HONEY GENTRY • Headliners #87

ABOUT HONEY GENTRY:Honey Gentry is a singer, songwriter and producer based in London, UK. Inspired by mythology, cinema, and self-help books in equal measure, the former screenwriting student prides herself on her worldbuilding.Born and raised in London, Honey Gentry had music fans for parents. “Music soundtracked everything – Friday night car journeys to Dad’s, or weekday mornings getting ready to club classics and disco hits on mum’s radio,” she reflects. Her dad’s music taste informed her music education as much as her mum’s love for pop: “Dad was introducing us to Kate Bush and No Doubt, later Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.” Her own taste was developing – she was a teenage fan of My Chemical Romance and Nine Inch Nails as much as Marina and the Diamonds or Lady Gaga. She mellowed as she approached her late teens – “I saw The Pierces on the Jools Holland show and their sound enchanted me; I went on to see them live in London a few times after that,” she says of the folk-pop duo, who inspired her to dive deeper into the worlds of Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Joan Baez and Janis Ian. Later, Lana Del Rey would place the final piece in the puzzle, inspiring Honey to perform as well as write. “What Lana gave me that most other artists hadn’t before that: extraverted aspirations for such an introverted singer. It was OK for an artist like me to aspire to be known – it didn’t mean I had to change who I was.”After school, she started her writing journey pursuing screenwriting, enrolling in film school at the age of 19. “It was during those years that, although I enjoyed what I was doing with film, I realised I couldn’t leave music behind,” she reflects. Upon graduating, she turned her attention almost immediately to music, painstakingly teaching herself how to produce and record at home, recording at night whilst working full time in admin jobs to pay the bills and fund her music. Those early recordings and demos led her to meet Ruben Elbrond-Palmer, who would co-write and produce Moonlight EP (2018) and Dreamlover EP (2019): “once we started work on the early Honey Gentry demos, I knew I had found the sound I wanted to pursue. He just immediately understood what I was trying to achieve and made my early sound what it was.”After Moonlight and Dreamlover, Honey Gentry took over as sole writer and producer for her debut, HG (2020): “It started entirely as a practical thing – we were in the early stages lockdown and I didn’t want to pause on the work I’d been doing on writing my next body of work.” By August 2020, the period of isolation had led Honey to emerge blinking into the late summer with her first album: HG, which was released digitally on 22 September 2020, and followed by a crowdfunded vinyl pressing.The follow-up to HG saw Honey take a deeper dive into production and sampling – the title track opens with a quote from the film, Night Tide (1961) which seems to perfectly reintroduce the artist: But I’d like you to know me better… I’m not afraid of that. The album glimmers with synths and electric pianos, soundtracking reflections on mortality (Summer Air), power struggles (Let You Win), desire to escape (Take Me Somewhere) and domesticity (Peaches).Different Water, the latest offering from Honey Gentry, is out now. Diving deeper into her sound as a producer, she also uses the three track EP to reflect on interstellar space, childhood, ageing, and straying from your own self for the people you love. Under Taurus, the lead single from the EP, is named after the Louise Glück poem of the same name. “With Under Taurus, I really wanted to use the imagery from her poem – someone pointing out something in the night sky that we just can’t see with our own eyes – to explore what it means to change too much for others – saying we want or see something that isn’t true to us.”Outside of writing and producing, Honey Gentry is