INTERVIEW: Gordi on her third album 'Plasticine Heart': "I tried to just be purely guided by emotion and instinct and just let the songs be what they wanted to be."
Words & Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Brianna da Silva
Published: 6 August 2025
Sound magician of folk electronic, Gordi (Sophie Payten), today releases Like Plasticine, an album so sonically textured and pulsing that the sound becomes a tangible thing - a taste, a touch, a memory. It's a sensory illustration, a window into Gordi’s world of bliss, stings, and gut-punches. Her divine third solo album is a showcase of exceptional lyricism and musical intuition, challenging boundaries, twisting sonic conventions, flipping ideas and asking: why not?
Sparse, deep-water synths hum with a pulse as Gordi crackles with suffocated rust on opener ‘GD (Goddamn)’: "You’re not there… / And no one wants a postcard, from another somewhere." Recorded entirely on an iPhone, it’s a near-holy reminder of the things we do to survive: Slow down. Call home. Take a breath.
The metaphysical weight flows into the heady echo of ‘Alien Cowboy’, where Gordi explores her relationship with herself and her place in society. She imagines - and paints for our ears - a queer utopia, a space where LGBTQIA+ people feel wholly accepted. This introspection shifts to the slow splintering between people on ‘Cutting Room Floor’. Written during an isolated residency, its acoustic strums and wheel-rolling beat mark a departure from her reflective synths, yet her buttery vocal and curled-lip smile remain, guiding us through this crayon-box journey of transitional relationships.
The standout pure-pop anthem ‘Peripheral Lover’ delivers a poignant, infectious joy. Written about the early hurdles of a relationship with someone not yet ready to be public, it stings with yearning: “Can you make up your mind? / Because you give me the impression you care.” It’s tears on the dancefloor - raised fist, radiant smile, and the solidarity of finding your tribe. It places Gordi among synth-pop greats while staying entirely her own.
Where second album, 2020’s Our Two Skins chronicled the turbulence of coming out in her mid-20s, Like Plasticine continues that excavation with ‘Peripheral Lover’, ‘Alien Cowboy’, and ‘Your Consolation Prize’ - a shimmering, heart-flutter beat that grapples with queer identity and lingering prejudice. Released alongside the album, it feels like a thesis statement: vulnerable, defiant, and deeply alive.
’Settle’ - a heartbeat with skipping toes and fidgety hands - sits delicately in the album’s centre. Built around a piano line and the flick of finger taps that feel like lacquered nails or a pen on a desk, the track flutters with anxious energy. Gordi’s calming vocal command grounds it, even as the rhythm threatens to dissolve into restlessness.
“It’ll settle... it’ll settle down.” It’s a self-soothing mantra and a promise - not that everything will be okay, but that we can stay still long enough to let the chaos pass. The production here is particularly delicious: intimate, fluttering, and precise.
Then, seemingly worlds away, but not really, come ‘Automatic’ and ‘PVC Divide’, drawn from Gordi’s parallel life as a doctor during the pandemic. But death, like love, is made of bone and blood. These songs reveal the cost of professional detachment - what it means to deliver devastating news and hold space for grief without breaking.
“Is it bad? / Yeah it’s bad / How long?... / It was written for me.”
Like its namesake, Like Plasticine is a technicolour dough of human vulnerability and resilience. It beats with Gordi’s many-armed skill, curiosity, and command of sound, a self-portrait we can all see ourselves in. She knows the depth of sound. She makes it paradoxically weightless, grounded, and physical. It’s more than music - it’s matter.
Hi, Sophie! Can I just say what a sight for sore ears this album is. It is everything. It's so, so beautiful. It's really, really gorgeous, so congratulations!
Thank you. That means a lot to me.
First of all, the plasticine in itself straight away heads to a warm nostalgia. Was there a point when you were collating these songs that you were like, ‘Oh, this is what it's all about’?
Interestingly, I had the title before I had the record. I wrote down ‘like plasticine’ in my phone in 2018 before really any of these songs existed. And so I had it as a concept in my in my mind. I didn't let that totally guide the songwriting, but it was kind of there, and I thought that's probably what my next record is going to be called. Then it came out as a lyric in one of the songs, ‘Your Consolation Prize’, and I think that was probably the moment where I felt almost like putting a belt on and tightening it like a lasso around this collection of songs. Finally I could see the way that the concept was interacting with the music that was coming out. So I think it was subconsciously coming together before I really realised it had come together in very literal terms. My life was in an intensely malleable period, and I knew that what the songs were going to be about, so it all came together piece by piece.
Your music always feels like it's almost a biological thing. You create such depth, they are like a living piece. And I think that does fall back to that plasticity notion, you can toy with everything and mould it and shape it. Is that something you are aware of, particularly performing these songs?
Yeah. I think when I was sequencing the record, I made the decisions about the order of tracks, not based on lyrical content, but based on the feeling of the song. I wanted to group songs that felt in the same family, to me, together, but then make abrupt changes to remind people that they're listening to one singular body of work.
When I am playing them live, they do still feel like living, breathing things. Trying to recreate the soundscapes is a beautifully impossible task in a live setting! But I do my best, and the real crux of the production approach, which really started from the songwriting stage, was trying to create atmosphere. That’s what I try to do in a live setting as well, to really create an atmosphere that people can be in for the duration of the show. And also in this record, for the duration of listening to the record, to be in this sort of little bubble where people can exist for an hour.
I want to talk to you a little bit about a couple of tracks, particularly ‘PVC Divide’, which is an absolute sledge hammer of a song, but so beautiful in its brutality. Can you talk to me a little bit about the creation of that track, particularly reaching out to Anaïs Mitchell to join you on the track.
With that song, the context is that I was working in hospitals during the pandemic, because I had finished my medical training, and my junior working years. I had quit my job and I went to be a touring musician, and unfortunately, it was 2020, so I went back to the hospital, and I was there for 18 months. The thing that I found most challenging about that time was not the virus itself, people are always sick in hospitals, that's kind of why they exist, but the lockdown measures. Family and loved ones couldn't come and visit patients. I had this particular instance, ‘PVC Divide’ is about this. where I had developed this really lovely friendship with a patient. He was an older man, and I’d walk in every morning and we'd have a chat. He had a brain tumour, which had been removed, and the plan was for him to go home and recover. We did some progress scans and we presumed it was going to be the scan to then send him home, and unexpectedly it showed numerous inoperable tumours had grown back. And I had to go and tell him that instead of going home to recover, he would be going home to die.
Normally in that situation, you deliver the news as respectfully and unemotionally as you can, and then you leave the patient in the room with their loved ones to comfort them. But the family couldn't be there because of lockdown, so I had to deliver this news. And I sat with him for hours, and we had this really beautiful conversation that I allude to in the later parts of the song, he was saying to me ‘this is what was written for me, this is what was written for my life’. It was a really profoundly moving afternoon that I spent with him, and then I went to my car that afternoon and just let all the emotion out that I had been trying to control all day. I probably sat there for 45 minutes before I put my keys in the ignition.
I'd never written about an experience in the hospital before, it's always felt quite separate, but that just so profoundly impacted me but I just locked it up because I had to go back to work the next day and the next day and the next day.
A year later, I went to Phoenix Central Park, and I'd set aside a week to try and write something because I hadn't been able to write anything for the whole pandemic. I sat down, I picked up a guitar, and this song came out. It was in part about the story I just told you, and in part a collection of things that colleagues had told me about people watching their loved ones die on FaceTime. An ambulance not being able to get to someone in need because they were overrun. so they spent 44 minutes on the telephone to this person while they died.
It's crazy to talk about like this, because it was such an unspeakable tragedy that was just an everyday occurrence, and all that kind of came out in this song. When I got to the final section of the song, I didn't really know what to do, and so I had some mics on a piano and I just pressed record, and I just played. It felt really cathartic to just play something and what I recorded is the part that you end up hearing at the end of ‘PVC Divide’ and I just layered things on top of that.
I messaged Anaïs and was like, I really want you to sing on my record, and I think this song would be perfect, would you be up for it? She was like, ‘I'm actually in the studio right now. I'll get you the vocal files by the end of the day’. So she sent the vocal files back, I massaged them into the song. and that was that!
That’s incredible. And it clearly goes to show that the song really just hit for her as well, like immediately.
Yeah, I think so. I hadn't seen her in so long. We first met in 2015, we were both sang backing vocals for Bon Iver on The Jimmy Fallon Show, and we kind in touch. I really admire her so much, she's someone I think about when I sort of get cynical about music and the world. She's someone who's just worked really hard her whole life and had a number of interesting pathways open up in her career. She's such a beautiful songwriter and I finally got to see her after a really long time just last month in New York, we played a show together, and we played the song. We have a really nice connection, and that felt important for a song like this.
That is so lovely. We have grief, we have global collapse, we have musical experimentation on this album, but we have pure pop joy as well. There's so much about identity and reflection and vulnerability and exposed nerves. Does it come natural to you, the moving between different spheres and emotions to create this album?
Yeah, I mean I find it sometimes easy and sometimes hard. You know? I always just go with my instinct, and I spent a lot of energy on this record trying to not over correct my course. If a song felt like it wanted to go a certain way, I let it lead me, rather than sort of try to cut it off and say, no, you got to go back this way. That was a new approach for me. And in the spirit of the record, which is supposed to be reflective of all the total ecstasy and agony that the experience of life brings, I wanted to try and capture my version of that breadth musically as well. So on one end of the spectrum, you've got ‘Peripheral Lover’, which always wanted to be the kind of song that you blare through car stereo with your friends and the windows down. Then you've got a song like ‘Settle’ or ‘GD (Goddamn)’, which is much more insular and you want to listen to it by yourself in your bedroom with your headphones on. And over the course of the years that I wrote this album, I had those different experiences, and so rather than get too bogged down in wanting to adhere to one specific style, I tried to just be purely guided by emotion and instinct and just let the songs be what they wanted to be, and be representative of a diverse period of my life.
I love that. And I gotta say, ‘Settle’. It's my favourite on the album.
Thanks, it's mine too!
I'm curious to know if playing these songs live has revealed anything new about the album or about where you were at when you were writing it?
Yeah, it's been nice because the songs that we started to incorporate so far are the more upbeat songs, which I haven't had a whole lot of in my catalogue, and it's really nice to play songs that aren’t all really sad! I can see the energy of the audience shift over the course of a set where we can really play with that tension of starting with a dark intensity, and then in the middle giving people those quiet moments where if they want to have a little cry in the audience, we set aside a little bit of time for them to do that. And then we can bring it up with this euphoria at the end. So I think having a relatively stylistically diverse record makes for a really interesting live set where we have a lot of different colours that we put on show. I've been waiting so long for this record to come out, and I think I fell out of love with it and then back in love with it. Part of falling back in love with it was playing it to real people who are singing the words back and taking the songs into their own lives.
Like Plasticine is out now via Mushroom Music. You can buy and stream here.
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