carina premieres ‘exit sign’ taken from her upcoming EP after the stars, due to be released August 18th on Don’t Sleep. carina is a unique artist who sits in between the realms of indie, pop and alternative music, with her own take on the genres providing her with a truly brilliant and unique sound. Having released her debut EP ‘spaceout!’ back in 2022, carina garnered support from Steve Lamacq’s prestigious BBC Radio 6 show, BBC Radio 1’s Jamz Supernova, BBC Introducing, and Clash, the future looks bright for this young artist.
I think I initially wrote this for another song called ‘Ghost’. I kept having dreams about this person I wasn’t over yet. And that’s where the line ‘our ghosts haunt me in my sleep’ came from. Then I got in the studio and this was the first song we wrote and made for the project. It’s the last song in the project ’cause it’s about accepting something is over. It’s kind of an end credit type of song.
Growing up in Oxford and now living in London, the young artist was given her name by her scientist father, naming her after the constellation ‘Carina’. She got into music when she began taking piano lessons from a young age, yet never enjoyed the structure of learning, and instead found creative freedom in writing and creating her own songs. Her sound became influenced by listening to the likes of Joan Armatrading and George Ezra during her formative years, whilst she now bases her sounds through Lo-fi genre tones, and artists such as Still Woozy and Dominic Fyke. The artist herself follows a variety of different themes, with a lot of the songs she creates based around being used by people she’s previously dated. For a while carina battled with her mental health, and overcame big problems with dissociations, and through this, music became the perfect outlet to ensure that she could remain grounded and explain how she feels through the means of creation. carina’s music has since become an extension of her, essentially narrating her life – she initially began writing through the tragic death of her best friend, and as a prolific songwriter, she has the capability to write so many songs that it has now just become second nature to her.
In terms of her live shows, she is still working on them, constantly constructing the exact image she wishes to portray, always trying to make the next show better than the last, and ensuring the crowd understand the emotions she aims to convey. Her live band members are her best friends, with carina explaining of her live shows: “It’s a beautiful experience to be able to share a part of my heart with people that come to see me.”
Outside of music, carina is very into technical skills, she took Maths and Computer Science for her A Levels, teaches children Maths as a side hustle and eventually wants to begin teaching coding. Meanwhile, the future is very bright for the young artist, having already written the project that is coming out after her upcoming new creation ‘after the stars’, and also engaging in a series production where she writes a song for every month of 2023, all the whilst she is documenting the project. When explaining who carina is as an artist, she explains: “an old soul expressing her experience from the lens of a young person’s view.”
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Pre-order after the stars EP: https://carina.ffm.to/after_the_stars_ep
EP drops 18th August
