Photo: WENN
"Do you know what it feels like to be afraid of yourself?" There's a stagnant pause. I'm supposed to be interviewing Angel Haze, but it's slowly starting to feel like the other way around.
After a series of mixtapes piqued the interest of the hip hop world back in 2012, Raee'n Wilson, operating under the stage name Angel Haze, released a reimagined cover of Eminem's 'Cleaning Out My Closet'. It was lyrically sharp, and starkly, brutally candid - detailing childhood sexual abuse in an articulate, urgently cathartic stream-of-consciousness - and the industry stopped in its tracks.
Since then, Haze has released a debut album, Dirty Gold, and this month, a full-length follow-up project - Back To The Woods. The night before its release though, they (Haze is agender, and with reservations - "I find it more funny, because it's like reading about a band" - tends to use the pronoun 'they') were begging their manager not to put it out. "I was so fucked up that day. I didn't not want to put it out because I was afraid of the response or anything like that, it was more like... You have expectations you put on yourself and all the crazy shit. I'm a little psychotic with my shit - but you know, it came out!"
Listen to 'Moonrise Kingdom' below
And thank goodness it did. Free from the shackles of commercial pressure and the deadlines that haunted Dirty Gold, Haze has produced a vast, sprawling and ambitious project, that attempts to prise apart and crack open the contradictions of being human. "I feel like a wandering soul with no place in this world / I'm trying but having no luck / I don't have one soul I trust / I'm starting to feel like empty is safer than love."
It might be steeped in metaphor, but the project's title is more literal than one might have assumed. "I went out into the trees and I would sleep there," Haze explains, with a chuckle. "There's a lot of dark shit in the motherfucking forest! It's scary, but I would sleep there at night, and not get harmed by anything - because nature coexists so fucking peacefully. The trees aren't jealous of the sky, everything works perfectly together, you know?"
"If you think about yourself as a child, you come out of the womb a fresh person, like a fresh canvas, and your entire life is meant to create or to take part in the beautiful, continuous shit going on around you, you know?" A lot of Haze's sentences end with "You know?" More often than not, I'm not sure I do.
It's no wonder, I say, given how frequently this half-hour conversation has descended into a form of poetry, that Haze is such a deft lyricist. "Shit! I'm so sorry, I didn't realise that. I'm, like, super high so I felt like I was being a dick almost. I'm happy that you think I'm poetic, that's cool."
Haze is warm, engaging company, but the conversation often unravels and spirals off in an existential tangent. Somehow, it's both difficult and easy to believe that they frequently struggle to connect with people. "I have an isolation complex. I can't explain myself to anyone because my brain is telling me 50,000 different things before the first word has come out of my mouth. I have so many secrets," they laugh sadly, "So many fucking secrets, because I don't bother to talk to anyone."
But a lot of those secrets, surely, have been revealed in the music? "I like to talk candidly about the stupid shit that I do, but the person that I am, in the most delicate sense of my being, I can't share with anybody. That's my biggest secret. That's my biggest fucking secret and that's my biggest problem in this life. It's why I can't connect with anyone, because this person inside me is too much."
Watch the video for 'Battle Cry' feat. Sia below
It's deeply upsetting to hear (in fact, I grapple so disastrously trying to come up with an appropriate response that Haze tweets me afterwards, "Sorry if I made that tough for you. x") - but for every expression of darkness, Haze also has something profoundly optimistic to say. "There's definitely a way to unlearn things," they insist chirpily after touching upon the years of childhood abuse, "or we wouldn't be here. We'd be extinct like dinosaurs!"
"If you think about homophobia, in the past, what, ten years, it's crazy. Looking back on my mum telling me, 'If you're bisexual, you're gonna burn in hell and get AIDS,' all sorts of crazy shit. I'm just like, 'LOL, I'm a 23-year-old virgin, you know, I have no AIDS yet.' There's agenderness, there's all sorts of shit that people are talking about now, actively engaging in. I feel like freedom and fluidity comes into play with all that."
The key, as far as Haze is concerned, lies in obliterating the binary approach that we often imprison ourselves within - particularly when it comes to sexuality and gender. "Gender cannot rule your interests. Because before you even have a chance to be phenomenal, you've already crushed yourself, inside of this little box that says, 'Girl. Boy. You can only do this, you can only do that'."
"Fuck that. You can do everything. You're a big giant heart and a fucking brain. Go for it. "
Haze's Back To The Woods is out now.
