Daughter's Elena Tonra interview: 'It's unfortunate that I attach my work to feeling unhappy'

Where indie folk band Daughter’s first album was shrouded in metaphors, their heavier follow-up saw frontwoman Elena Tonra let her guard down and step out from behind the poetics. “I feel quite strong in the fact that I can write things that make me look vulnerable,” she said at the time. On her new solo album, though, recorded under the moniker Ex:Re, Tonra lays herself so bare that you feel as though you ought to look away.

“I see your fingerprints on household things I’m just too sad to touch,” she sings on “Too Sad” over gnarled electric guitars. “I feel your skin on human beings I’m too sad to f***. If I could write you back here, it would be my best work.”

Chronicling a breakup she went through a little over a year ago (Ex:Re, pronounced “X-ray”, is a play on “regarding ex”), the album didn’t bring anyone back – but it might just be Tonra’s best work anyway. Having found acclaim as the lead singer of Daughter, which she formed in 2010 with bandmates Igor Haefeli and Remi Aguilella, Tonra has stepped out on her own and poured out her soul.

“This album’s made up of a lot of things I haven’t said to the person,” she admits, perched on the sofa of her cosy, cluttered London recording studio. “These are deeply personal stories that I’ve for some reason just decided that I need to tell everyone.” She says this with a laugh. Dressed all in black, she often qualifies intense, melancholic thoughts with a giggle – perhaps out of awkwardness, or in an attempt to reassure me.

Tonra sees the album – which was written over the course of a year in a process she compares to vomiting: equal parts unpleasant and cathartic – as a collection of letters she was too scared to actually send. She started writing it as soon as she realised her relationship wasn’t salvageable. “Because it made me so deeply upset that it was definitely done,” says the 28-year-old from northwest London, “I think that was the time I was like, ‘OK, I need to just deal with this wave that’s now here.’ It was just to try and swim out.”

When the album is released on Friday, those “letters” will be heard not only by the person they’re about, but by anyone else who cares to listen. “I hope they’ll be received knowing that they’re from a different time,” she says, “and knowing that I don’t feel those things anymore. Especially the anger. I really want the person to know that I’m not that bitterly angry anymore.”

There is indeed a magnitude of anger on the record. At times, such as on “Liar”, the fury is directed at her ex: “Tell the truth, you self-absorbed lightweight / Too late, too late, you liar”. Elsewhere, she’s angry at herself. “I raged through, wine-wasted, s**t-faced, solo”, she sings on the despondent, uncomfortable “New York” atop wailing, almost-off-key strings.

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That song was written after a trip to the US, during which Tonra found herself growing envious of the settled domestic life of her friends. “Their life was moving on and they were growing as people,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘God, why am I such a drunk mess? That’s all I can do. Go and get drunk.’ It felt like I was stuck. I was sinking myself into something which I could have tried to fight.” She catches herself. “Well, f*** it, I was in that state. Fair enough. I’m not gonna feel guilty about that.”

On “Romance”, whose muffled beat feels like being one room away from a house party you wish would end, Tonra’s attempt to find comfort in a stranger backfires. “I thought of another the whole time”, she sings, “who would have never stared me like that / See, he saw me as a human / This one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse”.

“It’s detailing a night where intimacy felt kind of cold,” explains Tonra. “I was wanting to find something in someone that wasn’t there.” Almost immediately, she became uncomfortable in that person’s presence. “It can just be in a look,” she says, “that makes you feel like, ‘Actually, I just wanna go. I don’t know what that look is, but that look doesn’t make me feel respected.’ As soon as your body starts to think fear... I don’t know what it is, it’s strange, but you have to listen to it.”

It didn’t take long for Tonra to acknowledge that Ex:Re couldn’t be a Daughter record. Before her last relationship, she dated the band’s Swiss-born guitarist Igor Haefeli for several years, but they broke up just before the release of their 2013 debut album If You Leave. It would surely have felt a little odd, then, exploring the aftermath of a breakup in such intimate detail with another former boyfriend. But that’s not it. “All the Daughter songs are personal,” she says, “but it just felt like another level. I was like no, this is too much, this is like handing Igor and Remi my personal diary and being like, ‘Have a flick through guys! Let me know if there’s any good stuff!’

“I just felt almost a bit like, ‘No one touch them’,” she continues. “It felt like I had to tell this story the way I needed to. Otherwise I might lose something along the way, and then I can’t get over it.” There’s a pause. “I’m still not f***ing over it! But I’ve done my best.”

Tonra is proud of the finished record, but throughout the process of making it, she’s had one lingering fear. What if she deliberately destroys her world in order to write about it? “I’ve been trying to analyse my own behaviour,” she says quietly. “When you see things cycle round, and that slightly destructive element… Why is it that when things go well, suddenly they start dissolving really quickly and then they end? Is that just life, and that’s what happens? Is that my doing?

“It’s just unfortunate that I attach those experiences to writing. If I’m attaching my work to that, to feeling unhappy, then I wonder how much is me going, ‘Set that on fire so you can talk about it.’”

She starts to laugh again. “I really f***ing hope not. I just wanna be happy.”

Elena Tonra’s debut solo album Ex:Re is out on Friday