effe confronts feigned romance on rejuvenated trip-hop drop “Lick The Flame”

The track’s processed swaying drums, moody synths, and crystalline vocals coalesce into effe’s deeply introspective world. With a self-aware lyrical pen like Lana Del Rey’s, and a downtempo sonic palette indebted to Dido and Portishead, her tragically relatable words “Now I know there’s nothing left / ’Cause you let us fall” make “Lick The Flame”, the first taste of her debut EP Solder, out 7 August, an incredibly sincere modern excursion of beloved and inspiring trip-hop.

From a young age, effe, a Brisbane native, had been enamoured by the genre, and art more broadly. Her parents played a lot of Dido and Sade in the house, hence the slowed breakbeat genre piquing her interest, and Del Rey being a fixation at 12 years old. Simultaneously, she learned GarageBand on an iPad, took piano lessons in her tween years, and tinkered with music on her uni laptop as she studied film, which she pursued for its adjacency with music. “I knew how to play chords,” effe recalls. “But I was very much like, ‘How do you actually make good songs?’”

During her degree, she met her best friend Zoë Hilditch, who today has her own trip-hop project, Plumia – sonically closer to Melbourne’s more macabre, guitar-driven proponents of the genre, such as Dumbhead and Shock Corridor. But at the time, they met producer James Halstead (Tejavu) and started playing iconic electro-pop as WIIGZ, touring Australia’s largest cities for a few years in the early 2020s. “It was very pop and high-energy, but also dancey,” effe describes her former band’s sound. “It was so much fun for the both of us, but just totally different from what we’re doing now.”

After ending WIIGZ, effe moved to Melbourne and spent a full year writing new songs. She eventually met Joe Agius (RINSE), who became her manager, enhanced the songs she wrote, and truly helped get the ball rolling for her effe project, which, overall, is truer to herself. “You can just write what you want to write, like what you want to listen to,” she says. “That was a good thing for me to realise when I got a bit older.”

An indisputable appeal of effe’s music is its embracing of trip-hop, coming at the perfect time as the genre has lately cropped up in Melbourne more than ever. “I remember someone saying to me that trip-hop came and went, and you don’t want to do the same thing again because it would come and go,” she says. “It’s cool again to see people take it even further and pay homage to it.” Now Effe, who’s grown up with that music and witnessed its resurgence, is partaking in it too. That includes her visuals, which are appropriately inspired by a shiny, metallic Y2K aesthetic: “I don’t want to do them too heavy-handed because I want to make it last the test of time. There’s something really cool about making visuals really of the time, especially when you look back.”

Solder’s delectable sound is also owed to her collaborations with Alex Craig (After) and Edward Quinn (Telenova). Effe would write the structure of her songs on the piano and bring them to the others to sculpt their final shape. “Obviously, Alex is very tapped into that whole world, all his pedals and plugins are perfect,” she raves about Craig. His strumming on a Guitar Hero-looking MIDI to play an electric piano is what ignited “Lick The Flame”’s wistful energy. “I like how the two songs I have with him on the EP are different to the ones I did with Ed because it shows my range of the world in which I’m trying to create,” she says of the collaboration. “There’s room for both, which is cool.”

To effe, Solder is a “continuation” of her initial standalone singles from last year. The marked development is gaining the life experiences to reflect on. “It’s actually super rare that I write a song based on something I’m feeling right now, ’cause I think it would be too sad,” she says, also noting her Pisces zodiac sign. Being someone who doesn’t journal, it’s the songwriting that fulfils that purpose in the moment, giving more distance to her gruelling memories. They’re not always about her, either – the upcoming EP closer “Tears Always Burn” is for her friend: “Sometimes it’s nice not to be super connected emotionally to the songs.”

The fan response effe receives from her songs of figuring out “yearning, wanting, and feeling unwanted” makes her musical ruminations worth it: “It’s really nice when people are like, ‘I’ve literally been there’, because I’m writing it for myself thinking, ‘I feel like chewing gum on the floor. I don’t want people to be feeling the way I was feeling when I wrote those songs, but it’s nice to be related to and not feel alone.”