Producer and artist Emily Underhill, aka Tusks, has released three critically acclaimed studio albums in which dark pop is combined with reverb‑washed electronica, stadium guitars and ethereal vocals. Her signature sound was originally developed in spite or perhaps because of a very lo‑fi setup.
“I think all the vocals for my first EP were done on a MacBook mic!” she laughs. “I had such a crappy MacBook that I couldn’t get through a bounce of the track without it crashing. So each track is, like, four bounces glued together.”
Underhill also works with Spitfire Audio creating virtual instruments. “As an artist, it really opens your mind to what you can do creatively,” she reflects, “especially using samplers. If I’m working on some kind of weird synth, for instance, making the loop points and playing around with them, suddenly you can get taken into this world that you wouldn’t necessarily find yourself in if you were just working as an artist.”
At the moment I can’t stop listening to
Within the last week, it is a band called Full Body 2. They’re a shoegaze band from the US. I don’t know what it is, I just love them. It’s proper, euphoric shoegaze with synth, and now I want to start a shoegaze band! I mean, I love shoegaze. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless album has been a firm favourite of mine for years and years. It definitely informs and influences what I do as an artist. My natural process when I open up a DAW, for pretty much any instrument, is to reach for a Soundtoys’ Decapitator and Valhalla VintageVerb. Just that distortion‑into‑reverb kind of chain. A lot of that comes from shoegaze. I’ve never properly gone into the actual shoegaze realm, but I think I would really like to experiment with that on the next album.
The artist I’d most like to collaborate with
I’d like to collaborate with someone like Leon Vynehall. I like his spectrum of music, you know; everything from classical to much more hard‑hitting electronic stuff. To anyone who doesn’t know his music, I would recommend listening to his earlier stuff. He’s got an album called Nothing Is Still which is absolutely brilliant.
Another artist in that realm who I would absolutely say is Oneohtrix Point Never. His latest album, Again, I’ve probably listened to it more than anything else this year. He’s got some elements in there which are almost like emo rock, and then he’s got a string section, and then it’ll become really hard‑hitting, almost techno... I find people who weave those worlds together incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of emotion in it, and for me, it’s just pure creativity. It’s so easy to make the same music that other people have made. But I don’t know anyone who has made an album like Oneohtrix Point Never’s last album.
The first thing I look for in a studio
If we’re talking about gear, anywhere that has a Flea 47 microphone is always great! I do love places that just have something weird or interesting; I went to SS2 in Southend, which is great. Everything’s in the same room, the desk is in the middle of the room with just a little bit of outboard gear, and sometimes you have to stop recording because there’s a fox on the roof! It’s full of things you’ve never seen before, like a Philips Philicorda, for example. You turn it on and play with it, and straight away you’re like, “Oh my God! This is so fresh and exciting!”
It completely depends what I’m doing in the studio. For me, it absolutely has to have a nice vibe to it. If it feels really clinical, like there’s not much emotion or history in there, then it’s going to be hard to make an emotive or rich piece of music. I’m someone who really vibes off the feeling of a place.
The person I would consider my mentor
I feel like I’m always looking for a mentor! In terms of production, I would say Tom Andrews, who I did the last record with. I never really thought of him as a mentor, but he has probably done more for me in the ‘mentor space’ than anyone else has for a long while. The way that he views production really gave me my confidence back. I engineered and produced this EP myself, I mixed it myself, and I’m going to do the next album by myself, and it’s given me back that confidence. I don’t have to know every single microphone in the world. I don’t have to know exactly what ratio to set a compressor to be a good producer. I can just rely on what makes me feel good and the creativity that gives me.
You know, being a woman in a very heavily male‑dominated space, I think you feel the pressure a little bit more when you’re going into spaces and you’re like, “Oh, I actually don’t know what this mic is,” or “I actually don’t know what’s wrong with this patchbay.” So, I’ve always been very conscious of the pressure to do some things a specific way, because maybe otherwise people won’t think I know what I’m doing. Tom helped me to completely shift that and be like: that doesn’t really matter. If I think it sounds good, it sounds good. Record it! Tom has really helped me reconnect with what made me fall in love with production in the first place, which is just to get out there, record something, do it on your iPhone, do it wrong... if it sounds good, that’s all that matters.
My go‑to reference track or album
This is something I’ve always struggled with, because I feel like the kind of music I’m trying to produce sits in between a lot of records, to the point where we’ll be trying to find a reference track for mastering, for instance, and we can’t find one! I’m actually going to say a song by Oneohtrix Point Never, ‘Plastic Antique’. I often bring that in as a reference for speakers. It seems to cover everything in one track! So many different kinds of textures and timbres. It’s quite chill, but then gets super huge. It feels like the most ‘3D’ track possible, if that makes sense. I’m not overly technical in the sense that some people can sit down and can say, “This is dipping at 3kHz,” or whatever. I’m not so much like that. I’m more like, “OK. These speakers aren’t giving me the emotion that I normally get.” Because that track is so expansive and has so much in it, it quickly becomes quite clear what might be missing.
Tusks: My natural process when I open up a DAW, for pretty much any instrument, is to reach for a Soundtoys’ Decapitator and Valhalla VintageVerb. Just that distortion‑into‑reverb kind of chain.
My secret weapon in the studio is
It might be a bit of a simple thing, but Decapitator by Soundtoys is just so great on so many different things. If I’m thinking of something versatile that I would use on almost anything — from vocals to the master bus — I just think Decapitator is great. It elevates so much in so many different recordings. And it’s actually quite a versatile tool, if you’re able to use it in the right ways.
The studio session I wish I’d witnessed
It’s not so much the studio. But you know how Prince recorded his soundchecks? I don’t know if you’ve heard those. There are quite a few tracks by Prince, which are out, and they’re just him fucking around in soundcheck! It is unreal. He’s just playing around and doing the most complex things. Then he’ll say, “Yeah, I need, like, three more dB on the vocal,” and then go straight into something else... I feel like you don’t get that any more. You just don’t really get people like Prince. Being from the generation I’m from, that’s an amazing thing to listen to. So, yeah, I’ll say I wish I could have seen the recording of a Prince soundcheck. I feel like you get yourself to a point, playing live, where you’re like, “Yeah, I’m getting quite good at this!” And then you listen to Prince and you’re like, “Ah, fuck.”
The producer I’d most like to work with
Marta Salogni. She mixes, she produces, she engineers... I was reading about her mixing the Duval Timothy and Rosie Lowe record Son, about her taking the mix out into naturally reverberant spaces and re‑amping everything... Stuff like that just shows that extra level of creativity in what could be a more clinical role. I think if you’ve got that creativity at every single stage, you really are bringing as much to the record as you can.
The studio experience that taught me the most
It was definitely working with Tom on my third album. I’d asked him to teach me engineering bits and pieces as we were making the album; we had minimal assistant engineers. We had assistants for some things we were doing, but most of it we did ourselves, with me helping him. I was getting him to teach me everything as we were doing it. So he was overseeing things like my learning about the three‑to‑one rule when it comes to avoiding phase cancellation with mics. He taught me to walk around the studio and hit the drum. Where do you think the drum sounds best? I was like, “I think the drum sounds best here.” And he’d say, “Cool. Put the drum there.” And then, “Where do you think it sounds the best, in the room? Put the mic there.” And I just thought, “Oh, my God. This now feels really, really creative.” Before, it almost felt more like a maths exam! I was never really taught engineering, but the minimal amount I was taught said, you know, “If you want to mic up this drum kit, you have to use this mic and you have to put it here,” and to me, that just isn’t interesting. But learning engineering with Tom meant that engineering could become creative for me. And that really stuck with me.
The advice I’d give myself of 10 years ago
Don’t be afraid to be completely creative. I think I’d go back and just spend at least two or three hours a day just being completely creative. And believing in what sounds and feels good to me. I’d say, don’t worry if something seems too simple or isn’t recorded or mixed ‘correctly’. The only thing that matters is: if it sounds good to you, if you’re moving, if it makes you feel good, if you’re excited to make it, if it’s cathartic to write, then do it. You can get voice memos on someone’s iPhone which are more moving than a finished track that cost thousands of pounds to record in a top‑end studio. To me, that’s what it’s all about: how it makes you feel.