Alongside her dedication to her craft, from her early teens D’Arcy had also begun to tap into a feeling of hyper awareness to the spiritual and non-physical world around her. Having relocated from small town Smeaton, Victoria to Minneapolis aged 15, the huge change in her surroundings and social life prompted a shift both in her musical ambitions and sensitivity to her intuition.
“Everything changed when I started listening to more rock music and blues; when I was there [in America] I thought right, this is something I could really intertwine into my own stuff,” she explains. “During that move to America a door must have opened, or something must have clicked, because bizarre things were happening and these experiences changed what I wanted to write about and how I wanted to be portrayed as an artist. I never did and still don’t quite understand why it is that how I feel in one moment can be altered in a second when a stranger enters the room. It doesn’t happen often but it can be difficult, and that started informing the tracks I was writing.”
D’Arcy is aware that her experiences are ones that might not be universally understood, but over her past two EPs – 2020’s ‘Little Demons’ and last year’s ‘Disarray’ – and heading into a forthcoming body of work heralded by new single ‘Crave’, she’s prioritising an increasingly honest lean into all facets of her personality. She describes her debut as a reckoning on the past and a way to get a host of “unresolved feelings” finally tied up and put to bed. ‘Disarray’, meanwhile, was born from a solitary lockdown that led the singer down some dark paths of personal exploration.
“I really found that inner secret feelings came out of that time. Being by yourself for so long, you realise things about yourself and I felt like it was really important to put that out there and to be truthful about it,” she says. “It was basically about the shadow self and your darker, deeper desires and darker feelings – going to that place that you wouldn’t generally reach with all the distractions that go on in normal life. It was interesting to tap into that because I don’t think I would have done it if it wasn’t for lockdown. Now I’ve found that what I’m writing about is the want and need for more. It’s like everything came crashing in and I’m at this point where I’m on sensory overload.”
D’Arcy Spiller crashed back into our ears in 2022 with new single ‘Curveball’, the fierce follow up to gentle ballad ‘Milk & Honey’ and rock anthem ‘Crave’. Written and produced alongside Dylan Nash (Dean Lewis, Angus & Julia Stone, Gretta Ray), and Rob Amoruso (Kelly Rowland, Macy Gray, Isabella Manfredi, The Rubens), ‘Curveball’ drips with the venom a woman scorned, D’Arcy’s rough, epic vocals cursing the relationship that inspired her pain.
