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Your first release was the dreamy “Sleeping In Waking,” back in 2013. How has your approach to making music changed since then?

I stopped going on SoundCloud and comparing myself [to other artists]. I was young and I didn’t really know myself, so I kept looking at what other people were doing. I struggled for several years, but then I started listening back to what I was really inspired by. I realized that was a lot of Japanese music.

Which Japanese artists were your favorite?

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I spent my formative musical years in Japanese school, and back then I was really inspired by this girl band called Morning Musume. If you look at their videos, it’s really psychedelic, and I didn’t feel like they were sexualised in a way that maybe [48-person J-pop group] AKB48 were, or overtly trying to be kawaii, like Kyary [Pamyu Pamyu] is.

I became really obsessed with Utada Hikaru — “Automatic,” and her songwriting in general. She was writing when she was 15 or 16, coming out with these incredible melody lines that were inspired by the West, because she was brought up in New York. Having her as a role model was awesome. She would give interviews and she wouldn’t really have perfect Japanese. It was like, Oh cool, she was brought up in New York, she makes awesome music as well.

But when I went outside of London for three years to go to Uni, it got all a bit confused. I sort of rejected Japanese culture for a while.

You studied at Cambridge University. Why did you put that part of yourself to the side?

I couldn’t put a name to it at the time, but it was definitely the patriarchy. I got there and [saw that] a girl went up to a black guy and was like, “Oh, you’re our replacement black guy.” And she was referring to a student that had graduated. The racism...I’d never been stereotyped in that way, because in London I’d gone to a multi-ethnic school. To survive, genuinely, I tried to lay low, but I ended up getting bullied anyway; I had to move houses because this group of girls decided to bully me.

How did you get through it? It must have been tempting to say “fuck this.”

Oh my god, all the time. When I was there, if you wanted to take a year out of uni and then come back it was called “degrading.” There was a big stigma about not being able to handle [the pressure]. I was extremely scared. At the same time, [I had an] Asian family; I don’t want to stereotype, but they were really happy I was going there. I didn’t wanna let them down. It did really take its toll on my mental health.