AA Williams had spent years studying classical music before stumbling across alt-metal titans Deftones in her mid-teens and becoming hooked on “all things heavy”. An accomplished pianist and cellist, it wasn’t until several years later, however, that she started playing guitar, teaching herself after finding one discarded in the street.
It was a good thing she did, as anyone lucky enough to have caught Williams’s recent YouTube lockdown project, Songs from Isolation, recorded at her north London flat, would agree. Her covers of songs by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Nick Cave, among others, were made all the more powerful by their skeletal arrangements, her take on Deftones’ Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away), in particular, taking it to new, spine-tingling places.
But it’s Williams’s own songs that are most impressive: minimalist singer-songwriter material blending with elements of classical, metal and post-rock to make a distinctive whole, most notably on Fearless, on which she duets with gravel-voiced Johannes Persson of Swedish metallers Cult of Luna. Quite apart from Williams’s knack for engineering towering crescendos, her songs are notable for their explosive shifts from quiet to loud. As she says: “There’s something very satisfying and elating about songs that have that drop in them, to stomp on the guitar pedal and let it all out.”
Forever Blue is released on Bella Union on 3 July
