Her pop career became soul-destroying. So she torched it and rebuilt it on her own terms

In October 2022, feeling ever more estranged from her decade-long run on the pop treadmill, Eves Karydas decided to set a flame to the whole thing.

On her Instagram, the Brisbane musician posted an essay titled “On social media, the music industry, and my experience as a woman within it all” that outlined the destabilising cycle she’d fallen into, a culture that prioritised social media likes over her actual music, and where she felt forced to sexualise her image (“I’ve posted thirst traps, marketed myself as a ‘hot girl’”) to get ahead in the industry.

“The truth is, as someone with a lot to say I’ve been surprisingly quiet as an artist,” Karydas wrote at the time. “I’ve silenced myself because I’ve been pushed to believe that my best asset is my body. Nothing gets the algorithm going quite like tits and ass.” She signed off saying that to salvage her creativity and sanity, she’d be moving forward self-managed.

“It was incredibly nerve-racking to do that Instagram post – I’d never spoken about something like that before – but it was a way to draw a line in the sand,” Karydas, 29, says. “I had to look in the mirror and be like, this vision of me that the public is seeing isn’t lining up with how I view myself.”

The post went viral, striking a nerve in the local music industry. “More than anything, it just showed how quiet women feel a lot of the time,” Karydas says. “It’s such a specifically female experience, having your image be so raised onto a pedestal and used as the first thing people judge. It’s really frustrating. So to have so many people reach out to me was equal parts awesome and sad. I was like, ‘oh man, we’re all feeling this, aren’t we?’.”

Two years on, seated in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ home in Brisbane, surrounded by boxes of vinyl, cassettes and merch for the coming launch of her new independent album Burnt Tapes, Karydas exudes a calm confidence that feels far removed from the despair communicated in the essay.

Back then, while still caught up in her careerist push, she had become one of Australia’s most promising young pop artists. Her 2020 single Complicated went gold (35,000 sales units) and featured at #22 on Triple J’s Hottest 100, and she was working heavily within the industry machine, collaborating regularly with pop heavy hitters in the US, London and Stockholm.

“It was pretty intoxicating, if I’m honest,” Karydas says. “You get swept up in it so easily when you’re, like, flown to LA and you stay in these nice houses and meet all these brilliant and famous people and whatever. But it all means nothing at the end of the day if you can’t do your job authentically. Now I’m like, if I never go to LA again, I don’t actually care.”

Cutting ranks with her management, label, and industry contacts – did she fear she was sabotaging her career? “It was more like, I’d just rather not do this career if it means doing it that way,” says Karydas. “I had got to the point where I was OK with that. The thing that drives a lot of us in this industry is this idea that it’s life or death, which is crazy. It’s such a privilege to work in this job and this industry, so you might as well do it the way that you want to do it.”

She saw an alternative possibility in the example of her close friends Cub Sport – the long independent Brisbane act who seemed to be thriving in a way that was genuinely themselves – and took the plunge. Beyond the music, Karydas is now responsible for her music videos, artwork design, press photos, and so on. “Fonts! I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about fonts!” she says.

“It’s crazy to me that I’d fallen into a pocket where I wasn’t doing these things, because when I first started my career 10 years ago, I was doing all of these things myself,” she says of her current creative load. “It isn’t easy work and I understand why people get paid a lot of money to do those things, and I’m not saying that the music videos I make are on the level of, like, a Doja Cat music video, but it’s a very pure form of expression of what I’m capable of and I kind of like that.”

Despite its journey, her new album Burnt Tapes is no victim’s lament. It’s free and loose, playful and raw. It’s sonically adventurous, touching a range of genres including R&B, trip-hop, ’80s city pop, and ’90s alt-balladry. Sideways features a surprising Rhodes organ solo, and on Call Me!, Karydas skids over placeholder lyrics – “something, something, something, something” – that highlight her creative process, an element as important as the finished product.

“What I wanted to do was point everything away from the digital, glossy pop thing that I had been doing,” Karydas says of Burnt Tapes. “I wanted to lean into imperfection and grit and things that are a little bit messier.”

It required working in a different way, a sort of subversion of her earlier pop process, which had involved countless songwriting sessions with endless strangers. “Yet another thing that women in music are just expected to do – get thrown in a songwriting session and, like, the girls are at the back on the couch and the guy is at the front on the computer; I can’t tell you how many sessions I’ve been in that are like that,” says Karydas.

“With this album, I totally flipped that on its head and it was just me and this guy Jens [Resch], and we just jammed it out. I know that sounds really dad rock of me, but it’s what I wanted to do.”

The approach feels aligned with pop’s wider moment. From Charli XCX’s plain-spoken stream-of-consciousness on Brat, to SZA’s raw honesty, to Chappell Roan’s singular eccentricity, pop has reached a moment where imperfection is resonating with audiences.

“Charli recently spoke about, you know, ‘women don’t owe you their faces and bodies on their album artwork’, and I loved her saying that because I had made the decision not to put my face on my album cover and it just felt like, hell yeah, we’re all banding together,” Karydas laughs.

“In an industry like music, your brand is what you look like and it’s easy for that to become monotonous and one-dimensional, and I think women are trying to push back on that. More than anything, it’s just nice to see some different representation out there for women, people doing things their own way. That’s always going to resonate.”

The album’s opener Girlboss feels like its closest nod to Karydas’ essay, evoking the kind of pop plea that Lana Del Rey has spent her career stoking: an appeal for complete, unvarnished feminine expression in a culture where empowerment has become the dominant doctrine. “I want to be everything, both the best and the worst,” sings Karydas.

“That line, it’s just about being messy,” she says. “Some days I feel super ambitious, other days I feel like I want to hide in a cupboard. That doesn’t mean I have a personality disorder, that’s just what it is to be a human being.”

Despite the marked delineation from her past, Karydas says her relationship with her old music is good. “Sometimes it’s easy to conflate the experiences I had at the time with certain songs. But the more time that passes, the more I’m like I was really good at writing in that pop and commercial sphere. I think the success of those songs speaks for itself, and I’m really proud of it.”

Burnt Tapes, meanwhile, feels righteously loaded. In going indie and dropping out of the industry rat race, Karydas hopes she’s offered an example to young female musicians that another pathway is possible, beyond the big label and the big manager and the industry expectations that can leave one feeling hopelessly disconnected from their work, as she felt when she posted the essay.

“I always hated being on the outside of all the discussions about my work; there was always a middleman speaking for me, which didn’t make sense. So even though there are ways this has been harder, overall it’s easier because all I need to do is stick to my vision and my plan,” says Karydas. “It’s a lot of work, but I’m passionate about the work so I’m happy to do it at all hours of the day. It’s good. I wouldn’t go back.”

Eves Karydas’ Burnt Tapes is out on Friday. She performs at Howler in Melbourne on Friday, at Mary’s Underground in Sydney on Saturday, and at The Brightside in Brisbane on Thursday, July 11.

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