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“I have never felt true to my age, and every time someone asks me how old I am, it\u2019s like I\u2019m lying,” says Billie Marten, certainly the epitome of an old soul if ever there was one. Not yet 22, the British singer-songwriter spent her mid-to-late teens releasing delicately rendered folk music across two albums and two EPs; though her work has always exhibited a precocious composure, her latest, Flora Fauna<\/em>, out May 21 on IMPERIAL Music<\/a>\/Fiction Records<\/a>, sees her shed the diaphanous layers, materializing into something fuller and more earthy. It’s a confident step away from the ethereal and into the reality of adulthood; on Flora Fauna<\/em>, Marten feels less like a wispy daydream and more like a woman waking up at the end of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I think I thought I was very much an adult on the first and second albums, but I was so confused and so impressionable and was trying to put across this very, like, English lit, bucolic sense of personality, which is a section of my personality, but I\u2019ve now realized that it\u2019s not the entirety. That\u2019s why all the artwork this time around is kind of confrontational and I\u2019m literally eating mud to kind of get rid of that whimsical waif idea,” she explains. “I didn\u2019t wanna be this kind of floaty ethereal waif anymore. I got rid of that person.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Signing with Chess Club and releasing her debut Writing of Blues and Yellows<\/a><\/em> when she was just sixteen, the boutique label no longer felt like “home” by the time they were absorbed by parent RCA\/Sony (they’ve since become independent<\/a> again). Though she went on to release sophomore effort Feeding Seahorses by Hand<\/a><\/em> via the major, she amicably severed ties with her entire team apart from longtime producer Rich Cooper by the time she’d begun writing Flora Fauna<\/em> at the end of 2019. “I just called him up and we started making sounds together again. And it was so quick and easy and natural to me and none of it was trying to force this particular image or writing style out – it was very immediate for me,” Marten recalls. She took up playing bass, which she says was a “huge moment” musically. “It just made all of these sounds come out louder and broader and more immediate.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n