A New Door

It's raining when Leure arrives at the back of a leafy, suburban pub to talk about Holland Sky on a gloomy August afternoon. The air is cold and smells of damp moss, and in a voice of similar pitch and timbre to the rain, Ash Hendriks patiently explains the pronunciation of her stage name. “Lee-oo-a”, she repeats for the third time. “Lay-oar”, I mispronounce for the fourth time. She laughs.

With James Gates, Hendriks forms guitar-anchored duo Wolves At The Door, but Leure's very different sounding tunes emerged rather unexpectedly for most on Soundcloud about five months ago. Since then, Hendriks's solo project has quickly become a hot addition to many experimental and beatsy shows, accumulating love along the way. She's got ardor from triple j; Dom Alessio reckons Leure sounds like Grimes or Fever Ray, but her fingerprints match Lykke Li, and Holland Sky is possibly the most cryptically brilliant LP to come out of WA this year.

Laughing, Hendriks tries to swat talk of praise like a small insect. “It seriously came about spontaneously,” Hendriks explains. “Wolves At The Door was getting a lot more rock and roll, which isn't like what this album is. James went to New York for a while, he had this beat machine on his iPhone, and he was like, 'You should try this out'.”

Hendriks was initially skeptical about moving into electronic production. “I'd tried using drum loops before, and I just didn't understand how they worked. I didn't do electronics; I wanted to stick to playing guitar. And then I was fiddling around with a few different programs, I've been recording with ProTools for a while, and now I've got Ableton and stuff like that, so I got my head around a few kind of programs but I'd never experimented with that kind of sound because it wasn't Wolves At The Door. And then it just came together.”

Hendriks' music is unassuming and confessional. Prior to Holland Sky's release, her Soundcloud consisted of three tracks carved from bone - Tired, Ghost Fire, and Waiting - but these alone sourced her gigs all the way up to opening for Chet Faker. While other bedroom artists (hey Youth Lagoon) exploit lo-fidelity to mask a lack of vocal capability, Hendriks' voice is the centre of her work; an exposed, beating heart surrounded by scratching and twitching. Holland Sky's minimalism breaks music down to Hendriks' voice, and affectations thereof.  It's music drawn from her emotional state over the course of the past year, she explains. “I was going through a weird time at the start of the year. I channeled all of my… I won't say anger, because I'm not a very angry person, but maybe creative frustration or something? Things weren't happening, and I put all my effort into music, and started making beats,” Hendriks says with a smile. “And I was like, 'This is quite enjoyable'. Within two weeks, I had the basis of an album, and songs just kept coming out. I have no idea how. I guess I built them on all these different programs.”

A collection of feathers and circles and shapes hang from Ash's neck, ringing as her hands work with her mouth to explain her music. “Oh, those?” she says, after I point them out. “It's just some jewelry I designed.” After a little prompting, she elaborates. “I don't have much experience as a drawer, but I draw them and then I get someone else to make them, and then we sell them online,” Hendriks confesses, as if moonlighting as a jewelry designer while making experimental music is the most natural thing in the world. Leure is as humble and measured as her music.