London’s olive wreath is watching a picture-in-picture livestream in the back of your head, and with her studio debut “cold warm green blue,” she’s unearthing memories we didn’t know existed.

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Stream: “cold warm green blue” – olive wreath

Last year, I was in the bathroom of a London pub, gazing over the dozens of stickers overlapping on the stall door.

The tinge of the overhead light made it hard to focus, but a silver iridescence caught my eye. It must have been stuck on recently, but it also seemed to call to me. It was an olive wreath sticker, and I took this as a sign to reach out to the artist the next day.

The London-based artist has already made a name for herself through gigs all over the city, including a sold out show at The Ivy House in Nunhead, in-store live sessions at Next Door Records 2 and Rough Trade Denmark St., and intimate house shows across the city.

Earlier this month, olive wreath debuted her first studio piece, “cold warm green blue,” a kaleidoscope of sounds that feel like colour shooting across your peripherals with closed eyes. With the distinct twang of the violin (Annie Prior) ringing in above the sounds of sparkling percussion and sparse guitar notes, soft vocals (olive wreath and backing vocals Kieran Alexander) lead the track in a register that almost begs you to sit with it. Lyrically, olive wreath writes the way her music sounds, and her artist manifesto says it best, as “watching a picture-in-picture livestream of the back of your head”:

“Heard claire read Dog Rose,
seeing their way
Hear words worm good good good,
stoke leathering change
New job, new voice, new songs,
new loves, new hates
No twitch, no kick,
no fix ticking outta my face”

Building from sparse acoustic guitars and expanding synths at the outset, olive wreath’s vocals arrive like a pillar of surety amidst an everchanging sonic landscape. Instrumentals and vocals marry and fall into release, plummeting the chorus into a whirlwind of shapes and colours that mirror the changing tides of self-perception and relationships.

For the single, olive wreath shares, “‘cold warm green blue’ is a song about getting older, the wind cutting through you, and changing relationships in the context of a realised queer identity.”

That’s what all her music sounds like – olive wreath recontextualises field recordings and sampled beats with intricate guitar lines to create music sitting in the intersection of soft electronica, post-hyperpop and modern alternative folk, lyrically exploring the experience of transgender identity and relationships in the new holocene age.

Olive wreath debuted independently in 2024, and has been hard at work ever since. No stranger to the music scene, however, this new project represents a renewed drive for how music can make audiences feel. With every new chapter of self-recognition, olive wreath’s music undoubtedly makes you feel the same.

but don’t it run round, round round,
right through you?
don’t it cut clean,
clean clean so clear and
don’t it run cold then warm,
then green then blue?
in the stippling dust
and your deadwood mood
in your smile set right
when you see new moon
oh don’t it all seem
so so so so untrue?

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:: stream/purchase cold warm green blue here ::

:: connect with olive wreath here ::

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Stream: “cold warm green blue” – olive wreath

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 © June Aspell

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