Speaking with RANGE, Alexandra Hughes — better known to fans as Allie X — reflects on creative rebirth, emotional honesty, and the inevitability of happiness finding you.

Girl With No Face was a very intense creative process, especially emotionally. What were you feeling internally that you may have not been able to understand or depict at the time? How do you define these feelings now that you’ve completed Happiness Is Going To Get You, where you’ve gotten to return to your roots?

Now I’m able to have a better perspective on Girl With No Face because it was the first time I’d taken on making a full body of work in that way. The technical learning curve for that was so intense that its challenges put me in this place of being insecure and feeling really stuck. In conjunction and in parallel with that, there was a lot as a writer that was stuck inside of me. It took Girl With No Face to really find my voice in a certain way.

In Los Angeles, I’d been doing a lot of writing rooms and a lot of collaborative stuff since I got there. I always had this sense of “These lyrics sound a bit generic where I don’t fully relate to what I’m saying and I’m not able to find the words for what’s really inside of me.” On Girl With No Face, that stuff started to come out, and as it went on, it just got angrier and angrier. It became this rageful release for me.

I had real-time frustration with how difficult it was. I got very sick during the process, it was the pandemic and it took me three years. For all those reasons, it was very intense. I finished that process and was so exhausted, ready to take the summer off. But then I quickly got creatively restless and I had these voice memos of ideas at the piano that I had recorded in this sort of stream of consciousness way whilst recording Girl With No Face — which was all programmed, so I was like, “These piano ideas are for something else.”

Quickly, it just turned into this record and it was such a different feeling process. It was pretty seamless and easy-feeling, not overthought. I wasn’t banging my head against the wall trying to crack these songs. They just sort of happened.

The last song on the album got me to think a lot about the idea of surrender and how there tends to be negative connotations with it, almost like you’re losing in a way. How do you personally define surrender and how have you found inner peace from that?

To be honest, I haven’t found inner peace, but I feel like as I’ve gotten older, I’ve moved more toward some sort of acceptance of “This is the way the world is. This is who I am for better or worse,” and just understanding my place in the world a bit better.

In this way, the sentiment of Happiness Is Going To Get You is both a way of saying surrender can be good and bad, but it’s inevitable that happiness is going to get you. It’s inevitable that life is gonna happen. I wouldn’t say this record is documenting that I found inner peace, but it’s documenting a coming of age for me and a real maturity. Knowing that [peace] is there, but also that chaos is part of being alive.

Basically, the last song is just light. It plays with this idea that light is so powerful. It burns you and it hurts, but it’s also so beautiful. It fills you up and fuels you and gives you this [feeling] that being alive is such an intense and incredible experience — these profound feelings. I’m better off as a lyricist than trying to explain them.

I’ve seen philosophers talk about how the mind thinks in duality — good versus bad, right and wrong — rather than embracing both existing at the same time. I noticed the album plays into that a lot. How has embracing duality and the law of opposites enlightened and fueled a rebirth within you?

That was such an interesting thing because the process of Girl With No Face birthed this. If Girl With No Face was hysterical, which it felt like at certain times, this is the deep breath in after that hysterical cry. It’s an intense feeling, but it’s completely different. How could I have had that breath in without that flailing?

The young philosophy of the shadow self and question of good and bad has always been very grounding to me — acknowledging that it exists inside of me and that creativity is my path and language for exploring it. When I think about my life that way, I think of what a gift it is to be an artist.

When I came up with the X in Allie X, that’s essentially what that X represented. In some ways, it’s a return to this thesis that I’ve had for a while. Sometimes it’s good to return to things that you know to be true. You feel self-assurance in that.

I know you said you recorded voice notes while working on Girl With No Face. When you put yourself back into a place where there was difficulty navigating emotions, it can be hard to re-engage with moments from there. How did revisiting those memos affect you?

It’s funny, the reason I filed [the voice memos] for later was because they had an entirely different feeling about them. It was very reflective, singer-songwriter — the sound of them was different, but it was also the feeling and tone that I felt inside. When I listened to those, even though it was during that time, it was like a different muse that was planting those ideas so that there’s almost no association, strangely.

I had a sense of, “Oh, this is very vague, but I got a feeling. I think I could develop this into a body of work in the future.” If you heard these memos, you’d be like, “What am I listening to?” They’re very scattered and there’s not too much tangible information to anyone that isn’t me in them.

I didn’t know at the time if it was truly viable as something to pursue. But when I started pursuing them, they just were like, “Hey, we’re here. We’re ready to live.”

I felt sort of amazed at the journey that I go on and how life just teaches me things. Like how I wasn’t ready at the time of Girl With No Face to explore those feelings of reflectiveness, perspective, nostalgia, and adulthood. I needed to still be immature and screaming teenage thoughts.

In retrospect, I feel something akin to spirituality. I’m not a religious person, but these experiences that I’ve had with inspiration and creativity, the ways that it informs people that I meet, journeys that I go on, and pain and healing that I’ve experienced — it just wows me. I didn’t know [the voice notes] would so quickly turn into an album, but I knew there was something there that as an artist, I was meant to explore.