Culture

Amber Bain has a bit of a self-flagellating streak when it comes to her music. “I have this thing where I release songs, and I’ll come back to them later and be like, ‘That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever heard,’” she tells Billboard, as a smile slowly forms on her face. “That’s not happening this time.”
Bain, formally known on stage as The Japanese House, sounds almost surprised as she reveals her lack of contempt for her new music. Her new album In the End It Always Does (out Friday, June 30 via Dirty Hit) shares plenty in common with her past works like 2019 debut LP Good at Falling or 2020 EP Chewing Cotton Wool — meticulously-crafted indie synth-pop that revels primarily in its own honesty about loss and heartbreak.

But Bain noticed something different about In the End shortly after she wrapped recording on the album last year. “It wasn’t intentional, but I think I used female pronouns on nearly every song,” she says. “That kind of stuff used to feel so huge to me — when I was a kid, I’d rewind t.A.T.u.’s ‘All the Things She Said‘ to listen to the word ‘she’ 3,000 times.”

The inadvertent proliferation of queer themes throughout In the End extends to Bain in real life — sitting in a conference room in Billboard’s New York office, Bain sports a beige t-shirt that reads “Abercrombie & Butch,” which she proudly points to as a sign of personal growth. “Three years ago, I would never have worn this, because I wouldn’t want to associate myself with the word ‘butch,’” she says, lightly laughing.

Below, Bain breaks down the conception and creation of her new album In the End It Always Does, how she worked with The 1975’s Matty Healy and MUNA’s Katie Gavin to bring it to life, and how it’s helped her come into her own as an artist and a queer person.

The album is coming out soon — how are you feeling about people finally getting to hear it?

I’m feeling super excited. I recorded it in summer of last year, so I’ve been living with it for quite awhile. which is kind of nice. Because I’ve had quite a big break from listening to it, I’m actually getting to hear these songs as a listener.

I really love that you’ve put a focus on releasing live sessions of some of the songs in lieu of more traditional music videos — is there a reason why you wanted to do that?

I think that, in doing this record, I’ve realized how much I really enjoy playing instruments and playing as a band. I love the musicality of that side of production — I’ve been less drawn to the electronic setup, on my laptop with my fancy screen. It didn’t feel natural to do a music video, because I didn’t want to create a whole narrative. The songs themselves are far less abstract than before, and they’re quite direct and to the point. So I thought, “Well, if I’m doing a performance video, it’d be cool to do a different version of the songs.” Some differ more than others to the original versions, but like, they’re all pretty different.

That “Sad to Breathe” live session was phenomenal, it was so cool to immediately get this very different interpretation of the song.

Thank you — yeah, it was nice to record them, because I really like my band. We haven’t toured since 2020, so those were the first time we were playing as a full band together again.

“Boyhood” is such a fitting lead single for this project, because it shares some DNA with your past work, while also getting right into the more explicit queer themes you see on the record. What went into the writing of that single?

It was a lot of things that sort of amalgamated into this one song. I’d called it “Boyhood” because I’d watched that Richard Linklater film — I love that film — and realized that I have some weird links to it; I think [the protagonist] is exactly the same age as me; my parents are also divorced. So then, I was just thinking about the way that you grow up, and how the things that did or didn’t happen to you really mold you, to the point where you either have to let certain things go or embrace them. And I was thinking about how it’s quite sad that you don’t have a choice of who you are.

That then made me think about how that tied into gender. For the last few years, I’ve really been exploring that I don’t feel like a girl. I really didn’t relate to a lot of my friends who were girls growing up — in our girlhood, I didn’t feel like I fit in to that bracket at all. As a kid, I truly think I was verging on trans; I would really think about changing my gender a lot. As I grew older, there was suddenly language that made it possible to talk about the fact that there are more than two genders, which allowed me to settle into just being whatever gender; I don’t really have a label for myself, maybe genderqueer. So, the song is me wondering how different I would be had I had the boyhood that I wanted. It’s about letting go of needing to know the exact catalysts for everything.

That’s part of what makes it so relatable — because it feels like, on the whole, labels around gender and sexuality have become a lot less important to a lot more people.

Completely — though I do think it’s obviously different for everyone, as well. I think people sometimes talk quite negatively about people making certain aspects of themselves a big part of their identity. But who cares? I mean, I used to be so afraid of making being gay part of my identity, in terms of releasing music. The thought was that I didn’t want that to be my “thing.” Now, I absolutely don’t care if it’s my thing — in fact, it’s kind of amazing that it can be a thing. Today, I walked down the street and I can’t tell if I’m looking at a bunch of lesbians or they’ve just been born after the year 2000. Everyone looks like a lesbian, and I love that!

What felt different to you about the making of In the End It Always Does compared to Good at Falling?

One of the main differences was working with Chloe [Kraemer, the album’s producer and engineer]. When I started working with Chloe, we just kind of became best friends. I don’t think I’d ever worked with another queer woman in that capacity, and it felt like I could see myself reflected. We’re so similar in a lot of ways; musically, our personalities, our identities. That just kickstarted the whole project.

We always talk about the lack of representation for women and queer people in production — getting to work with Chloe, what stood out in getting to experience that feeling of shared space?

It was kind of life changing — like, I don’t ever want to work on anything without her. We have such a close connection, which I do think is because we share such a similar experience. That’s not to say that I’m “missing” something when I’m working with George, but I can just look at her and roll my eyes, and she gets it. You feel f–king crazy when these old men in their 60s are telling you what a microphone is.

In one of the first meetings I had with a manager who I never worked with, he said, “You’re a girl, but you can also produce, that’s so crazy.” Like, why is it crazy? We can use computers. That was about 10 years ago, so just having that connection with someone and feeling completely comfortable and understood made a world of difference.

You also got to work with Katie Gavin from MUNA on “Morning Pages” and “One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones.” What was she like to work with?

So “Joni Jones” is probably my favorite-ever studio experience. I had this piano-y song I had recorded that was this really obvious ode to Joni Mitchell. Matty and I decided to make the vocal be this sort of rambling, non-linear piece with it. That morning, Katie was gonna come into the studio because she was in London and we were hanging out. I’d written this weird little poem, which would end up being the lyrics — I was too involved in thinking of how to do it, and so Katie just looked at it and said “I’ll give it a go.”

She sat at the microphone and in one take, note for note, did that entire song. I mean, we were sobbing. She’d never heard the song or read the lyrics. So we kind of got high off that moment for days after. Yeah, I love working with Katie, she’s just a really great friend.

You’ve been with Dirty Hit for nearly a decade of your career at this point — how have you seen your label evolve over the last few years?

I joined Dirty Hit when The 1975 were playing to a few hundred people — I was one of only a handful of people on the label, and I’ve been collaborating with George and Matty for pretty much the whole of my career. Now, the label has all of these other artists, and I feel like there’s a lot of producers who really like working with Dirty Hit. So it’s now a situation where, if you want to work with someone, there’s probably a way through all these artists and connections that you could get there. Which is kind of amazing.

Part of what makes this album work so well is the fact that you’ve clearly figured out a sound that works for you, but still offers you lots of room to play around. How much of that flexibility was an intentional part of the process?

I’ve never really made anything with a direct goal for what it should sound like; it kind of ends up sounding how it sounds, because I just prefer that in the moment. It will just sound like me. But I think your tastes change — the things that excited me five years ago are not the things necessarily that excite me now, but then there’s also like classic things that I’ll always be drawn to. Certain melodies, certain ways of producing instruments, stacking vocal harmonies; that’s just what I love, because it scratches that itch in my brain when I hear it. A lot of producing feels like Tetris to me — you’ve got the perfect line, and you fit it in just the right spot. That’s how I feel when I know that the song is right; it’s just satisfying.