Jade Thirlwall on Going Solo, Talking Politics, and ‘Angel Of My Dreams’
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Words: Daisy Jones | Photographer: Yana Van Nuffel | Creative Direction: Ione Gamble | Makeup: Grace Ellington | Hair: Mike O’Gorman | Styling: Zack & Jamie | Set Design: Lucy Cooper | Video: Charlotte Amy Landrum
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“Angel of my dreams / I will always love you and hate you, it's not fair,” so sings Jade Thirlwall on “Angel of my Dreams” her first single since leaving Little Mix – the most successful girl band of the 2010s. Her voice glides out in a silky falsetto, pitched-up slightly, like a Eurotrance song from the 90s, before crashing into a taut, punchy, Drag Race-like chorus. The song has subtle shades of Little Mix, but it’s also weirder and more leftfield than that, like something from sixth album Confetti dunked in fluorescent goo.
“What do you think?” her publicist asks, as I hand back the Airpods. I’m in the Polyester studio, listening to the track in person, which is uncommon. Usually, you’d get sent a stream, but the build up to this release has been shrouded in secrecy. It’s easy to see why: every day on TikTok, a new post purporting to be Thirlwall’s new single lands (usually an anonymous piano ballad), with fans doing avid detective work in the comment section to work out whether it's legit (it never is). A week later, the actual track does leak. It’s only a few bars, filmed on a shaky camera during a Blessed Madonna DJ set, and then it’s gone. Quickly erased from the internet. Pop culture forums light up immediately. “Where is it???” users type. “It’s been scrubbed.” “Can she hurry up???”
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It’s been three years since Thirlwall released anything (“Confetti” was the final Little Mix single), which isn’t very long, but to fans it’s been an age. They were used to her coming out with something every few months, a churn that Thirlwall herself had gotten used to. “Before, it was such a well-oiled machine, I didn’t even have to think about the process,” she tells me now over Zoom. It’s the next day and she’s at home, a psychedelic fabric draped on the wall behind her, hair loose and cascading down both shoulders, her face bright and well-slept. “We were together for 11 years. So every album cycle, I knew what to expect. But this process has been so different… I was so conditioned for so long to have that pressure of churning out music that I really had to reprogram myself to just exist with a less chaotic mindset and less pressure.”
After Little Mix disbanded, Thirlwall found herself at an impasse. She was in her late 20s then, but had never been left to her own devices. “I remember going into my flat, and just sitting down and looking at my diary and for the first time in my whole adult life, it had nothing in it. I was like, what do I do now? What do I do in my life? I knew I was on the verge of a menty b.” She went on a trip to Budapest immediately, tried to keep herself busy with friends and plans and her boyfriend. “I knew if I sat down for too long and took in what had happened, the spiral would have been hard. I’d had therapy and all that stuff, but… if you think that, from being 18 until up until that point, my whole life had been scheduled. We’d always have a year-long diary in place. To not have that anymore was so scary. But once I got over that, I was like, this is really exciting. Now I write the diary.” "
“My whole life had been scheduled. Little Mix would always have a year-long diary in place. To not have that anymore was so scary. But once I got over that, I was like, ‘This is really exciting. Now I write the diary.’”
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Once that excitement kicked in, she took herself to LA and started “speed-dating” for new management. “For the first time in my career, I was in control of looking for my team; it was really liberating,” she remembers. By that point, she’d already written a bunch of songs. She’d started writing during the tail-end of Little Mix, and had an idea of what she wanted things to look like, to feel like. She just needed the right team to pull it off. And, of course, she was no longer the wide-eyed 18-year-old that had auditioned for The X Factor – there was a self-assurance there. “It sounds so cliche, but I literally did feel reborn. My personality shifted. The minute I turned 30, it was like I suddenly stopped caring so much. For my music that was great because it meant I was going into sessions and being so much more experimental. I wasn’t caring about, like, ‘Is this a radio-friendly song? Is this going to work on TikTok’?”
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“The minute I turned 30, it was like I suddenly stopped caring so much. For my music that was great because it meant I was going into sessions and being so much more experimental.”
Much of Thirlwall’s music is about feeling trapped and released, controlled and liberated, this push-pull between a desire to be seen and unseen. “There was a formula within the band of, you know, girl power, or, ‘we don't like boys!’ – which we loved. But on my own it was more experimental, conceptually. The rulebook was thrown out the window of what a standard pop record should sound like,” she says. For “Angel of my Dreams”, she wanted to tap into her own experiences; not just that of a group, but hers. “It’s about my love-hate relationship with the music industry. I love being a pop star, but I also hate what comes with it. I feel like that song is, like, a three and a half minute version of my whole career squashed into a song. The opening sequence, to me, feels very like The X Factor, and then when the beat comes in it’s like I’ve been catapulted into the music industry. I wanted it to feel super theatrical. Almost like it's got three acts.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve interviewed Thirlwall. Back in 2018, just before Jesy Nelson left the band, I spoke to Little Mix around their fifth album LM5. I’d been taken, at the time, by the ways in which Thirlwall in particular wasn’t afraid to speak clearly about social and political issues. I’d assumed that those in pop bands were told to keep schtum or remain vague, that not doing so would risk “isolating their audiences” or whatever the deal was. But Thirwall wasn’t bothered about all that. She attended Black Lives Matter protests, on the ground, and was outspoken around banning transgender conversion therapy. In 2018, she became an LGBTQ+ rights ambassador for the UK charity Stonewall, and in July 2020, called out L'Oréal for not standing with the Black trans community after their treatment towards model Munroe Bergdorf. Most recently, she was spotted attending a pro-Palestine rally.
“I did think like, ‘Oh, I haven't even started my solo career – should I be so outspoken?’ But, I can sleep better at night knowing that I have.”
Thirlwall wasn’t always this candid. In the early days, she was what she calls a “basic bitch activist”. “I felt like if I said something that I felt strongly about, it might damage other people’s careers,” she says. But then, in her early 20s, there was a turning point. “I tweeted about bombing in Syria and the amount of hate I got was a lot. But then when I looked at who was doing it, it was all male MPs. At that moment, I was like… maybe I'm pissing off the right people. It wasn't friends who hated me, it was those who thought I had an influence over young fans. So it kind of spurred me on. As an artist, with such a huge reach, I do feel a responsibility to speak out about things. I'm from Yemeni heritage. So I've been quite passionate about the government's complicity in selling arms to Saudi Arabia. But also, you know, the Palestinian people – I've spoken about that for a long time. I did think like, ‘Oh, I haven't even started my solo career – should I be so outspoken?’ But, I can sleep better at night knowing that I have.
I’m interested in why Thirlwall is sort of an outlier in that sense. Why do so many pop stars on major labels choose to stay clear of political issues? Is it because they’re afraid of losing revenue, or alienating audiences? Is it because they feel it’s not their job? “I think it's for many reasons,” Thirlwall says. “Once you speak out about something, there's a level of like, well, you have to know what you're talking about. There's the fear that in the next interview, someone's going to be like, ‘So, what do you think about this specific thing?’ And if you don't answer you're gonna look like an idiot. Which I don't think is fair, to be honest – you can just be a decent human and say what you know. I always try to educate myself further on something if I'm going to speak out about it.” She pauses, for a moment, as if mulling something over. “I cared more [when I was] in the band. I didn’t want to drop anyone else in it. So I guess there’s a bit more freedom now, on my own.”
During her Polyester interview with Mikaela Loach, Thirlwall had asked the activist whether she ever thinks it’s an artist’s responsibility to boycott festivals. I wondered what Thirlwall’s answer to that same question might be. “I've not quite been in that position yet, so I don't know what that feels like,” she says. “But I admire the artists that do take a stand. I liked her answer about how, you know, it's always a community-driven or collective thing. If there are multiple artists who all agree to do that, then obviously change is going to happen. So yeah, I think it's the right thing to do.”
Aside from focussing on her solo music, Thirlwall has been seeing an astrologer. Which, in a way, is also kind of related to her music. She tells me that the astrologer revealed to her which dates she should release what songs. “I messaged the group chat like ‘guys, apparently it's a good day to announce something because it will be received well,” she cackles through the laptop screen, throwing her head back.
What else did the astrologer tell her? She thinks for a moment before answering. “She said I'm genuinely quite a lucky person,” she says. Well, that’s good! I say. Fingers crossed, then? Jade smiles in response. “I guess. But I get scared when someone tells you that; like all of a sudden I’m gonna fall down.”
“This is a dream come true for me… to curate what I would love to have seen. If I'd read this from people growing up, I would have maybe had a lot less issues.”
It’s nearly time for us to part ways, but before we do, Thirlwall tells me how much she enjoyed curating this issue of Polyester. She was hands-on throughout, doing research and selecting people that she was really interested in. It was odd for her, being on the other side of the editorial process, but it’s something that felt important to her personally. “This is a dream come true for me… to curate what I would love to have seen,” she says. “Which sounds so cheesy, but even yesterday when I was doing the interviews with Afua Hirsch and Mikaela, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ If I'd read this from people growing up, I would have maybe had a lot less issues.”
