The first time I saw Esther Joy was earlier this year at Glastonbury. I'd woken up, face down in a disgustingly hot tent, before dragging my body across fields of crushed chips and vomit towards the distant sound of synth and the unmistakable voice of Charli XCX filtering through the morning air. Charli XCX was amazing, as usual, but as she threw herself across the stage in a see-through raincoat, I noticed someone else just behind her; someone who had eyelids splodged with red make up and who was thwacking the synthesised drums with more vigour than I probably approach most things in my life.
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That person was Esther Joy, and a few months later, I am sat across the table from her eating a veggie burger in east London. As it turns out, Esther is more than just Charli XCX's bandmate – she's a sick artist in her own right. Earlier this year she released her debut EP Psychic Tears, a collection of five brutal, synth-led tracks in which her voice flits between a kind of pained falsetto and a distorted, laidback drawl. It's music to get in your feels to, basically, which is where the title comes from. "There are three types of tears and 'psychic tears' are the ones you get when you're stressed, angry or happy," she explains. "I think it's an amazing thing that our body does that, and I also think it summaries the EP fairly well for me."While her EP is worth being emo to, it's actually her new video for the fifth track "Friendless Necessity" that we're here to chat about, because we're premiering it below. According to Esther, the track was the first she'd written for the EP, and "it's about trauma. It's about 'bad' emotions. And it' s about trying to be set free from that stuff but also needing it at the same time. It's about having a relationship with these dark internal feelings as opposed to them just happening to you."The video itself is simple and visceral, the perfect accompaniment to the sweeping, angsty electronics of the track. Directed by Colin J Smith and edited by Steven Lang, the whole thing drenches her face in murky colours and patterns as she fixes the camera with various glares. "I think we just wanted to keep it really simple, with me just expressing emotion so I can connect with the viewer in a really honest way," Esther says. "The video is me trying to express all those different dark parts of me." Towards the end of the visual, black goo spills from her mouth, like an exorcism, as if there's a bunch of dark stuff inside her that's trying to be released.It hasn't been an easy journey to get here; not by a long shot. "I feel like I lost a lot of years…" Esther, who is now 26, tells me. "For a long time, I just wasn't doing anything and just failing at life, miserably. I was in rehab for a year, and after I came out of that I was really broken. I felt like a child, like someone had rearranged my brain. The whole world felt too loud and too bright and too much. I couldn't deal with anything. That was when I was 21 or 22, and then up until I was 24 I was in a weird state of nothingness. But then I started this audio engineering course at Uni and that really helped get back into everything."And now, of course, we're here, and there's a body of work and to show for it. "I don't necessarily feel like my music is a healing process for me. I think it's more like a documentation of it; a discussion more than an outlet. But music can be so powerful; the sound, the beat, everything… it can truly express how you feel internally, much more so than saying it with words."You can follow Daisy on Twitter.