Hirons’ “Vertigo” is a dizzying study in control and surrender

“Music has always been there for me,” says the British-American songwriter – real name Jenny Hirons. After learning piano for ten years as a child, she has turned a private habit into something intensely public. “I would play piano whenever I had access to one. I credit LA for bringing music into my life in the way it is now, with songwriting. I finally had the physical space to have my own piano.”

That sense of space became crucial. Now ten years deep into life in Los Angeles, the city offered not just room to play, but connection. “I accidentally ended up meeting a lot of musicians here and became involved with that scene socially,” she says. “My friends are all songwriters. LA is a big part of why I went down this path. If I was in London, I probably wouldn't have done so.”

Hirons’ sound exists slightly outside LA's dominant folk and vintage, nostalgia-tinged scenes. “I'm connected to people from those scenes, then there are people I play with who are involved in jazz and different kinds of music. I sometimes play in a band called Coffin Prick, which is perhaps a bit more similar to my music, or at least from the same world.”

Her solo music resists categorisation, grounded instead in curiosity and emotional clarity. The journey toward her debut EP Future Perfect (out today) was, by her own admission, a patient one. “It was a very slow process,” she says. “But it happened quite naturally. I had my piano and collecting a body of work seemed like the next natural step.”

The five songs that make up the project took years to finish, in part due to Hirons splitting her time with her career in graphic design. “I took two of the songs to Luke Temple, who is signed with Western Vinyl. He really believed in the music.” Western Vinyl would later go on to sign Hirons. “It was all quite amazing and very surprising,” she adds.

From that collection, “Vertigo” stands out. It was one of the tracks that she enlisted Temple's help with. “It's my favourite track on the record,” she says. “We got heavily involved with the outro and had a lot of fun with it. I had been interested in doing something around the subject of vertigo, which I suffer from myself.”

Ultimately, the subject became an emotional metaphor: “The sensation of vertigo made me think of the experience of being in an unhealthy relationship. The extreme highs and awful lows.” The result is a song suspended between chaos and calm, where hope flickers just long enough to soften the fall.