Elena Thorne on Failure, Solitude and Stopping Reading Reviews

Elena Thorne is speaking from somewhere that sounds like a kitchen. There are background sounds — a kettle, a chair scraping — and she makes no attempt to minimise them. This feels deliberate. In person (or as close to in person as a phone call allows), she is thoughtful, digressive, and occasionally blunt in the way that people who have spent a lot of time alone become.

Her third album was recorded over eight months in a rented house in a rural area she declines to name. She wrote, arranged, played, and produced it herself. The resulting record is the best thing she has made: fifty-three minutes of music that sounds like it was made with no concern whatsoever for who might hear it.

The new record sounds completely uncompromised. Was that a conscious decision, or just what happened?

It was what happened, which is the only way it could have been conscious. If you sit down and decide to make an uncompromised record, you’ve already compromised it. You’re making a record about not compromising, which is its own kind of posturing.

I just moved into this house with my instruments and some recording equipment and started making things. There was nobody to tell me something wasn’t working. Which is terrifying and liberating in roughly equal measure.

Was there a moment when you knew what the album was going to be?

About four months in. I’d recorded a lot of stuff that I ended up not using. And I played back what remained and I could hear a character. Something with a specific personality. At that point I knew what to add and what to subtract.

The discarded material isn’t wasted — it was the process of clearing brush to find out what was underneath.

The lyric about bruises, from the song “Glass Atlas” — that’s become something people keep referencing. Did you know when you wrote it that it was going to land?

Not at all. I wrote the line and moved on. Sometimes the things you agonise over don’t register and the things you dash off become the thing. I’ve stopped trying to predict which is which.

What I was trying to say, I think, is that I’m not interested in music that sounds finished. Finished music sounds like it belongs to someone else. Music that has a bruise somewhere — a note that isn’t quite right, a production choice that catches — that’s the music that sounds like it belongs to the person who made it.

You’ve talked about stopping reading reviews. How has that changed how you work?

Enormously. I didn’t realise how much of my internal monologue was other people’s voices. When you stop reading reviews — not just of your own work but of anything — you start to notice what you actually think versus what you’ve been told to think.

The strange thing is that it didn’t make me more self-indulgent. If anything the opposite. When the only feedback loop is your own attention, you get more rigorous. You can’t hide behind other people’s approval.

What does the next period look like?

I genuinely don’t know. I might record something immediately or I might not record anything for two years. The discipline I’ve developed is the discipline of not forcing it. When something is ready to be made, I’ll know.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can the album be purchased? Elena Thorne’s third album is available through her official website, Bandcamp, and major streaming platforms. Vinyl and CD editions were released alongside the digital version.

Has Elena Thorne toured extensively? She has selectively performed live, favouring smaller and more intimate venues over arena tours. Upcoming dates, when announced, are listed on her official website.

What instruments does Elena Thorne play? She plays guitar, piano, and various synthesisers, and handles the majority of the instrumentation on her records herself.

Is there a music video for “Glass Atlas”? A visual piece accompanying the song was released on her YouTube channel shortly after the album’s release.