Music
Interview
SISTRA: “Our North Star for writing is if we start crying in the studio”
The rising alt-pop duo on mining their sister relationship to create new music
Sylvie and Sasha aren’t afraid to bring sister conflicts into the studio. The musical duo have recently scrubbed their Instagram to make room for a new concept: a fraught family home that they’re building from the ground up, a space in which to explore every side of the sibling bond.
The lines between narrative and real life do blur, they confess, but the two are very close in real life. They live ten minutes down the road from each other, although – “We don’t live together. That’s maybe one step too far.” They describe breaking into “sister language” in the studio, translating for their collaborators after they’ve already silently agreed. Two EPs in and still full of inspiration, they’re meticulous about their reference points, and their evocative alt-pop demonstrates a duo already settled in their sonic identity. Ahead of their set at Oslo for The Great Escape’s First Fifty showcase, we sat down with SISTRA to talk about how they’ve mined their personal lives to create their artistic personas.
When did you start making music together?
I mean, we’ve always played together, and made probably some terrible things when we were tiny, but I guess lockdown was when we kind of locked in and started making stuff together in a serious way. But all the groundwork was done years and years before, without us realizing, just through us covering our favourite stuff together and making little songs.
Were many people in your life surprised that you went down this route?
I think a lot of people were surprised, because we were quite insular about it. We were playing covers together from a young age, but we weren’t performing together. So I think when we dropped our first cover in lockdown, people were shocked.
Earlier in your career, you described your music as ’emotional music for emotional people.’ Is that something you feel still applies to what you’re making now?
Definitely. Our North Star for writing is really if it makes us start crying in the studio. That’s when we kind of know that we’re excited about the song. To move people is kind of the key in everything. Our favourite films are films that really move us, our favourite music is the same. That’s what we want to do.
I’m really interested in this narrative you’re creating on social media around your upcoming track, ‘Things I Really Mean’. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
We’re building this world, which I guess is a heightened version of the reality we have as sisters, which is essentially us stuck in our familial home that we’ve kind of never left, and trying to separate ourselves from this co-dependency to spread our wings out in the world. I guess that came in this song in the form of falling in love, and what that does to a sister dynamic. We’re each other’s number one, but then if one of us has fallen in love, how does that work?
Does digging into those difficult dynamics ever put a strain on your real-life relationship?
In a word, yes. But it’s a catch 22. It’s a sort of healing thing. It’s a form of therapy. It seeps into therapy. It’s a mess, but a kind of beautiful mess, and a lot of humour comes out of it, and also a lot of closeness and learning about ourselves and each other, which is great.
How do you feel about performing live these days?
We’ve come to love playing live now. I think at the beginning, it’s a really scary thing, and we’ve talked a bit about recently how it’s nice when you’re performing to have a kind of persona that’s bigger than yourself to help with nerves and with performing. Playing with your sister next you is great in some ways, because we’re in it together. But then also it’s tricky overcoming each other’s gaze, sort of like being clocked by your sister. I feel like we figured that out more recently and we just really enjoy it now. We’ve got movements. We’ve got, like, our ‘dance mums’. We’re keen to just keep building and keep bettering our live show into an extravaganza.
Which artists have inspired you when creating those live personas?
There are so many artists we love. Rosalía’s live performances have such a power to them and a drama. It’s quite cinematic, what she creates on stage. We really want to do that.
What are you listening to at the moment?
I think this year has been an Oklou year. We’re obsessed with her. We’ve been loving PinkPantheress. And like everyone else, we’re listening to the new Lily Allen album.
If you could go back and give advice to your younger selves at start of this process, what would you say?
The really obvious one is to trust the process, and also, don’t always be looking outward for the answer and for the creativity. Look inward. It’s all in you. Our reference points, what we grew up listening to… it’s all there. You don’t have to think, “That’s what they’re doing so I’ll copy that,” or, “That’s popular at the moment.” Trust what you’ve got inside.
Part of being an artist is to be inspired. We’re artists, but we’re also stans of music, and I think that helps you grow as artists. But it’s okay to put the blinkers on and just make our favourite music. That evolves itself, so that will keep us in good stead.
Looking five years ahead, do any particular goals come to mind?
There’s definitely venues we want to play. Brixton is on the list. Ally Pally is definitely up there as well. Glastonbury, of course. But also just building a full world and the fans to go along with it. We’re very excited to reach them.
How is working with your sister different from working with another close collaborator?
It’s very different because we can never not be sisters. You can not be friends or not be colleagues or not be band mates, but we’ll always be sisters. That means we have to sort of enforce these boundaries to make sure we stick to them, because there were just less boundaries at the beginning. You wouldn’t speak to colleagues in the way that you speak to your family, and that’s good and bad. But it’s also a kind of special power that we get to harness.
