QSC Aspiring Interview: spill tab on debut album ‘ANGIE’

Having collaborated with Metronomy and supported Sabrina Carpenter on tour, 2025 is the year in which French-Korean artist spill tab releases her debut album, ANGIE. This Los Angeles-based singer and producer chats to Headliner about the brilliant singles she’s released for the record, singing in English and French, her huge support slot for Charli XCX in Paris this Summer, and how Guinness tastes different around the world.

Born Claire Chicha in Bangkok, Thailand, to an Algerian father and a Korean mother, spill tab also spent time in Paris before settling in Los Angeles. Her musical project was announced to the world in 2019 with the release of her debut single, the brilliantly assured Decompose. 

While many artists often become unrecognisable from their very first release, Chicha’s first single was the perfect introduction to her stylish bedroom pop, lo-fi music production and her Billie Eilish-esque, almost whispered vocals.

Things built very quickly, with a following established in good time for her 2020 debut EP, Oatmilk. The opening track, Calvaire, let the world know this was not an artist who felt bound to the English language, and the third track, Santé, also sees Chicha singing in French. Generating tens of millions of streams, the EP is deeply impressive as a first collection of songs, and it’s little wonder that its popularity continues to this day.

Chicha has just got back to Los Angeles after supporting Perfume Genius in Europe, and is pleased to report that: “The weather in LA is gorgeous, the tacos are good, and the beer is no longer cheap, but it's affordable, and that's all we can ask for. 

"In Europe, I was just living it up on all the beers there. It is crazy how Guinness and pilsners will taste different in different places. Those European beers really do be tasting so much better in Europe than they ever could in the US.”

Chicha had a fairly unique childhood in that she spent a lot of time at her parents’ post-production audio studio in LA, until they were forced to close it due to the recession and film studios starting to record and engineer in-house.

“My parents met in Bangkok,” she says. “My mum is from South Korea. My dad grew up in the South of France. They were on a work thing, and they met at the airport, which I find super romantic [laughs]. We've moved countries many times. I've had, like, 21 different addresses where I've lived. My Dad grew up a jazz man and played the sax and the flute, and was a composer. 

"My mum was obsessed with the piano and classical music. When we moved to LA, they started a post-production business. So it was a lot of dubbing movies from one language into 40 other languages, or doing ADR sessions. They would do orchestral engineering, recording, and mixing. There was this big recording room where they would record 40 or 60-piece orchestras, and I had the whole mixing board in front of me when I was tiny.”

With the decision to make her music bilingual as early as 2020 on her first EP, with its even split of French and English language tracks, it was something Chicha pondered on — the commercial implications of doing so, weighed against her artistic vision for not singing solely in English, as many non-English speakers feel obliged to do for their music to reach the markets of the US, the UK, and beyond.

“I loved listening to Bossa Nova when I was younger,” she says. And I'm a huge Rosalía fan. I feel like a lot of artists that sing in their native tongue, I find it so beautiful, and it's a different way to interact with the music — when you don't understand the lyrics, you are thinking about the production and the way the vocals sound. When you can’t understand the lyrics, your other senses of the music are heightened. 

"When I decided to incorporate French, it was partly to represent my identity in its fullest form. But I was also excited to utilise a different language, almost like a new instrument, because French does flow very differently from English. It was a way to experiment with texture and I just also thought it sounded fucking cool.”

Chicha’s love of sticking a number of genres into a blender and switching it on, full power, is evidenced again on Assis, one of the recent singles for her upcoming debut LP, ANGIE. Choosing to sing en français on this track, it’s a track that initially places you somewhere between the ‘60s and ‘70s with its Rhodes piano and bass guitar groove, before the modern lo-fi production and vocals enter the mix.

“We started Assis on the drums and bass,” Chicha says. “The essence of it already had this Euro ‘50s cinema vibe to it. That guided the choice to sing in French quite a bit. I was leaning into this idea, with it feeling like a movie. It feels like an Italian or a French movie where they're driving down the coast with the girl having a little scarf on her head, and it's a convertible.

“One of the things that I had in mind that I wanted to exercise was more live instruments, and more instruments recorded onto a mic. So there's a lot of upright piano, and there's trumpet on the album. There are live recorded strings. I think with that territory comes a lot of humanity and human error, and that breathes a lot of life into a track. If it didn't have that, it would be to the grid, which is super cool for certain contexts. I wanted to feel like it was breathing a little bit.”

Prior to this single release was the album’s title track, with an accompanying music video in which Chicha gets into a car in a junkyard, only for her and the car to be lifted high into the air by a crane. In keeping with the rest of the record, Chicha brilliantly achieves her goal of melding real instruments with the electronic: in this case, acoustic guitar with electronic sounds and a lead electric guitar plastered in effects pedals. Her vocal refrain soars over the grungey textures; on paper, it shouldn’t work, but it does.

In terms of producing the album with the co-producers she worked with, she says that “It was me carving out what I liked and didn't like, and then moving stuff around. They’d bring loads of ideas to the table, and then it’d be 20 per cent of me adding stuff. On Angie, we worked on that second verse in the studio — I didn’t want to add new instruments, I liked the instruments that we had, but we didn’t have them with us in the studio anymore. So I just chopped and spliced the guitar from the chorus, and then pitched it around and made that the verse.”

Beyond ANGIE releasing in full on May 16th, another career milestone for Chicha this Summer sees spill tab on the poster for France’s We Love Green 2025, just a few entries on the poster’s lineup below the all-conquering Charli XCX.

“She's incredible,” Chicha says. “She’s such a headstrong, independent artist. And she does it exactly how she wants to, which is really inspiring. I'm but a humble fan, and we'll be partaking in Brat Summer for sure.”

When asked what the phrase play out loud means to her, she says that “The first thing that comes to mind is this idea of being present and having fun and enjoying what we're doing. There are a lot of times when I can feel pretty lost in the sauce, and on a mental health level, there are days that are not as good as others. So I think the idea of playing out loud at a live show or whatever is just being comfortable in my skin and being able to express myself freely and have a good time.”

With that French festival slot, other big performances booked, and the imminent release of her debut album, there is a very strong sense that this could be the year spill tab’s music finds a much bigger audience than the one she has already cultivated. “I took a year-long hiatus to just work on the album and didn't do much else. I just want to give it the best chance of reaching people and the best chance of being portrayed in the right way. The work is awesome and mysterious and crazy, and I am happy to do it.”

www.spilltab.net

Photography by Neema Sadeghi and Jade Sadler