Knight Shift by Ellie Dixon: A fantasy-fuelled banger straight out of The Shire

What's Legolas shaking ass to in the tavern? The age-old question has been answered in Ellie Dixon’s latest single, Knight Shift. Grab your chainmail and bend the knee. It’s Medieval girl spring.

On her last two releases, Renaissance and Guts, there was an unmistakable air of BSE (big sword energy). On Knight Shift – a medieval club banger the London-based artist and producer never intended to release – the concept has been fully unsheathed.

Mixed by Manon Grandjean (FLO, Cat Burns, Stormzy), Knight Shift invites you to step into a fantastical – and let’s face it, fun – realm and pull up to the tavern with your fellow witches, elves, trolls and girls. The inspiration? All roads lead to The Lord of the Rings.

“With this whole round of new music, it's all been very fantasy and medieval-inspired,” says Dixon from her flat in London, although she’s originally from Hertfordshire. “Me and my whole flat were re-watching The Lord of the Rings and watching this Netflix show called Delicious in Dungeon – unbelievable,” she stresses, mid-sentence – “a great show. 

"I highly recommend it. It's an anime based on D&D campaigns. I love fantasy. I love these otherworldly worlds. The great thing about D&D and medieval imagery is it's something that everyone understands. It's a fantasy world that we've agreed on. 

"Obviously, Medieval times existed, but I mean it as in, you have these fantasy worlds that are very influenced by medieval culture, so you have this fantastic pool of inspiration that doesn't take itself too seriously.”

Take a peek at Dixon’s Instagram, and amongst the impressively intricate deconstructed harmony videos that have seen her go viral, you’ll see armour, goblets, elf ears and capes. And swords, naturally.

“There’s so much visual imagery to work with,” she nods. “I don't have to do any pre-educating for everyone. If I wear elf ears, everyone knows I'm an elf, because I am an elf,” she laughs.

Knight Shift was never meant to see the light of day. The song was inspired by a few memorable nights out with friends – “We’re an eclectic group” – and captures the feeling of confidence, fun, fantasy and chaos.

“Knight Shift was a joke – I wasn't writing it to release it,” she admits. “I was like, ‘What's Legolas shaking ass to in the club when they're not adventuring?’”

Dixon’s inspiration also derives from the weird and wonderful minds of Doechii and Doja Cat, and her masterful lyricism is kindred spirits with the chaotic camaraderie of Remi Wolf.

“It’s also super inspired by ‘90s and noughties R&B and hip hop, as well as Doechii’s latest album,” she shares. “I love her flow and how much humour she has in everything. Night Shift is this melding of pure feel-good, danceable, groove-led music that's about being a little elf girly throwing ass in the tavern.”

A lot has changed for Dixon in a few short years. These days, she tends to her staggering online following, (1.2 million TikTok followers, over 1.3 million YouTube views, 300K Instagram followers, and counting) she’s racked up over 18 million music streams, was nominated as TikTok Songwriter of the Year at iHeartRadio Awards, and her single, Swing featured as an official demo in Apple Logic Pro 2024 update. 

She’s been plastered across Amazon Music billboards across London, been BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record and Tune of the Week, and the Level Up Your Game campaign with VISA for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games saw her work alongside three-time gold medalist Adam Peaty OBE and creative technologist Tigris Li to make music using the swimmer’s body (and that’s not even her most unusual sample – it’s a microwave door closing, if you were wondering). 

On the flip side, she also moved to London during COVID and got dropped by her label.

“I love a bit of London,” she declares. “I moved here when COVID started kicking off. It was a weird introduction to London, but I was very fortunate that it was a very prosperous time, thanks to the internet. Best believe I did some live streams,” she laughs. 

“I did a live stream in an inflatable space suit. It was for my single Space Out! which was about dissociating and feeling stuck. This inflatable spacesuit became the absolute highlight for me and my family because I would run around the house in it, and we would all have tears streaming because of the way my little legs would shimmy past one another. It was a time of hysteria,” she points out, adding that it’s currently in her wardrobe, should the need arise. “It’s ready to go at any point.”

Headliner and Dixon trade stories about the recent BRIT Awards and the after parties. Dixon was at the TikTok party with the stars of tomorrow; Headliner at Warner’s with that horse from Danny Dyer’s table and Teddy Swims. From lockdown spacesuits to celeb afterparties, does Dixon find it surreal mingling with the music industry’s stars?

“I've had some moments,” she answers, grinning. “I've had some shocking BRITs after parties. One time, I spoke to Lewis Capaldi, but I was so drunk I couldn't see him. As a fly on the wall, that interaction must have been very strange. 

"It is completely mad. It's something that quietly happens, and you don't notice it as you start making more and more friends in the industry. Everyone says it's a small world, and it is. You don't realise how few connections you are away from everyone. 

"I was watching the BRITs with all my friends, and we were looking at all the nominees, and everyone sat at the tables, and we were like, ‘We either know every single nominee personally or have one friend in common.’ It's nice seeing all your peers doing amazing things and being inspired by the people around you. It's made me up my game and never rest on my laurels.”

It might be all BRITs parties, electrifying live shows and viral videos these days, but as a teenager, Dixon was so anxious she missed out on many formative teenage experiences. Releasing Guts in January 2025, she calls the song a samba-rock-dnb-pop fusion, painting the frustrations of the anxious mind. It’s a party song for the people who weren’t at the parties.

“That's the whole point of Guts,” she nods. “I truly felt like I'd missed out. It wasn't until recently that I started making friends with people who had had way more chaotic teenage years than me – some had the most genuinely crazy stories, and they were so much fun to listen to. But I had this weird moment of self-awareness where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have none of these.’ 

"Growing up anxious, you don't take as many risks, so I didn't have any of these bonkers stories, because I wasn't putting myself in a position to mess up or have something go wrong. I suddenly saw the benefit of what going wrong looks like and having all these amazing stories and life experiences. I felt like I massively missed out, and it was this panic of, ‘What have I done with my life?’”

She’s making it up for it now, though, she assures Headliner. “At 26, I'm living a crazier, more entertaining, risk-taking life than I have ever taken before, and I love it, but it's taken me this long because of the type of person that I am. I'm old enough and have enough confidence now that when I go into these situations, I'm not giving in to peer pressure. 

"My safety and my comfort come first, and so Guts was almost a grieving process. It was like, ‘I need to scream about this because I'm upset, but I'm still me, and I'm still brave for doing these things that scare me, even if it's just taken a little longer.’ I didn't want it to just be a woe-is-me song. It was like, ‘I'm annoyed about this, but also I'm proud of myself,’ so it’s this big, heavy, rocking out song about being anxious.”

Choosing to forgo the rite of passage that is passing around a Smirnoff ice in a field with mates, as a teenager, she and her friends found solace in a fantasy world instead.

“I had a friendship group made up of nerds, and we loved our teenage years,” she reflects. “Me and my best friend watched so much anime. We would learn dances to anime Idols, and we would make our own cosplays – I had wigs in the wardrobe. 

"There was a particular night when there was a massive school piss-up in a field, and me and my best friend just stayed in and marathoned all three The Lord of the Rings films. It's not to say that I didn't have really amazing teenage years,” she points out. 

“I'm grateful because it's made me very creative, and you can still see that in everything I do now, but sometimes you’ve got to mourn the thing that you didn't have as well as appreciate the thing you did have.”

As an adult, is she Team Legolas or Aragorn? “Growing up is truly fancying Aragorn at the end of it all,” she answers without hesitating, suddenly remembering a conversation she’d recently had with a flatmate: 

“We were doing a dream recasting of The Lord of the Rings if it was really yassified. We were casting Lady Gaga as Legolas. Wouldn't that be unbelievable?”

Dixon is refreshingly open about her experiences with anxiety. In Guts, she sings, ‘Adrenaline just to take the bins out.’ She says that going from that to pushing herself to put her music out there and to command the stage as she does today happened incrementally:

“It's been loads of ups and downs and shows where I've been really nervous,” she shares. “Growing up, my performance anxiety was truly crippling. I would be in a ball in the back of the car, and my dad would be trying to help me do breathing exercises to get me into the venue. 

"It's been a long journey. There has been quite a big conversation over the last few years about how excitement and nerves feel almost indistinguishable physically; the only difference is how we interpret it. 

"For me, it's being able to make peace with these physical sensations and understanding their purpose, and actually coming to love adrenaline – not like I want to jump out of a plane or anything,” she clarifies, “but loving adrenaline in the sense of appreciating what it does for me. It's an acceptance that nothing's perfect and that sometimes we are just uncomfortable.”

A pioneer of unique production styles and DIY sampling, Dixon has been pushing the envelope of what can be done in a bedroom studio. Self-produced and written, and mastered at Abbey Road Studios, Guts is the heaviest sound we’ve heard from Dixon yet, with a hooky guitar riff that, given her love of ’90s R&B, could be a nod to Destiny’s Child’s Bills Bills Bills.

“That’s not a conscious nod,” she considers, delighted with the comparison. “I didn't even think about that song, but I love that riff! We always take in everything we listen to. I was obsessed with Glee growing up – obviously – and The Warblers and Darren Criss – that's my president. 

"They did a cover of Bills, Bills, Bills. The riffing that he does, the whole delivery of the song and all the ear candy sounds they do are phenomenal. There's a compilation of all the best songs that they did, and that CD was played violently as a child,” she deadpans.

Dixon has always had an ear for picking out melodies and vocal stacks. She joined the school choir as early as she could and took music as a GCSE to study production.

“I started singing and was super shy. It took a good few months for me to get a note out to my singing teacher because, in choirs, you're lovely and hidden. I love the sound of harmony. That was the birth of my understanding of harmony. 

"I was an alto, so I was already used to not singing the main melody. Altos sing the most random parts because you're nestled under the main melody; it’s like filling out the texture. Then you hear it as a whole, and it's this magical thing where you've been one small part in what is the huge, incredible, thick sound. 

"When I started being the person singing the main melody, I was like, ‘Oh, I like this, too.’ Harmony stacking became quite a natural progression because I was singing. I loved production too. I had a microphone and a laptop at home, and I would just sing into the mic over and over, and I'd stack it up. 

"I could make a sound that was more than me, but I was just on my own, and I love that. It felt like pure, godly creation to be able to do that.”

When it comes to producing her music, Dixon reveals the key pieces of kit, as a bedroom producer, she couldn’t be without:

“Logic has become like a second body,” she says. “When you become used to a piece of software, it truly does revolutionise the way you create. There's a Fender Jazz Bass guitar I'm currently borrowing from a friend – it’s been about two or three years now. It's the nicest bass to play. You plug it straight in, and it sounds delicious. 

"It's the bass that you hear on every single song. It's just beautiful, and it’s such an amazing vehicle in terms of a writing tool because I'm not thinking about it, I'm just loving playing it.”

The entire Soundtoys plugin has revolutionised her sound as well. “It's made my production so much punchier. Shout out, Devil loc Deluxe – that's going on my vocal every single time, and it sounds absolutely unbelievable. I don't have to do anything. I'll just put that bad boy on. 

"Crystalliser is great as well. It's the most beautiful wet effect that's like a delay reverb, but weird because it reverses and messes with things.”

After unleashing Renaissance into the world last year, which Dixon calls “a musical phoenix from the ashes”, she ushered in a powerful new era, one born from a deep, dark place, after unexpectedly parting ways with her label. 

Dixon describes it as the most turbulent year of her life, starting the year the most depressed she’d ever been, to coming back as an independent artist with brand new music, completely self-funded.

“Self-producing saves me a lot of money,” she discloses. “If I spent the amount of time that I spend at this desk in a studio, I would be broke. It's really weird having a career that is so dependent on people liking you,” she considers. 

“The highs are so high that it makes you continually gaslight yourself into being treated quite badly at times, in terms of being in an industry that is so bad for your mental health. But I do it because I love it – the heart of it never goes."

“With a label – and I don’t have a bad word to say about Decca [Dixon says the decision came from upper management] – they're running a business, they're not integrated into the culture that they're essentially profiting off. That's a really strange place to be because, as an artist, to make the best art, you need to be truly innocent and go in with nothing but curiosity for what you are going to make and complete freedom in a place of no judgment. 

"If you speak to any artist about the best stuff they've made, they will say the same thing: that they felt free and let themselves experiment. If you mentally have the concept of the bottom line and the concept of commercial viability as this ever-present thing, there is such mental gymnastics you have to do to permit yourself to stop thinking about that when you're creating. I found that difficult.”

Being dropped was a fresh start for Dixon. “It felt like what needed to happen in order to move forward because it's quite hard to get excited and get a project together when you feel like you're waiting for something to go wrong. 

"Obviously, it was heartbreaking, and it's terrifying, losing your team in one fell swoop and all your funding because it's your job,” she adds. “But it gave me this crazy freedom. Once that happened, I could breathe again. There's an inspiration that comes with freedom and rebellion, and knowing that I'm striking out by myself. Now, I'm making the best music I've ever made.”

Hopefully, Dixon fans won’t have to wait too long to hear this new music, as an EP is in the works, and more singles. Expect swords, bangers and fat riffs.

"It's all in this fantasy world, but it touches on a lot of different themes,” she reveals. “It touches on a lot of different genres and a lot of different sounds. What I love about this particular campaign is that you literally cannot predict what the next song is going to sound like. 

"If you heard Renaissance, you probably wouldn't have predicted Guts. If you heard Guts, you're definitely not seeing Night Shift coming. I don't think anyone's gonna see what’s coming after Night Shift. The other two tracks on the EP add a different aspect to the world. It’s quite experimental in terms of how many different things it touches on. I love it.”

With the music ready, Dixon is currently toying with two EP names that may or may not be Knight-related. “They are so similar,” she laughs. “We've been arguing about grammar in terms of, how do we phrase it? It's like, ‘Am I going to the shops,’ or, ‘Do I go to the shops?’ It's the semantics of it.”

Headliner asks if today’s music title aversion to the Caps Lock has also factored into the discussion. Dixon is horrified at the thought. “Oh no, the caps are there! Listen, I love grammar. I love a good capitalised title.”

This year promises to be a busy one for Dixon, as in addition to the EP and singles to come (as well as another project her fans are sure to love), her UK and EU headline tour kicks off in September – her biggest shows to date. Dixon stays grounded through it all.

“I've had big wins in my career, and then I've woken up the next morning and made beans on toast,” she shrugs.

Last image credit: NICOLE NGAI