When Elkka turned her sights towards making a debut album after a run of critically acclaimed EPs that established her as one of dance music’s most exciting breakthrough talents, she knew she wanted the record to come from a very personal place. “I really thought about what inspires me,” the Welsh DJ/producer tells Apple Music. “Where have I come from? Where am I now in my life, in my thirties as a woman? Those themes just poured through. One of my main inspirations has always been women and women’s sensuality, and sexuality is something that’s always been at the forefront of what I do. It felt very natural to pour that into the record.” The result is Prism of Pleasure, an album of beguiling emotional scope, where vulnerability and strength are at the heart of songs that range from club bangers to ambient techno to euphoric house anthems, the presence of Elkka’s vocal adding a soulful intensity. “I think when you challenge yourself as a musician and you expose certain parts of yourself, things really translate musically. I wanted people to feel like I’ve poured myself into this.” After her father passed away during the album’s creation, Elkka found a new resilience to push forward. “I decided I had to finish this and I had to do that for him, for me, for my family. He wouldn’t have wanted his passing to derail my passion and my future,” she says. Read on as she guides us through a poignant, propulsive debut, track by track. “Break all my walls down” “Opening the record with my voice was quite important as a statement of what I want this record to be about. That vulnerability in singing is very different to a dance track without me on it, which I’ve done before. This song is very much like I’m pouring myself out to you here, that I’ll give everything to you to make sure that you love me and that you feel my love. I wrote this track because I needed someone to hear that, so it’s not a made-up story, it's very much part of my life. [It] was quite important to me for people to hear that straight away, to let them know that this record isn’t just going to be pure dance music, it’s more than that.” “Right Here” “I wrote this on the day of my dad’s funeral. It was the last track written for the record. In the back of my mind, I was searching for another song subconsciously before he passed away. But there was a moment where I just needed to go in on myself and put my headphones on and sit at the kitchen table, which I did, hours before his funeral. I felt the real urge to write, which is not usually how I go about things. Sometimes, out of sheer vulnerability, really beautiful things can happen and this is probably the most vulnerable point in my entire life thus far. There’s a beautiful melancholy to it. I really love this song and it’s a nice way to dedicate something to my dad but I don’t want it to be necessarily seen as a sad song, it oddly feels uplifting at the same time.” “Make Me” “‘Make Me’ was one of the first tracks I wrote, a number of years ago, before the album process started. I love the fact that it has this incredible energy to it but also this softness and warmth. Warmth is something that I really treasure throughout everything I write, and I think it’s a tangible consistency between everything that I do. It was a collage of different things that came together and I was able to add my vocals to it. I think it’s an interesting track because it has this powerful cursive element to it, but also this kind of warm, ‘sing along with your friends and family or lovers on the dance floor’ moment as well.” “Crushhh” (feat. John Carroll Kirby) “This is probably the most vulnerable track because it came from a real place. They all have come from a real place, but [this is] about a real person. And crushes are hard. Crushes can be unrequited, they can be unfulfilled. I think you can hear that in my voice on this song. I wrote this with John Carroll Kirby. It came out of the session where we also wrote ‘Passionfruit’. We laid the groundwork of melodic ideas for this and then I came home and wrote it. It just poured out of me, and this person that I had in my life at one point poured out of me as well. It’s one of my favourite tracks on the record.” “Air Tight” (feat. Dot Major) “I wrote this with Dot from London Grammar, who’s wonderful, and we just instantly became really good friends. It’s a more simplistic song than some of the other ones because it’s just a really great dance track. It took us a while to pull together, sometimes things sound simple but it’s quite a complicated track in production. Getting the balance right with everything and the structure was more challenging for this track. It took several sessions and different forms.” “Your Skin” “This was fairly early on in the writing process where I was like, ‘I want to sing more…how do I do this?’ I was kind of crystallising what I wanted the record to be about, about feeling liberated to talk about women’s sexuality and sensuality, and this is about that, being in bed with someone, about how they feel to you, they taste to you, lust for someone. I think that tension is in there in that song, you can hear it. I performed it quite a lot last year as well. There were a few tracks that I put into my live show that were unreleased just to see how they felt and this always garnered such a great reaction. And I got David Kennedy [the London DJ/producer Pearson Sound] to mix it as well, which was another great collaboration for the record.” “Passionfruit” (feat. John Carroll Kirby) “This came from an improvisation with John. We had one main session where we wrote the basis of these two tracks and it was a long, sprawling improvisation. I fully expected to listen to it back and be like, ‘Right, I’m going to take this section from here and this section from here and craft this’, but I was listening to it over and over again and being, ‘I don’t want to cut any of this out.’ There’s something beautiful about the journey of this track and how it’s about taking your time. It made me think about the record and the symbolism of taking your time with someone and the joy of that. When I think of women, I think of that, not being in a rush. Exploring someone is the most beautiful thing.” “I Just Want to Love You” “This is a previous single of mine and I really felt like it had a place on the album. It’s very relevant to this record and it’s just a beautiful love song. It uses a sample of John Martyn’s ‘Small Hours’ and the response to this song’s always been so prevalent. At gigs, it’s the song that people talk to me about the most. I think a record about pleasure is also about love and heartbreak, so this song needed to be on there for that.” “surrender2me” “This is a dance-floor-moment track, it has that want-to-put-your-arm-around-someone feeling to it. There’s a bit of heartbreak in there with the words. It was originally sung by Olivia Newton-John, ‘Love Song’, which is a beautiful, beautiful track.” “FCKD It” “Like the beginning, this was an expression of ‘I need to write something to tell someone how I’m feeling and what’s happened.’ I wrote the first version of this in lockdown. I had a really rough time, like a lot of people, during that time, and I nearly fucked it up and I needed to tell the person I love that I’m not in a good place, but I am trying to get out of it. Luckily, I didn’t fuck it up, but I was very close. This record was never going to be just about pure joy, I didn’t want it to feel like it was not showing all sides of being a woman. Women’s pleasure comes with pain sometimes from different points in your life, and it would be naive to not explore that too, the vulnerability that we have at different moments, which can be beautiful and painful. It was a nice bookend from the first song to the last song, a record of something that I came through.”