Alison Goldfrapp on Her Disco-Ready New Album and Embracing Vintage Fashion

Over the years, Alison Goldfrapp has appeared on album covers and graced the stages of Glastonbury as all sorts of different characters: a film noir siren, a Weimar cabaret dominatrix, a Studio 54 diva, a Wicker Man earth mother, a traveling circus girl in a harlequin suit. Which perhaps explains why her latest guise feels the most radical of all: these days, she’s simply herself. 

Goldfrapp is best known for the 20-plus years she spent as part of the genre-bending musical duo Goldfrapp (although the group is not over for good, she notes, just on hiatus), where she cycled through about as many musical genres as she did costume changes: gorgeously decadent electronica on their breakout album Felt Mountain; stomping electroclash synth-pop on Black Cherry and Supernature; and dreamy folk-pop on Seventh Tree. You name it, Goldfrapp probably did it—and often a few years before everyone else. 

She wears this as a badge of honor: “That sounds like a wonderful compliment to me,” Goldfrapp says of being called eternally ahead of her time. “I think it’s lovely that someone would say that!”

When we speak, she is deep in rehearsals for the first live shows in support of her first solo album, The Love Invention. While it carries echoes of Goldfrapp albums past—all throbbing disco beats, sensuous ’80s-inflected synths, and impossibly catchy melodies carried by Goldfrapp’s soaring vocals, which still go together with electronic music like peanut butter and jelly—it also marks new territory for Goldfrapp. The project’s singularity of vision and irrepressible sense of joy speak to the new chapter in her career that she’s opening with the record. 

Here, Goldfrapp talks us through the genesis of The Love Invention, how its psychedelic visuals came together, and why she’ll always be a fan of vintage fashion. 

Vogue: Hi, Alison! How are you feeling now that the album is almost out?

Alison Goldfrapp: It’s always quite an intense week, release week—plus, I’ve got a gig coming up, so it’s especially frantic. I’m in rehearsals right now, and I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to wear. So yeah, it’s pretty crazy at the moment, but I’m really looking forward to getting out there and playing the record. 

Was stepping out on your own a desire you’d harbored for a long time, or was there a kind of eureka moment when you decided to do it?

I guess it’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. And you know, weirdly, in some ways, it doesn’t feel that different, because Will [Gregory] and I never toured together, so it was always just me out on the road. But then at the same time, it does feel completely different. It’s a weird one, but it’s also a nice feeling. I’m not sure if I never really had time before, or if I didn’t quite know how to go about it. Maybe I didn’t feel confident enough. Interestingly, I think lockdown probably helped quite a lot. I really wanted to work with some other people, and lockdown was a good time to experiment and see what happened. I built a little studio at home, which enabled me to try out some new things without too much pressure, because no one was going anywhere or doing anything. Originally, the idea was just to do an EP and then it kind of grew. There was no definitive point at which I said, “I’m going solo,” you know? It didn’t happen like that. It evolved. 

How did working in a studio at home change your process?

I think it was just being in a room on my own and feeling less self-conscious, I guess. I could just noodle about for hours and hours and hours, without feeling like I’m boring the tits off someone else. [Laughs.] So that was quite helpful.

There’s a real sense of joy and a celebration of pleasure across the whole album—did the freedom of how it came together inform that in any way, do you think?

I’d wanted for quite a long time to make something that was much more rhythm-based, beats-based, straight-up dance-y and poppy, all of those things, and I didn’t always feel like it was appropriate with Goldfrapp for various reasons. And there’s always a bit of humor among all the seriousness, especially on this album—there’s a real sense of the surreal and the fantastical. But also, I think it was just great timing. It’s funny how these things work out.

How did all of those words you mentioned—the surrealism, the fantasy, the humor—inform the visual world you built around the record? 

It’s always a real mishmash. It’s a bit like with the music, I have so many reference points and sounds and colors whizzing around in there—things that are quite retro, but then things that are also very contemporary. In terms of musical production, especially, I wanted it to feel very contemporary. For the visuals, I worked very closely with Mat Maitland, because every time I listened to the music I saw lots of his colors—I just felt like he’d be able to bring it to life. 

It was always exciting with Goldfrapp to see the way in which you’d reinvent this 360-degree world from the ground up with every album. Does this feel like another reinvention?

The visuals and the music always go hand-in-hand for me, even if sometimes it doesn’t quite come out the way you planned it to. With the videos for this album, there really was no planning, as we used AI for the backdrops. I always knew that we were going to use AI, as I’m very fascinated by AI. I liked that idea that you’re sort of telling it what to do, but actually, it just does its own thing anyway. In the video for “NeverStop,” where you get the worm fish hand, that was a complete accident, but somehow it fit really well with the song. There was that element of surprise, which is always great. It’s often the same when I’m writing music. You have one idea about something, but you usually end up with something completely different. I love not quite knowing how something’s going to turn out. That’s the beauty of working with other people as well, and probably why collaborating has always been so exciting for me—the energy of a complete stranger coming in to shake things up. 

Is that why you love old synthesizers so much? You can input what you want, but you never really know exactly what’s going to come out the other side…

When you work with analog, these old synths, quite often you don’t know what the hell they’re gonna do; it’s quite unpredictable because they’re ancient. It can be quite amusing and also really fucking annoying at times, actually. But a lot of the analog synth sounds are actually plugins, so that means you don’t have that irritating thing of plugging something in, waiting half an hour for it to warm up, and then pressing a button and not quite knowing if it’s going to work or not. Which used to really do my head in. So I’m pleased to be able to have those sounds without all those issues. Thanks to the modern world, we can do that.

You mentioned the word retro, and I noticed you were wearing a lot of vintage throughout the visuals—some Alaïa, John Galliano, Issey Miyake, among others. Did that dovetail nicely with the sound of the record, to you?

No, it’s mostly because it’s very hard to get people to lend you clothes unless you’re Cate Blanchett or Lady Gaga. [Laughs.] But I mean, I also love vintage clothes, don’t get me wrong. I own lots of vintage clothes and they can be really fun and beautiful. I love going to see my friend Stephen Phillips, who has a shop called Rellik in London, and he has a vast archive of vintage clothes which is absolutely amazing—he has a huge warehouse in his home, and he’s so knowledgeable about all the designers. So I absolutely love doing that. But it’s also because, yeah, it’s very hard to borrow sometimes—I often ask designers and they don’t always lend. I borrowed some beautiful things from Alexandre Vauthier the other day in Paris, he was very generous. And Goom Heo, she lent me some stuff, and she’s wonderful too. It’s not always that straightforward, but I absolutely love fashion and getting to wear wonderful things—I do still love that part of it.

I imagine this record is probably going to be a fun one to tour, right? As a part of Goldfrapp, did you tend to enjoy the live shows for the more upbeat albums, or the moodier ones?

Well, first of all, I’ve got to figure out what I’m wearing, because I still haven’t got a clue and I’ve got a gig in less than two weeks. But I mean, it’s always so different. We did a Felt Mountain anniversary show last year, and it had been postponed—we were supposed to do it in 2020 originally, but it got canceled twice or something. When it came around last year, I thought, Oh my God, do I really want to be doing this again? Anyway, I really enjoyed it, of course. It’s such a different energy, doing something like that to doing something like Supernature, but I love them both equally. So I’m really excited about doing something more high-energy, for sure—especially when festival season rolls around.