Type O

On her debut single Sleepless, Anna O, aka Anna O'Neil, recounts the insomnia she experienced while she was suffering from a two-year bout of glandular fever. “I couldn't get out of bed and was sick with every virus that came around,” says O'Neil. “So it just kind of came from that place of being alone all the time, sick in bed every day and it just made me think too much; like I had way too much time to think other than watching too many episodes of Stargate.” It was this experience that helped her gather inspiration for her debut EP When The Winter Came. Growing up in a musical family, O'Neil went on to study at WAAPA as a jazz singer and played with on and off again with various groups but she says the EP was borne out of a desire to make it on her own as a solo artist. “The EP kind of came from that place of having to think and go 'What do I really want to with my time?', like do I really want to live my life doing all these music-related things or do I actually want to do my own thing and make my own music.”

The EP puts O'Neil's powerful, soulful vocals front and centre against a backdrop of electronic loops and samples, touching on influences from Jessie Ware to Kimbra and Lorde to name a few. “I knew I wanted it to be very strongly vocal-driven because that's my main instrument and I wanted to play around with that,” she says. “Heaps of music lately has been having the crazy vocal layers and I loved that. So when I started writing I was using my little GarageBand iPad app and I was making a million vocal layers and that's kind of where the sound started to come together and then there was a drum machine on the app so you can make hip hop drums and stuff and I started doing it and I was like 'I'll just put it in until I can get in with a producer then we'll do it all properly and get the drummer to come in,' but then I ended up really liking it and the producer really liked it so we decided to go more for the electronic kind of sound.”

With the EP set to come out in mid-March, O'Neil is holding her release party for the album at Rosemount Hotel on March 22. “I'm really excited but I was really nervous to begin with,” she says. “The thought of playing to everyone you know in this one cramped little room, but now we've started planning and rehearsing I'm really excited about it. I just want to do it really well because I want to do it forever, I don't want to be some one-hit wonder or whatever, I don't want to disappear so I'm trying to set myself up to do really well and keep making music forever.”