Welcome to a feature where we sit down and talk to bands and artists about their latest albums to find out all about it. Today we speak to musician Jenna Leigh-Raine about the album SVREN.

Hello nice to meet you, tell us about yourself!

I’m a writer and artist from London with my own studio facility where I produce and play everything. My music evolves from electronic-based alternative rock, though now is now quite cinematic, with themes of humanity, future and spirit.

Tell us about the new album

SVREN (she) centrals around a character who escapes the new dark hybrid-run regime under order. It’s about survival and looking at the future with flashbacks of previous life.

Favourite track on the new album and why?

It’s between three: Outter Limited, Leather Dead, KHROSSES. Outter Limited is like an anthem, it’s also been receiving a lot of good feedback. It’s very sparse in electronic, cinematic depth – dark yet majestic. There are two short verses and a repeated chorus, and the rest is music. Leather Dead is durgy, dark, menacing with deep bass synth growls and distant vocal landscapes. It’s about a new ‘Hybrid Engineered, Half Human, Half Alienlike Machine.’ There is a strong sense in the track that a greater being is controlling humans as workers and women as pawns and pleasure.

Tell us a bit about the recording process, was it fun to do?

This album took nineteen months which is long for me. Any longer, I get bored as it really starts to feel like filling in long government forms. I decided to master it myself. Mastering is a real art form so I went into it knowing to be patient. Trials and deleting. You have to master or save settings and alter levels slightly differently for digital and vinyl. But it had taken so long that by the time I was done, I think I’d lost some memory cells.

I didn’t decide on the central theme straight away. Recording some instrumentals led to various ideas. Records like Capital Brutalist, along with Outter Limited, spelt that way the first ideas.

I wanted the sound to be uniformed, so I stuck with about 3-4 main sound, design and fonts. It came together better than I thought it might sound doing it this way, but it was sounding very cohesive. This was overcome by using big, deep, drone synth basses and towering synth lines through the songs frames.

What inspired the album name?

I had it as one of the tracks. I asked my publishing company which do you prefer from three. Everyone seemed to agree on SVREN as it was direct, easy and different.

Tell us the idea behind the album cover?

The cover is to evoke a dystopian image.

What one of your songs on the new album do you think will be the most difficult to rehearse for a live audience? 

None, really, but I recently performed a lot of the album live in big theatre halls and did worry a tiny bit as the intro are perfect in smaller spaces which then builds into the first song GOD NOISE. It all turned out okay though.

Why should people listen to the album? 

I think it’s a seminal album in my career and in electronic music, I feel it’s up there with bigger names and heroes of mine like Gary Numan.

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