Words by Tina Edwards

Natasha Khan—AKA Bat For Lashes—is taking a break from working on performance costumes.

Her mum has taken her young daughter out for the day to lighten the load; the child who is the muse for Bat For Lashes’ sixth studio album. The Dream Of Delphi is maternally driven and etherally-charged. The album’s tender sparsity and shimmering textures could draw comparisons to Kate Bush’s Aerial or even Cocteau Twins’ Milk & Kisses in how it cradles you. 

Natasha gave birth to Delphi in LA during lockdown. “At that time I was in this very insular, introspective place of doing loads of breath work, meditating on the baby, and doing lots of walking in nature—being quiet”, she explains. “But then when Delphi was born, I felt like it was a huge atomic explosion inside of this really quiet world where everything would kind of shut down; I started playing piano and the music started to flow in the moments where I wasn't totally sleep deprived and tired and psychedelic!”. Studio time was limited and precious. “I found a method which was to go away to the studio and just record improvisations—things started to appear fully formed”.

At Your Feet flowed easily—it was written and developed in a day, whereas writing the track,The Dream Of Delphi, provided a revelation: “the arpeggiated scale, bass notes, and the lyrics came out, and then I started to think: this is my very own bleary, liminal, improvised way of trying to channel what's happening emotionally for me at the moment”.Natasha elaborates: “The Midwives Have Left [and] Her First Morning have so much space, tentativeness, and quietness to them; I felt like I was in a tunnel between who I was and who I was becoming... I was trying to grab these themes and ideas and feelings, but sometimes they were fleeting, and sometimes they were so overwhelming or powerful. Hormone induced or not, I had a lot of profound feelings running through me."

The previous album, 2019’s Lost Girls, drew on vastly different contexts; 80s sci-fi, biker girls and nostalgia set the palette. This time around, the tracks are less structured. “When I first started going to the studio I realised that I wasn't sitting down and doing the craft of songwriting ‘verse-chorus’. It wasn't that kind of album. It was a much more instinctive, intuitive process”.

Natasha worked with the tools at her disposal—the restrictions of which sculpted the sound of the record. “I didn't have a lot of choice…so I was given a palette of sounds really. Out of the—maybe—twenty types of instruments, I repeatedly used the Juno, the Prophet, the 80s Synth, and the Mellotron—which had recorded tape loops inside each note! The Beatles were famous for using that”. With the encouragement of her assistant producer Tyler Karmen—Natasha is the lead producer—she experimented with the vocoder: “It was very strange, but we came up with this sound. Then once I had my palate, I felt comfortable that for whatever reason those sounds worked well together and they mirrored my feelings. How I felt inside was mirrored sonically".

The album, being the bohemia-laden, shoegazing offering that it is, lends itself to generous visualisation. It gave Natasha the perfect opportunity to realise a long-desired goal to create a long-form film, which she describes as “vulnerable—exposing in some ways”. Featuring a trilogy of women—including Natasha—the film is choreographed to reflect the sound world offered by the record, loosely inspired by her love of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch as well as Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramovich.

“[The Dream of Delphi] naturally seemed to just evolve into a visual piece”, says Natasha. “To express [the album] with dance, performance, landscape, poetry… It's like soundtrack music. I also used old voice memos of piano songs I had recorded at the time that Delphi was born [as well as] voice notes and archive footage of Delphi as a baby in LA; a real, rich amount of things. If I had wanted to do a film before, I would have had more of a script or I would have believed that I needed actors or ideas... whereas this one, it just sort of came together”.

Whilst the album has been born as a tribute to Delphi—”I think she thinks I’ve just made it for her and no one else”—I can’t help but wonder if there are any elements of her own mother that have been reflected in the album.

“My mum was a very young mum; she was 21 when she had me—I had Delphi at 40. [She] was also a single mum that brought up three children on her own. What I’ve taken from my mum is her youthfulness, her love of music. She took me to Michael Jackson’s Bad concert when I was nine at Wembley Stadium. We were always singing in the car, and she was very glamorous and fashionable and into pop culture—she always has been.""She still knows all the new songs on the radio which I don't! I suppose my love of music and being transported has come from her. She's like a wild horse inside a mum’s body—she's got that wild spirit…”, Natasha muses. “It's been really nice seeing her be a grandmother. There's a lot of healing that goes on between mums and children and grandmothers''. If we’re to take a cue from Natasha’s music—and her very own range of tarot cards, the Motherwitch Oracle Deck—we can assume that she’s a deeply spiritual person; a warm and hippy-hearted neighbour who is impossible not to get along with. Although, Natasha finds herself in and out of phases with spirituality.

“Sometimes people think spirituality and rituals can sometimes do a disservice because we use it to beat ourselves up if we don't do it regularly or we're not doing it right. I don't believe there's a wrong or right. I think you can go through phases of needing that kind of intuitive hit; there are those punctuations in life”. With six studio albums under her belt, kicked off by Fur and Gold in 2006, Natasha isn’t in a rush to plan her next move. She prefers to let ideas grow at their own speed, as opposed to plotting out her path.

“I have done that—[plot my path]—but I know it doesn't work for me. It brings up all sorts of human ego stuff, negative self talk, frustration and procrastination. If a farmer was to plant his seeds and then go pull all the pumpkins out of the ground a week later and be like, where's my pumpkin….?” Natasha trails off. “You have to let that natural cycle of development and growth happen. I'd rather avoid that altogether and go and do some painting, or spend time with my daughter, or walk in nature or all the things in the [tarot] cards really."

Natasha ponders. “Having said that, I've got ideas bubbling away under the surface. I know what I want to do. But I think there's a real power in just letting things stay, and build, and grow without voicing them or turning yourself out to the world too early. So there's things coming for sure, but they're just starting to sort of take up space in my body, and I'm housing them quietly”.

The Dream of Delphi is out now via Mercury KX.