album's creation, from the production (she co-produced alongside Mikko Gordon) to the artwork and the specific technology she used throughout (KORG plug-ins, like one of her favourite artists Maurice Fulton, and Elektron synths, like The Knife). "The first record I made was a very different process. I didn't have the confidence to produce a record on my own," she says today. "This record made me technically proficient because I really pushed myself. I figured out a lot of things that I didn't know before. In the past, I made every mistake. I allowed others to lead the charge and I'm not doing that any more." Primarily written and produced over the summer of '23, It's Over follows the loose trajectory of a not-quite-relationship from the year before, and the push-pull emotions that came with it. But, more than that, it's an album about modern dating, alienation and the shadowy confines of existing online. Even the album name, It's Over, is itself a nod to the popular meme (It's over, we're back!). Internet language permeates this record in the same way it permeates our intimate lives (on first single "Down Bad", a chest-thumping, clattering dance track, she sings lightly, "I wish I could delete these feelings, I wish I didn't need to see ya") "The language [of the album] is how I speak to my friends. It's so part of my intimate personal relationships," Tatyana explains. "I feel like we're in a really dark time and a lot of that is to do with how being online numbs our ability to be intimate with each other... We're using all these terms that are stand-ins for real emotion. You're not actually expressing yourself; you're just using a placeholder." Elsewhere, on album opener "Bird of Prey", a bombastic, twisty dance track spliced with funky bass slaps and unexpected electro claps, Tatyana sings about repeating the same old romantic patterns, but trying hard to do something different. "I've been down this road before, and it never changes," she sings, her voice syrupy and casual over the crisp beat, "Fly away, you don't belong with me." She describes the song as a "mission statement" of sorts. "It just introduces musically everything that follows," she says. "It's at the start [of the album] because I haven't been completely worn down yet. I'm still quite confident and self-assured and putting boundaries in place for healthy reasons, as opposed to unhealthy reasons. But again, there's still this friction. It's not a 'we're doing great' song - it's 'this is wrong and things aren't going to work out' between us'." In many ways, It's Over is like a tapestry of Tatyana's music credentials and eclectic, transient upbringing. Born in London, before moving to Russia, Holland and Singapore in her teens, before eventually landing in the USA to study music at Berklee College - which she attained on full scholarship - and then back to London, Tatyana imbues her music with both haywire technical proficiency and encyclopaedic, far-flung tastes. Mostly, though, her sound originates from a pure love of the dancefloor: Robyn, Tirzah, Mica Levi, Jessy Lanza, The Knife, LCD Soundsystem, Four Tet. You can hear these dance-pop influences everywhere, from the colourful synth shapes of "Control ft. Dave Okumu" to the crackling analogue hiss of "Nothing is True, Everything is Possible" and the swirling, undulating melodies of "Out of Time". Lean in a little closer, too, and you might catch the shimmer of a harp on every song (she's played harp since she was a little girl, and toured extensively as a professional session harpist). Cult Detroit producer Maurice Fulton is also a figure that she name-checks regularly when speaking about the creation of this record. She spent months trying to track him down in the hopes that they might collaborate, attending multiple DJ gigs and messaging him via various channels, to o luck. "I spent a night listening to basically every piece of music that I could find, although I'm still finding new pieces of music because he's very prolific," Tatyana says. "And he made this record with this artist Kathy Diamond, Miss Diamond to You. And it blew my mind when I heard it. I almost started crying out of frustration because I was like: this is what I wanted to make." Eventually, Tatyana realised she could just make the record she wanted to hear, using everything she'd learned from Fulton in the process. "What I ended up doing was that I really studied this record," she says. Hence the Korg plug-ins, and the weird, hooky, synth patches that shine though. When it came to working alongside Gordon (The Smile, Arcade Fire, Idles), the two of them created a "rubric" so that Tatyana could track the progression of each song in the studious way that she's used to. "My mix engineer, Mikko, was a professor at Goldsmiths [University], so I was like, 'let's make a rubric, where we can grade each song on'," Tatyana says. On the rubric were categories like "groove, effortlessness, weirdness, irony and the internet, sound system, human element, noise, DJ, Harp." No song was complete until each element was ticked off. To outsiders, this specific way of working might sound overly detailed or academic. But for an artist familiar with honing her craft, this was a way for Tatyana to make the record she wanted. "I wanted to make something really cohesive, almost like a concept album, where everything sounds like it's from one world," she says. "Something you could play at a dinner party or a pregame that people my age could enjoy." You could view It's Over as an introduction to Tatyana, showing the full breadth of what she's about - at least for this snapshot in time. The artwork shows her alone in a pink gown and leg warmers, surrounded by shadowy streets, like a bright burst of emotion amid isolated surroundings. In some ways, that's what the album sounds like. A beam of heartbreak at a time when everyone's pretending not to care. "I write about love, I write about romance, these are the things that interest me," says Tatyana. "That's what this record is. It's about this relationship that broke my brain and I had to write about it.