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SOAK: Killing Them Softly

SOAK

Still in her teens, SOAK is an old soul with a young heart

Latitude 30 is your typical Sixth Street watering hole: sticky floors, $2.50 Jägerbombs, shitfaced collegiate carousing. At the moment, however, all is quiet, by order of an effusive BBC DJ, who’s just introduced the next act in a string of showcases. Shrouded in dense red-and-blue stage lights, Bridie Monds-Watson (a.k.a. SOAK) makes her way gingerly to the front of the stage with her acoustic guitar. Jagged bangs partially obscuring her eyes; she looks significantly younger than her 19 years. That the packed club stays silent for a solid half-hour is all the more surreal, given the barely controlled South By Southwest chaos unfolding just outside.

“My music works better in the quiet,” says Bridie (the name she prefers in conversation) over the phone from England, several weeks after her SXSW appearance. “It just wouldn’t get across otherwise.”

A few hours from now, the Derry, Ireland, native will be appearing on Later… With Jools Holland, sharing airtime with Father John Misty and Paul Weller, the latter almost three times her age. At SXSW, SOAK’s stunning half-hour set cast teenage upheaval in a luminous confessional glow, carried along by a voice from another planet—though not in the histrionic Björk sense. Her singing can’t help but convey a certain vulnerability, though that unusual Derry accent helps subdue any overt preciousness.

Bridie first picked up a guitar six years ago, and she still has no problem singing stuff she wrote at 14—songs like “Sea Creatures,” the title track of her first EP, released when she was 16 and still catching rides to gigs with her mom. “I wrote it about a friend who was getting bullied in school,” says Bridie. “It was very stream of consciousness … kind of like getting everything out of my head. When I sing it now, I just try to put myself in the position I was in when I wrote it.”

“Sea Creatures” can also be found on the new Before We Forgot How To Dream (Rough Trade), a richly varied full-length debut that’s being pegged as a coming-of-age statement. Truth is, SOAK already sounds pretty damn sure of herself. And while a lyric like “I’ve got a ghost, and she’s haunting me” seems to speak to some degree of dysfunction, home has always been a place of acceptance for Bridie. The middle child of three, she was 14 when she told her parents she was gay. Both are supportive wannabe hippie types with solid jobs and killer vinyl collections. “My parents were always playing music around the house,” says Bridie, an avid skateboarder when she’s not performing. “My dad would play ‘Sweet Baby James’ on his guitar as a lullaby.”

In 2012, a demo of “Sea Creatures” found its way to the BBC courtesy of Bridie herself, who uploaded it to the station’s “Introducing” web page. Radio 1 latched onto it from there, and she wound up on a European tour with Tegan & Sara. Things advanced even further when she met Tommy McLaughlin, of the Dublin-based indie-folk outfit Villagers, who produced Dream and is now part of SOAK’s touring band.

Since her eye-opening SXSW appearance, the minor buzz is approaching a loud hum in the U.S., and she’ll be touring small venues here over the course of the summer. But is it all coming too fast? “It doesn’t seem like it happened all that quick,” says Bridie. “I’ve been playing gigs since I was 15, so, to me, it feels like a slow and steady rise.”

Four years can seem like a lifetime to a teenager.

—Hobart Rowland