Venbee takes us through her new EP ‘Back to the Drawing Board’, track by track
The rising dance star discusses how label trouble made her start again on a new release that rebuilds her foundations
By Nick Reilly
The genre-blending dance star Venbee returns today with new EP Back to the Drawing Board, which sees her take on a new sound and a new resilience after leaving her old label.
The Chatham musician explains that the title does what it says, and comes after a period where she had to take a step back and re-evaluate what her career could be.
“I originally had a different name in mind and a different vision for how it was going to go,” she says. “But life happens and things fall into place and I was discussing with my management about what to call the EP and I think I’d flown a few names out, and everyone was like, ‘Well, no, those are shit’. So I just went, ‘Oh, back to the drawing board then’, and one of my managers responded and said, ‘This is a sick name’. That’s how the idea was born.
Listen along to Back to the Drawing Board and read Venbee’s track-by-track guide of the new record exclusively on Rolling Stone UK below.
‘Not My Day’
I name check Lewis Capaldi on this one and he reposted it on TikTok, which I thought was quite sweet. The poor lad probably thinks I’m like a crazy fan. I love his music and his name rhymes with Aldi, which is why I used it, but I was very grateful that he responded to it, because he didn’t have to do that. I think my girlfriend called me and I was eating dinner when she told me he’d reposted it. I was sitting there eating Shepherds Pie, laughing. But I really like the song because it doesn’t really have a hook, it’s not conventional, but it’s gone down really well.
‘Stars (Johns Local)’
This song was born as a figment of my imagination. My friend Evan often comes to my flat and we make tunes and we have a laugh. I came up with this idea that’s so ridiculous about having a mate called John and his local pub is like, the maddest underground rave,. Originally on that song, the production was so different, it was like, you know, if you walk into like a club, and you’ve got that background noise. I wrote that song and it felt like something where I’d want to make a movie about it one day. I put it to the back of my mind, but there’s a DJ called Jigitz who was having a big moment in the States.
He messaged me because he’d seen ‘Not My Day’ and he wanted to work with me. He completely transformed where that song could have gone. So then me and Evan stayed up till 3 o’clock in the morning the next day trying to rework the production. It’s really cool that I got to release John’s Local and have the whole story behind it and now it’s turned into a really cool remix that he’s done.
‘Encore, Encore’
It’s a song about doing nothing, sitting in my flat and doing nothing. I’m an introvert that presents as an extrovert. I spend a lot of time by myself with my dog in my flat, sitting on my computer making tunes.
I spend a lot of time in my own company, so I wanted to make a song that was about that part of my life.
‘Intrusive Thoughts’
It sounds like a big title but it’s a bit more tongue in cheek, I guess. It’s about all those thoughts you get that are completely wild. You’ll be walking in public and if someone’s walking too slow, you have that thought to just move them out of the way, but you can’t obviously do that because we’re human beings and there’s something called decorum. It’s about that stuff and any sort of intrusive thoughts that I’ve had throughout my life, which sometimes can be a bit dark. It’s the power of the brain having these, these wild thoughts, but never never acting on anything, you know.
‘Song 2’
‘Song 2’ is probably one of the most like personal songs I think I’ve ever done, and also it’s not dance, so I do feel a bit nervous about it, it’s about where I’m from and people that have, you know, played a massive part in my life and how they’ve struggled.
It’s very much not about me, it’s about someone else. Everyone knows that Chatham isn’t a bougie area and there’s struggles, but it’s also pinpointing the reality of sometimes how bad that struggle can be. When people hear it I think a lot of them will be in the same predicament and the same situation and understand that it’s all about, you know, a broken system and that being passed on down the family tree. I want it to be a little bit eye opening, more so to people that haven’t experienced that.
Because I do think that there is always a stigma and a level of judgment sometimes that people have towards other people regarding life choices or where they end up or how they live or how their house looks or what clothes they wear. It’s a societal thing, you know, you’re always going to have that one kid in school that has fuck all but is going to lie and say that he’s got an Xbox One to his friends to make him feel like he fits in. I want people to know about that.