Faye O’Rourke of Soda Blonde: ‘I think being open about your failings creates more interesting art’
Ahead of the band’s appearance at Beyond the Pale this weekend, Sarah Gill spoke with Soda Blonde frontwoman Faye O’Rourke all about the reality of starting out as a teenage girl in the music industry, knowing what to unlearn and what to keep close to heart, and the love of creating melancholic euphoria.
“I want people who are coming into the music industry now to be well armed,” Faye O’Rourke tells me. “I want them to understand that their validation does not lie in getting the thumbs up and a clap from the audience. It has to be found in the making of the thing. Without that, there’s just no point.”
Vocalist and songwriter of alternative pop four-piece Soda Blonde, Faye has been making music since she was 14 years old, and first ventured into the music industry at just 17. In the intervening years, there have been pearls of wisdom gathered up and squirreled away, insights that have changed the way she thinks about society, herself and her place within it all, both on and off the stage.
“My spark was dimmed by the industry when I started so young. I was confident in myself at that age, but I found that I was railing against a lot of criticism from older people,” Faye recalls. “As a teenager, you get used to getting criticism from your peers. You’re not used to getting it from people ten years your senior. You believe it when it’s coming from that direction, and it was a total mind f*ck.”
“I found it really hard to find my voice through the first band, but I was able to channel a lot of those feelings into the music I was creating and that is what withstands the test of time. I don’t have any regrets, and all those things I railed against, they’ve brought me to a good headspace now.”
Few people I’ve had the privilege of speaking to get candid quite as quickly as Faye did over the course of our conversation. Open and illuminating while radiating a pragmatic optimism, her perspective on creating art, healing from toxic thought cycles, and the changing landscape of how fans engage with the music they love comes from a place of deep consideration and great understanding.
“I had a lot of internalised misogyny and sexism. I grew up around men who said it was quicker to hand the guitar over to someone else to tune, and was made to feel that any time you fumbled on stage, you were representing your sex,” Faye recalls. “I felt that men had the license to make these mistakes and get good in front of the audience, whereas I felt I had to get good immediately and privately.”
It’s a real vocation to make art at the moment, because there’s just so much of it. The passion and the love of it is really in the making of it. Afterwards, when people engage with it and enjoy it, that’s a bonus.
Soda Blonde is made up of Faye, Adam O’Regan (guitar, production), Dylan Lynch (drums), and Donagh Seaver O’Leary (bass). Formed in 2019, the band is known for their atmospheric synths, glassy guitars, dynamic rhythms, and introspective lyrics that explore identity, relationships, and self-discovery.
There is an unofficial sub-genre of song warmly classified as the humble ‘sad banger’. They’re the kind of tunes you can’t help but dance to, bopping around your living room until your brain catches up with the lyrics and you feel the poignancy. What Soda Blonde specialises in could be better described as melancholic euphoria.
“I think I’ve done my job well as a songwriter when people resonate with and see themselves in the work. That’s the remit,” Faye says. “It’s theatre and cinema, it’s never going to be one thing. We’re always trying to push ourselves and we’re always being turned on by new things, and that’s why I say we make pop music, because that can’t necessarily be pigeonholed. It’s an ever-evolving thing.”
Their latest EP, People Pleaser, was released last month, with standout singles like ‘The Queen of Mercy’ and ‘The Saddest Thing’ receiving the highly stylised 4k music video treatment, which is something the band have become known for. On their debut album back in 2021, ‘In The Heat Of The Night’—directed by Adam and featuring some of the band’s very best friends—was shot in one continuous take with a huge 360 dolly track. I wonder if the creation of top tier music videos is something of a dying art?
“There’s such a demand now to create more and more short-form content, and people can’t always afford to drop thousands of euro on all the elements involved in making a music video to a high production quality,” Faye considers. “It’s a blessing to be able to do these things, but we’re interested in the more candid, off-the-cuff world of content too.”
Amassing nearly 90k monthly listeners on Spotify can be a difficult figure to wrap your head around, and it’s something that has made Soda Blonde develop a new appreciation for engagement. “Seeing that someone has gotten something from the art you have created is brilliant,” Faye says. “At gigs or through emails or DMs, the engagement is so sincere and it’s not this transient thing, it feels like a real connection that we have with our fans. I get that in snippets from our TikTok audience too, and it’s reviving.”
“It’s a real vocation to make art at the moment, because there’s just so much of it. The passion and the love of it is really in the making of it. Afterwards, when people engage with it and enjoy it, that’s a bonus.”
Of course, as your platform grows, so too does the presence of trolls, but Faye is of the belief that as an artist, being criticised comes with the territory. How she sees it is that criticism and praise are both equally important, while also being equally unimportant.
Music and art is for other people to step inside of. I want there to be a bit of mystery, I want to be able to find myself in the art that I like and not just be dictated to and told exactly what something is.
People feel at liberty to pass comment on just about anything, and to exist as a public or online figure is to be goodness incarnate. “You have to be immaculate to get up on that podium and speak, and our art and the work that I write about is human failure, I write about my flaws,” Faye tells me. “If you get a fine toothed comb and a magnifying glass, you can find out some pretty dark things about me that I’ve revealed through vulnerability in our music. I think being open about your failings creates more interesting art.”
“Music and art is for other people to step inside of. I want there to be a bit of mystery, I want to be able to find myself in the art that I like and not just be dictated to and told exactly what something is.”
Soda Blonde are performing at Beyond the Pale on Friday 13 June in Co. Wicklow.
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