Five years in the dark, and now the truth bleeds through the speakers
👉 Full interview with Pip from Devil Electric embedded at the end of this article — don’t skip it. This one cuts deeper than most.
There’s something rotten at the core of Tahlia.
Not in the sense of failure — no, this thing is too alive for that — but in the way a wound festers before it heals. It breathes. It aches. It remembers things you’d rather bury under amps and distortion. And when Devil Electric finally dragged it into the light after five long, strange years, it didn’t come out clean.
It came out honest.
Sitting across from Pip, you get the sense that Tahlia wasn’t written so much as extracted. Pulled out piece by piece like shrapnel from a body that kept moving long after it should’ve stopped. She talks about it calmly — too calmly — like someone recounting a storm they didn’t realize they were in until the house was already gone.
“I didn’t realise how bad things were when I wrote it.”
That’s the hook. That’s the fracture line running straight through this record.
Because Tahlia isn’t some carefully constructed concept album. It’s a delayed reaction. A chemical burn that only starts to sting after the damage is done. And now, with distance, clarity hits like a brick to the teeth.
The thesis of the whole damn thing?
“What nourishes you destroys you.”
Say it slow. Let it sit.
That’s not a lyric — that’s a warning label.
And Pip knows it. You can hear it in the way she talks about writing — not like a craft, but like a lie detector. Every line either passes or gets thrown into the fire.
“I always know when I’m being dishonest.”
No romanticism. No “trust the process” fluff. Just gut instinct and the quiet panic of knowing when something isn’t real enough to survive.
That’s why these songs feel like they’re teetering on the edge — because they were. Written in moments that weren’t fully understood at the time. Emotional snapshots taken in the middle of something messy, unresolved, and quietly destructive.
And then there’s This Hereafter.
Nine minutes of slow, grinding weight. A track that doesn’t just build — it drags you through it. Like pushing a boulder through sand with no guarantee there’s anything waiting on the other side.
When Pip talks about it, the tone shifts. Subtle, but unmistakable.
“Stupidity served intravenously.”
That line doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s rooted. Personal. Tied to addiction — not dressed up, not disguised. Just laid out in a way that feels uncomfortably close to the bone.
No grand statements. No moralizing.
Just reality, humming underneath layers of fuzz and doom.
And yet — somehow — this isn’t a hopeless record.
That’s the strange part.
Because for all its weight, Tahlia doesn’t collapse under itself. It exhales.
Pip calls it catharsis — an “exhale” after holding something in for too long. And you believe her. Not because it sounds neat, but because it sounds necessary.
Like this album had to exist for her to move forward.
Then there’s the other side of it — the transformation.
Offstage, Pip is measured. Thoughtful. Almost reserved.
Onstage?
Different story.
“I’ve got a witch and a demon inside me.”
Not metaphor. Not branding. Just the only way to explain the switch that flips when the lights hit.
“I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.”
That’s the trade-off. That’s the cost of pulling something this real out into the open night after night. You don’t just perform it, you become something else to survive it.
So what is Tahlia, really?
It’s not just an album.
It’s:
- a delayed realization
- a document of a bad place
- a confrontation with truth
- and somehow… a release from it
Messy. Human. Unresolved.
Exactly how it should be.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers
Killer.
