A lot of the album centers on the themes of shame, fear and masculinity. Was that a conscious decision? Or is that something that came naturally throughout the writing process?

Those themes I only realized after writing four or five songs and piecing it together, and I think it’s a good indication of where I was at. This was three years ago and only in recent years have I reached a point with those feelings of fear and shame. My way of navigating them has just been to hide the things that I feel uncomfortable with about myself, and in recent years I’ve realized that doesn’t work. Shame, in particular, thrives on secrecy and being concealed. I was at a point in my life where I started being a bit more open and it made its way into the music. Songwriting is so much easier than a conversation. Nothing is harder than a back and forth, and nothing is harder than eye contact. Songwriting isn’t a conversation, there is no back and forth. It’s a conversation with yourself, but you’re not in the room when somebody listens to it, there’s nothing confrontational about it. So it was a lot easier for me to start opening up in songwriting than it was in my day-to-day life. That was the beginning of me being a bit more visible.

I haven’t been controlling it, it’s been controlling me

The lead single, “Hideous”, is your first time speaking publicly about your positive HIV status. You’ve been living with HIV for almost half of your life—why did you choose now to start speaking about it publicly?

I found out my diagnosis when I was 17, and you know, I was a kid. My way of coping with it has been control. I know exactly who I’ve told, and if they’ve told somebody else, and that’s how I’ve navigated it for most of my adult life. For me, personally, it hasn’t been working. I haven’t been controlling it, it’s been controlling me. And my initial decision to do it was just such a hit the ‘fuck it’ button; I’m going to throw it out into the world and I’m going to be done with it. But the first person that I played the song to was Jamie, the second person was my mom, and my mom is a mom, she’s very protective and she knows me well, and she was like, this feels a bit drastic. Because she knew where I was at in my life. I would say most of the key people in my life knew about my status, but some people didn’t. Some people I’d maybe only told one time, and then just been like okay, we don’t talk about that now, that’s done. And she said, okay, maybe baby steps first, start having those conversations and see how that makes you feel first. Which was great advice from my mom, but exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Like I said, conversations are much harder, but I did have them. The first ones were very uncomfortable and felt very heavy, but each one I had felt progressively less uncomfortable. Then I started working my way further and further out of my inner circle of people, and by the time I released the song it didn’t feel like an impulsive thing; it didn’t feel dramatic.

That process must have been really cathartic.

Making the music has been cathartic, but it’s everything else around the music that has really—at the risk of sounding very American—it’s where a lot of the healing has happened. When I’m left with my own thoughts, my perspective of the world and of myself can get way out of whack. But just saying something out loud in company can give you perspective. And my intention of sharing stuff that I haven’t liked about myself hasn’t been to beat myself up or to make myself feel any worse—but the opposite. When you share something, it opens up a dialogue and my relationships are so much better, people are a lot more open with me. Even this interview is cathartic. We’ve just met, speaking like this would have been impossible three years ago. I just wouldn’t have been able to do it. Noticing things like that is really nice, because it has been gradual over a few years.

You said elsewhere that part of the writing process for this album was about mentally separating your sexuality and the stigma associated with HIV. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Yeah, I think getting my status at the age that I was, you know, at 17 you’re kind of just stepping out into the world for the first time, and you’re still forming, you’re still figuring out who you are. That was an age where I was just opening the doors; I was starting to be a bit more outwards and stepping out into the world, and for it to happen at that age, it scared me, it made me super scared of the world outside, but it also married itself to parts of me. I was just starting to be open with my sexuality, and now suddenly my sexuality is something to be scared of or something that could do me harm. It’s taken a long time to start unpicking that.

Jimmy Somerville features on three tracks on the album, as well as the Hideous video clip and the short film. Can you tell me more about how that relationship developed?