Exclusive Interview: Ellise on how her Album 'PRETTY EVIL' Brought her Back to Life

For Ellise, arriving to the release of her sophomore album, PRETTY EVIL, has been a journey of creative rebirth, shedding the ghosts of her past, and embracing her scintillating wits and integrity as an artist. Fresh off the album's release and the closing night of her touring gig alongside Bishop Briggs across North America, Ellise joined us to talk about the genesis of her album, PRETTY EVIL, finding inspiration in everything from Megan Fox memes to a vicious heartbreak, and how rediscovering her voice has brought her back to life.

CREDIT: PRESS | PHOTO BY BEN ALLEN

Before making the long post-tour trek home from Boston to Los Angeles, Ellise is nothing but bright-eyed and full of easy humor as she hops on our call, laughing about the spookiness of her dark hotel room. Known for her love of haunting aesthetics and dark-pop sonics, Ellise herself is exactly the opposite - full of light, basking in the joy of her soul-freeing PRETTY EVIL finally being out in the world.

As we settle into talking about the early stages of the album's creation, Ellise sets the scene for just how long she's been chasing this moment. "My first album was four years ago, and I started working on PRETTY EVIL about a year ago. Honestly, I've been making music and scrapping it for an album for a good four years," she says. "So I feel like this album has been almost four years of process and four years of creation, but the actual songs that made it on the album, I've only been making for about the past year."

"I wanted 'PRETTY' and 'EVIL' to be two sides of the same coin where it's like, 'Hey, we wanted to be together forever. We romanticized it, but it's really not that pretty.' And then at the end of it all, we both did horrible things to each other." - Ellise

A series of intertwined fortunate and unfortunate events led Ellise to finally hone in on the music that became PRETTY EVIL - she found herself caught in artistic and personal nightmares that she kept disguised behind an angelic facade. Cracking that facade like a delicate doll was the moment she finally felt the power and vision she'd been searching for years for starting to rise from the ashes. "Honestly, I don't think I realized that it was going to be a concept album until after I made 'valentine.' I had made 'ballerina' one day and then 'leech' the next, and I knew I loved them both. And this was, like, January [2024]. Then in February, when I found out that the subject matter for 'valentine' happened, that's when I made 'valentine.' That really rocked my world, that betrayal and that breakup. So after that had happened, that's when I knew, 'Okay, I need to make a huge change in my life.'" She smiles, reminiscing on this karmic twist of her fate and the way her dreams were coincidentally born out of hell. "Not only did me and that man break up, but I also fired my manager who was my manager for two years and got a new manager who I'm so obsessed with. So there were a couple of really big changes in my life, and I knew, 'Okay, I need to find a producer that I love, that I'm gonna make stuff that I've that I've never made before, different sounding stuff than I've ever made before and different subject matter than what I've written about before.' So I think when I met Arthur [Besna] in June is when I realized, 'Okay, I'm gonna take these few songs that I have that I love, and we're going to build something so much bigger around them.'"

With a stellar team behind her and a sharp sense of the twisted tale of love and fate she wanted to tell, Ellise was finally equipped to nail down her vision for the project. "I knew I wanted the album to be called PRETTY EVIL, and I knew that the concept around PRETTY EVIL was this concept of this very polarizing love where it's really good or it's really, really bad. And so we had made a song called 'pretty evil' where the concept was basically, 'I'm evil, but you still love me, and I do these horrible things to you, but you still take me back and accept me.' So, you know, 'I'm evil, but you still think I'm pretty.'" But after going through hell and back to reclaim her voice, Ellise wouldn't settle for just being another pretty face with the voice of an angel - she wanted the beauty to be in the substance of the project. "After we had made [the title track], I just felt like that wasn't really what I wanted to say. That wasn't necessarily what I wanted PRETTY EVIL to really mean. So then that's when I sort of thought of the opener 'PRETTY,' closer 'EVIL.' I wanted 'PRETTY' and 'EVIL' to be two sides of the same coin where it's like, 'Hey, we wanted to be together forever. We romanticized it, but it's really not that pretty. That isn't really the reality. And then at the end of it all being like, 'You know what? We both did horrible things to each other. 'I never wanted it to get so evil.' It just did, and things happen, and we have to end it now.' So that's how the PRETTY EVIL concept became what it is - scrapping that original song and then making the two new ones."

After Ellise shares that she knew she wanted the album to be called PRETTY EVIL, it feels like there's a story behind the title dying to be told. When asked where the idea came from, Ellise moves closer to the camera and smiles, "Oh my God, can I actually be so real? It's so funny, like, not deep. I feel like I'm a very, annoyingly overly deep person that has to make meaning out of and romanticize everything usually. But, genuinely, I saw a meme of Megan Fox, and it just said, 'I've been called evil, but never ugly.' And I literally saw that and was like, 'Wait.' And at first it didn't have any real meaning, I just knew I liked the words 'pretty evil.' Then I made it have meaning later, but, genuinely, off of a Megan Fox meme."

Her other inspirations for PRETTY EVIL lay in the music she was listening to during the album's creation, from the darker sonics of The Neighbourhood and Melanie Martinez to the clever dance-pop fusions of Daft Punk and Sabrina Carpenter. "I feel like 'committed for life' was very much inspired by Sabrina Carpenter's music," she says. "And I always love Melanie Martinez. It's actually a funny story; I met [my executive producer] Arthur because I had messaged another producer, CJ [Baran], who did the whole Melanie Martinez PORTALS album. I just messaged him and was like, 'Oh my god. I'm a really big fan of your production. I'd love to work with you.' And then I met CJ, and he and Arthur worked together, and that's how I met Arthur. So indirectly, Melanie Martinez, thank you."

Now that the album isn't her pretty little secret anymore, Ellise has been overwhelmed by the response to the project from her fans. "Opening social media, seeing all the insanely nice things my fans are doing - my fans have been doing fan projects, I'm seeing good memes and just really heartfelt reactions. And at the same time, getting to actually meet fans face to face on tour and look into the crowd and see that there are three girls in the front row that already know all the words [to 'PRETTY'] before it's out. It's those types of things combined that have just made me so happy and so grateful. So it's been an amazing release weekend, I guess, so far. I'm really happy."

In looking to the future and finding ways to connect deeper with her fans, Ellise is far from ready to close this chapter. She confirms, "There will be a PRETTY EVIL headline tour, and I'm also working on even some international touring later this year." If that weren't enough of a blessing, she adds, "I'm about to drop the vinyl so soon. I'm making so much cool merch for this album and I have two different colorways of the vinyl, which I'm really excited about because they're super different colorways, but, somehow, both of them work well with the cover art."

This place of creative freedom seems to have given Ellise new life as an artist, where she can allow her creative musings to pour out of her all in wickedly stunning fashion. But Ellise still visits the grave of the version of herself she's left in the past, knowing she wouldn't have the life she does now without her. "I definitely think I'm in a much better place mentally now than I was when I started making this album. Like, obviously, the album is about getting cheated on and this big betrayal and this crazy relationship, and all of that keeps you in a state of sort of fight or flight. And when you're in that fight or flight state with someone that you've been with for so long and things are just so tumultuous, I feel like that can leak into every other part of your brain. I was just in this headspace of, like, 'I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't love any music I'm making. I feel really uninspired. I don't know what magic I used to have that made me make music I thought was good, but I think I lost it.' And that was genuinely how I felt for years," she says.

After years of hunting for the perfect mix of alchemy to harness the balance of her light and darkness on her own terms, Ellise makes it clear that PRETTY EVIL brought her back to life. "I didn't even realize how depressed I was until these changes happened and I literally forced myself out of this position that I had just allowed myself to be comfortable in for so long. When I finally got out of it and finally had new people around me, new perspectives, just a new outlook on everything, that is exactly when I started making the album and loving the songs I was making. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm still insane, but I definitely am doing much better."

Watch All The Things Music: The Podcast x Ellise here.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ELLISE:

INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | X | TIKTOK