Sin Clair’s “Affirmations #2” is a considered exercise in heady, deconstructed club

Formerly part of The Ninth Wave and now playing keys for The Horrors, Kidd operates in a mode far from gothic pop when alone. “Affirmations #2” is a slice of esoteric deconstructed club produced with a sound collagist sensibility similar to james K and Tirzah. Her chopped-up vocal processing, a nod to Burial, sounds percussive as she voices near-intelligible phrases.

However, a song like the accompanying lyric-driven and piano-heavy “Exhale” is its origin. Kidd begins writing on the piano, then tears those songs apart upon returning after a few months, but still harnesses how it’s “incredibly real, highlighting the impurities of the creaks in the piano,” as she describes. “My songwriting process comes from the amalgamation of these two things, which sounds like it should be absolutely horrible, but sometimes it yields really good results.”

This artful synthesis of organic instrumentation and mechanical computer music shows great promise; only those who witnessed her rare live performances had initially heard them. Now, four years later, Kidd is revealing her sonic world untethered from genre limitations, with these two earlier works from an upcoming larger project showing what’s to come. It’s taken a while to give Sin Clair the space it deserves. Her solo songwriting dates back before her incredible enlistment in The Horrors, which clearly ate into her time. “I put a lot of energy into making other people’s work be out in the world to the detriment of my own stuff coming out. It’s all been for the best, I think.”

With The Horrors currently between albums, more time has opened to pursue this endeavour. A push from the band’s lead vocalist Faris Badwan also drove Kidd to do so. Badwan produced The Ninth Wave’s Happy Days! EP, and following their dissolution, Kidd stayed in touch by sending him demos, only for him to question why she wasn’t making a record. Her excuse to “be in a group situation” instead didn’t fly. “He really pushed me to do stuff with the songs I was writing, because I was still going to write them, but just release them in a way that felt true to myself.”

Madison Velding-VanDam, of New York post-punk band The Wants, also accelerated that process after Kidd opened for them last year. Earlier this year, he reopened his label STTT to provide a stable infrastructure for Kidd to release her music. “I’m very lucky to be surrounded by people who believe in me a lot more than I believe in myself, which I think needs to change,” Kidd says. “I think there needs to be a good balance.”

Kidd reiterates that she’s “not a natural solo artist... I hate being on stage by myself.” With Kidd’s live act once the sole way to experience her multifaceted musicianship, it’s fascinatingly at odds with her comfort. She has little equipment to hide behind; the onus to perform her music well is entirely on herself. “It’s a lot more vulnerable because it’s my own material,” Kidd explains. “If you make something good, you’re going to have a divided opinion. You can’t make something that everybody’s going to love.” At the very least, the positive encouragement from her collaborators and fans signals she’s doing something right.

Kidd admits that her confessional songwriting is more vulnerable than performing on her own. “I just really hope that people don’t read into my lyrics too much, they’ll understand a lot more about me.” This thinking matches her description of everything she does being “heady or emotional.” Like most club music, those elevating sensations are inescapable from “Affirmations #2” as it moves listeners both literally and figuratively. Yet, Kidd laughs as she reveals the unexpected humour injected into it.

“I’m obsessed with money affirmation videos. The visuals and really calming music behind them, ‘I am the path that travels, money will find me,’ all that shit. It’s so interesting how that’s where we’ve landed as a society. While writing ‘Affirmations #2’, I wanted it to be in that little-bit-stupid world. At the same time, the message is still potent, which I feel is at the backbone of everything I do: ‘What am I going to do with my life?’”

From her many years in Glasgow’s music scene, Kidd’s key takeaway is that collaboration is the most important factor of anything, especially in guiding a solo career. “Being in bands definitely taught me the importance of listening to other people, and you cannot ever take your own opinion as gospel,” she says. “You might have a leading factor that you want to follow, but at the end of the day, it’s important to also rely on the people around you that you trust.”

Indeed, James Greenwood (Ghost Culture) mixed “Affirmations #2”, and Joel Patchett co-produced “Exhale”, adding their flourishes to Kidd’s songs to ultimately give them the completeness they deserve. “I could do those things myself, to a point where they were passable. But why would you do them to that point, when you have all these incredible people who could push you further than you could ever get?” Sin Clair has slowly unravelled so it can be at its best, and that’s come from being in bands.