Watch: SLO - "Shut Out Of Paradise" [Premiere]

The track is a creaking ballad, drenched in echoes and Mills' fizzing vocal lines - her voice is forever on the verge of crumbling into the abyss and soaring into the sky. Despite the overt darkness in the lyrics, Mills ensures that there's a strident sense of optimism in her music; the smooth trip-hop keys and crisp percussion gel together to create a solid spine, and while the words slip in and out of the periphery, everything remains solid. This is a sublime pop gambit, ticking all the right boxes, and proves SLO as a formidable force to keep one eye on at all times.

Mills is no stranger to the industry, flying under her own name for a few critically acclaimed releases in 2011/12, and working with vaunted newcomers like TĀLĀ (Mills co-wrote "Alchemy").

"Shut Out Of Paradise" was written/produced with Catching Flies and members of Zero 7 and The Nextmen. The video is directed by lauded artist Kate Moross (Jessie Ware, Wild Beasts).

Read over our Q&A with SLO, and then check out the track afterwards.

Hi SLO, could you briefly introduce yourself for us?

I’m a singer and a songwriter, I write both for myself and in the last year I’ve started writing songs for other artists too. As well as working on my own record I’ve been lucky to write with some brilliant new artists in the last year.

What do you want to achieve with your music?

I guess the thing I dream about most for this project is playing big shows. It’s an incomparably amazing thing, a very surreal and tangible way of witnessing people’s connection to the music, if it can get to that point I would be very happy.

What's influenced you along the journey to this point?

The albums that continue to inspire me now have done since I first heard them, some of them many moons ago. Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk, Third by Portishead (Beth Gibbons is one of my heroes), Voodoo by D’Angelo, also more recently Burn Your Fire For No Witness by Angel Olsen, they all soundtrack my life on a daily basis.

How did you write "Shut Out Of Paradise”?

"Shut Out Of Paradise" was a song that happened over the space of a month or so. I had sung the melodies down at the end of one day working on something else with Brad [Ellis, The Nextmen], and then took the track away to write the lyrics. I wrote them over a weekend buried away deep in the countryside. George [Catching Flies] heard the song when we did some work together a few weeks later - I’m a big fan of what he does and was really excited he wanted to work on it. I love the way he works with space and a hyper-minimalism in his production. That felt like the perfect treatment for this song.

What was it like working with different musicians on the track? What did they bring to the process?

I love working with Henry [Binns, Zero 7]; he’s a dear friend of mine. Writing music together came as an extension of hanging out and loving a lot of the same music. Brad is such a diverse producer and writer - he’s one of the producers I work most with these days, and we have an ongoing musical dialogue and a lot of the work we’ve done has formed the back bone of this project.

How did you write the whole EP? Is there anything that's particularly inspired you?

The EP came together over a few months last year. I was writing a lot with Brad and Henry at the time, working on songs for the Zero 7 record, and the ones we recorded for me kind of happened simultaneously. Lyrically, the songs unravelled a lot of old ghosts, things that surprisingly continue to provide endless food for thought…

What was it like working with Kate Moross on the video?

Kate has a brilliant mixture of bold vision and an openness to collaboration. She was incredibly supportive of the project from the beginning, it was a real privilege to work with her on it.

What do you have planned for the rest of the year?

I’m in the middle of finishing the next EP that will come out later in the summer - I wrote part of it while I was out in L.A. for a couple of months at the beginning of the year. I’m also working on finishing my album. I’ve had real space to work on this record and feel so proud of the work that’s been done. I cannot wait to start playing shows in the next little while too, it’s been too long.

SLO's four-track EP will be self-released later this year.

You can watch the video for "Shut Out Of Paradise" below, and then download the track for free afterwards (it's only available for a week, so grab it quick!).