aja ireland | cryptid @ anxious musick magazine
In a candid conversation, British experimental artist Aja Ireland reveals the behind-the-scenes story of her album Cryptid. Released at the end of January 2025, the album is a deeply personal project born out of her struggles with grief, burnout, and the pressures of independent artistry. Ireland draws on sonic extremes—noise, experimental bass—to capture the emotional tension between numbness and catharsis. A key inspiration was Joey Holder’s Cryptid exhibition, whose themes of mutation and adaptation translated into a musical exploration of form.
The artist highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity: her collaborations with designer LU LA LOOP and poet Leomi Sadler resulted in a fusion of fashion, performance, and hyperpop production. The conversation also touches on her social engagement—creating a sanctuary for the queer community and advocating for women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights. Cryptid is not just an album but a manifesto of vulnerability, hinting at future projects: a tour and an EP that continue her raw, transgressive artistic language.
Artur Mieczkowski: First of all, congratulations on your wonderful album, Cryptid, released at the end of January 2025. I’m truly impressed by it. What were the main inspirations behind this project?
Aja Ireland: At its core, Cryptid is an album about survival—both in a personal and creative sense. It came together during a time when I was processing grief, burnout, and the relentless grind of being an independent artist. I wasn’t making music with the intention of sharing it; I was making the sounds I wanted to hear, the ones that would pull me out of a deep fog. That gave me the freedom to push further into noise, distortion, and textured bass, letting the rawness of those elements reflect the intensity of what I was experiencing.
A huge turning point for the album was Joey Holder’s Cryptid exhibition. Her work explores ideas of mutation, resilience, and the unknown—things I was feeling deeply at the time. The themes in her art made me think about how we adapt to our environments, how we shapeshift to survive. That translated directly into the music, where I was experimenting with form, genre, and sound design in a way that felt instinctive rather than calculated.
I’ve always been drawn to the extremes of sound—noise, experimental bass, and future trap—and artists like Arca, SOPHIE, and Ice Spice are major influences. When I’m producing, I tend to latch onto certain tracks as “anchors” that I return to, almost like a sonic reference point, but my actual process is completely subconscious. I enter a kind of flow state where I forget to eat, I don’t need much sleep, and I feel like I’m living inside the tracks. Then, when I step away, I can’t always recall exactly how I made them. It’s like the music is pulling itself together through me rather than me consciously controlling it.
Ultimately, Cryptid is an album that sits in the space between emotional detachment and deep, raw feeling. It captures the numbness of burnout but also the moments of joy that remind you why you keep going. It’s about survival, but also about connection and transformation—about letting yourself change, and evolve into something new.