Sugar and Violence: Louisahhh on Trust, Shadow Work, and the Dancefloor
When producer Helsmoortel first reached out to electronic artist Louisahhh, the collaboration felt effortless. “He sent me something and was like, ‘do you want to put a vocal on this?’” she recalls. “It was an immediate full-body yes.” That exchange became the foundation for Sugar & Violence, the first of three EPs the pair will release together through Artoffact Records.
Sugar & Violence by Louisahhh x Helsmoortel.
For Louisahhh, complete trust in her creative partners is non-negotiable. “It's being able to honor and carve space for all the different kinds of work, and to be honest about what's possible on what timeline,” she says. That also means knowing when to let go, “if a song isn't the right song or if it doesn't feel like it's moving in the right direction, being able to not get too attached, or too precious, or too people-pleasing about it. [Helsmoortel] sent me a really great track that I had no ideas for, and I was like, ‘I don't think this one's for me.’ And that's okay.”
That confidence comes from putting years of practice into her craft. After releasing her 2021 album The Practice of Freedom, she stopped worrying about whether each idea might be her last. “Breaking through that feeling of, ‘what if this is the last song I’ll ever write? The last good idea?,’ it’s just trusting that it’s being channeled. I do morning pages, I do a lot of process just to keep the knives sharp, so there’s always a seed of an idea germinating, waiting for the right place to go.”
Lurking beneath the club-ready exterior of Sugar & Violence is the driving force that Louisahhh says runs through all her work. “There’s always a tension between who I want to be or who I wish I could be versus this rapacious part that is just like, ‘we’re here for self-destruction,’” she admits. “Longing for the bad thing is really fertile creative soil for me. And I feel like [Helsmoortel]'s work is dark enough that it supports that in a really powerful way.”
The EP centres on this push and pull between self-destruction and empowerment. One track is built entirely from dialogue from the film Poor Things. “It blew my mind,” she says. What stuck with her most was a monologue from Swiney, the madam of the brothel, “there’s this idea that care has to be precious or delicate. But life is tough. Care isn’t always going to happen on your terms, and that has to be okay.”
Louisahhh. Photo credit: Mae Ferron.
That juxtaposition between pain and performance surfaces across the record. The first single, “What I Want” comes from “a much younger version of myself that was very much trying to perform for the male gaze. Looking back, I’m not regretful, but it’s interesting to juxtapose those two versions of myself. From wanting to be loved by somebody else to rejecting the notion that anybody else's opinion is necessary for self-actualization or self-love.”
Louisahhh says that her career path is about following what she jokingly calls “the first rule of Fight Club: have fun and be yourself.” That refusal to compromise makes success all the sweeter, “when people in clubs dance to it, that feels like a real gift.”
For Louisahhh, integrity also means rejecting the narrow ways success is measured within the music industry. She’s cautious of rigid strategies and skeptical of the pressure to optimize for algorithmic growth. “Stream count is not a valuable metric for art,” she says. “It just talks about palatability, as opposed to actual value. Think about the music that you love the most in the world — I doubt that you listen to it a whole lot, because it’s super potent. I think that’s the music that I want to make, I don’t want it to be easy-listening. In fact, I’d rather die than make easy-listening music.”