How Ellie Rowsell granted Imogen and the Knife permission to let it “rip”
Sometimes artists need a little push, and almost always, that push can only really ever come from another artist diving first. To be encouraged out of your shell, sometimes you need to see someone shining out there first, and that is exactly what Imogen and the Knife found on her favourite record of 2025.
2025 was a great year for music, and for Imogen, it was a busy year of working behind the scenes. She didn’t release any music under her name, but she did tour with The Last Dinner Party, write and produce an EP with the band’s Lizzie Maynard and share an album with her side-project, Thredd, stepping into the alter-ego that band affords her for a while.
However, even when an artist seems quiet, they never are. In her studio, Imogen has been crafting what’s to come next, but there was a block she kept stumbling over.
“I was in the middle of recording some stuff myself, and I’d been struggling,” she said, and while the instrumental was there, the lyrics were ready, for some reason, the actual singing was causing her stress. “I think I’ve been recording my own vocals, which I think sometimes is a really bad idea, because I’m a perfectionist,” she explained, “but also I get ear blindness and end up not knowing if what I’m doing is right.”
“Right” was also a loose concept, as the music she’s been working on is different from the work she presented on Some Kind of Love. “Some of the material is quite big, and requires a lot of character in it,” she said. Frustrated and wound up by it, it became a cycle where the more she stressed, the further from the right take she was wandering as she shared, “I think I was feeling maybe a bit despondent and a bit down about stuff, and I just was not getting the vocals right”.
Then something switched, and it switched from her simply hitting play. “And then that album came out,” Imogen said, and it was Wolf Alice’s fourth record, The Clearing. It’s not just that she loved the album, which she did, declaring it her favourite of the year, but The Clearing felt like a door opening in her mind, just like it seemed to be a door opening for the band.
“I heard Ellie, and I felt like I’d been granted permission to just go to the studio and let the thing rip,” she said. Hearing Ellie Rowsell’s massive vocals on that album, sounding so strong and powerful and healthy across tracks like ‘The Sofa’ and ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, Imogen felt like she suddenly had a guide, or even just someone to encourage her to leave it all behind and just fully go for it, because The Clearing made it obvious that the key was simply to go all in.
“The way that she has developed on this album is unbelievable,” she said. That’s undeniable, as Rowsell’s vocals have been building and building album by album, developing to this obvious new high. Imogen has been there every step, adding, “It’s so satisfying to have been a fan since the very beginning, and I’ve waited for this moment, like, I wanted Ellie to be like this for the whole time, and I’m just so excited by the whole thing.”
With the encouragement from one of her favourite artists, she went to the studio and let it all out. It helped her then, but it’ll continue to help her moving forward, as she said about watching the band live on the album tour, “It’s so satisfying to me. Seeing a band exist for that long and keep developing and keep changing, it was just really phenomenal”.
