Rising electronic pop singer-songwriter Emily Atkinson, aka Fourth Daughter, has announced her forthcoming EP ‘Hyperreal’ and shared pulsing, summery new single, ‘Should Have Told You’.
A surefire dance anthem, ‘Should Have Told You’ showcases Atkinson’s soaring, celestial vocals against an irresistible background of propulsive beats and glistening, Balearic-sounding synths.
Atkinson said: “HYPERREAL is an exaggerated, over-the-top version of reality when you get in your own bubble and focus on one thing so much that you can’t make out what’s real and true outside of it.”
From the edgy electronics and assertive groove of ‘Take The Fall’, to the upbeat energy of ‘Chained To Try’ and the multi-layered ‘Calling Out Your Name’, Hyperreal is packed with tracks that capture the ecstatic abandon of the dancefloor.
Below, she breaks down the release, giving us a detailed look at the tools used in the creation process.
Words and photos by Fourth Daughter
My EP HYPERREAL was made over the span of a few years and in different studios so there was a lot of different pieces of gear and recording elements that contributed to the EP. There are a special few that were really key to the process and have featured across the whole EP so let’s get into it.
First up is the KORG Minilogue XD. I bought this synth in the depths of lockdown in 2020 when I’d spent a great deal of time reflecting on the music I’d been making prior to this and what I wanted it to sound like moving forward and although there are dark elements across the songs, the dance music direction was where I wanted it to go. I got the KORG out and used it straight off to write the song Should Have Told You which was the last single I released from the EP in July of this year. The opening chords of the song are from that synth and are actually a stock sound that I made no edits to. I think it helped to shape the sound massively for the rest of the EP and helped to create a sonic of dance-inspired music paired with really lush analogue synth sounds that have always been present in my music. This track almost became a blueprint of where the rest of the EP was headed before I even knew it.
Next up is the Ableton Push. I use this for so much for playing live but it’s also a really great tool when I’m writing. Most of the songs on the EP have vocal samples that are made out of either my voice or a sample of someone else’s voice and it becomes the key melody in certain sections. A lot of this is done using the push to drag an audio recording in which then gets split up and assigned to all of the pads and allows you to sample it in a way that makes it feel like you’re playing an instrument rather than drawing in the sample to Ableton on the computer. Vocal samples are a prominent feature across the whole EP – most prominently in Walk With Me, Say What You Want and Chained to Try.
Another synth that played an important role in the creation of HYPERREAL was the Prophet. I am obsessed with the Prophet and always will be. The one I used is actually my friend & long-time collaborator, Dave Oscillation’s. He ignited my love for it years ago when we first started working together. The Prophet has those in-the-face brass stab sounds, rich string pads, EDM style pad sounds that can really elevate a section in a song. I have always been a massive Moderat fan and a lover of sections between songs not always being a slow build but swapping into them and the dynamic change to slap you in the face. The prophet is key to that and it’s featured for this reason in almost every song on the EP. You can really hear it in Walk With Me and Say What You Want but it really is featured heavily across most of the songs.
It’s no secret that HYPERREAL is very bass-heavy and has some pretty intricate bass lines. There are a number of them which were made on the ARTURIA Minibrute. Rich in analogue sound and the ability to record in live the opening of a filter is what made me drift away from always using midi bass sounds for convenience. This bass has a tendency to fall out of tune quite easily so it always feels like a win when you get a take quickly that’s good and I think it contributed to the beginning of a richer bass sound across all of my songs. Featured most clearly on Chained to Try.
It would be criminal to not point out some of the cool production that went into recording and creating the vocal sound across the EP. There’s a lot of layering and new techniques that I used on it that I’ve never done before. Most notably would be recording vocal layers at different speeds and then reverting them to the normal tempo which would create little defects in the vocal layers that you just can’t get otherwise which makes them super unique. This was a really heavy feature in the chorus of Take The Fall where I sang super fast and then super slow and brought them back to speed. Another layer in the chorus here too is a vocal with a stutter effect on it – this tied with the vocal layers with defects and the main vocal on top is what has given it the rich vocal sound it has.
When a song gets written and recorded, initially a guide vocal is put onto the track which can sometimes sound not the best but then sometimes it has some charm to it that you can’t get when you re-record the vocals again. This happened in a couple of the songs and what I did was to record a new layer as the main vocal and then pair it with the original one so that the essence of the song wasn’t lost. This was done in the opening track of the EP, Walk With Me. When I re-recorded all the layers of the vocals it lost so much of the essence of the song so the original vocal is in there and it’s helped create a cool lo-fi effect. Most of the vocals were recorded on a Sennheiser E865, a Neumann u87, and a Shure SM7B.
Grab your copy of the release here.
