"I try to observe my feelings as much as I possibly can everyday, and write them down as often as possible." That is Brendan Wright, who records as Tiberius, describing a creative process that is closer to a practice than a method.
Five artists here work from difficult material. None of them treats the music as therapy exactly, and none of them is precious about it. What they share is a working habit: catch the thing accurately, then resist the urge to make it more comfortable than it was.
Tiberius
Tiberius is direct about where the songs come from. "Tiberius certainly reflects the more introspective, anxious, and snarky parts of my personality. I'm a pretty anxious person, and have been on antidepressants since about the time I started this project." He calls the results confessional emo country with psych and shoegaze dressings - pop rock tunes, he says, with all sorts of dressings on them. When he picks up a guitar he draws from those notes rather than waiting for inspiration to arrive whole. The seriousness stops at the music: "If it's not fun for me, it's simply not fun for anyone else. I really don't like to take promoting my music too seriously."
I Ya Toyah
"I don't write to escape reality," says I Ya Toyah. "I write to expose it." Born in Lodz and now based in Chicago, she describes her sound as industrial at heart, electronic by design, human at its core - heavy enough to shake the walls, vulnerable enough to leave a bruise. Songs begin with a sentence she cannot stop thinking about; she builds around idea and rhythm before riff and melody, and once she knows what truth she is chasing, the sound follows. On her latest, the hard part was not technical: "The biggest challenge wasn't technical - it was resisting the urge to soften the message. The song only worked once I stopped worrying about being misunderstood."
Stress Dolls
Chelsea O. writes as Stress Dolls from Buffalo, and runs her own label, Angry Girl Music, which she reissued Queen of No on this year. The album is not a concept record; it collects songs from more than a decade. "Writing always comes from a personal place, even if it's inspired by things outside of my own experience," she says - books, films, other people's stories, all of it filtered through the same channel. Listeners have handed her comparisons she clearly enjoys, including "Kathleen Hanna fronting Modest Mouse."
Magana
Jeni Magaña moved to Los Angeles mid-2019 while touring as Mitski's bassist, and her recent trilogy came out of a period she describes without varnish. "The writing and recording of the Teeth trilogy was absolute chaos. I had never recorded my own music professionally before, and I had (have) no good system for organizing files." She is equally plain about the business: "Does having help count as a strategy? I'm not the most organized person and I really have no idea how the game or system works." A supportive friend, label, and PR are, she says, the only reason she has kept releasing. The trilogy was timed for winter deliberately - cozy, reflective, calm, post-holidays but pre-spring.
Lazy Faire
Renee Zon, a classically trained pianist who now records as Lazy Faire, puts their version as a working principle: "Music is about self-discovery and self-education. The only cure for a troubled mind is to learn something new." Their personality shows up in the work as joy and introspection, and, they add without ceremony, probably their ADD or depression too. "I don't ever want to be kept in a cage creatively."
Accuracy over comfort
The common move is refusing to round the material off. I Ya Toyah stopped worrying about being misunderstood and the song worked. Magaña calls her own process chaos rather than claiming a system. Wright writes the feeling down the day he has it, because the specific version does not survive being remembered later.
None of this makes the work heavy. Tiberius spent the year collecting super 8 film to cut into shorts, and made a ratty VHS video for "Sag" because it was fun. Serious about the songs; not solemn about the rest.