Cassyette

Rock music is about to get a shot in the arm from Cassyette, a no holds barred musician from Essex who is loudly and unashamedly reclaiming her rock roots. Her journey has taken her through everything from drum’n’bass and house to pure pop and the result is a chest thumping mix of pop, rock and metal, addressing everything from feminism to trauma. Cassyette is loud, proud and taking absolutely no shit from anyone. It took her some time to find that path. Growing up in Essex, she attended strict Catholic a girls’ school where she didn’t feel that she fit in with anyone.

As she grew up, the rock leaning music of her teens fell out of her regular rotation. A few years of DJing and producing revealed her talent for writing pop melodies and irresistable toplines. Though spinning records was fun, Cassyette’s natural energy and charisma really needed a bigger stage. “I get really bored easily and I think that’s why I kept moving between things,” she says of her genre hopping adolescence. About three years ago she began performing with a band again. “Back then I used to get such bad stage fright,” she recalls. Pop music doesn’t leave much room for error; she soon realised that rock allows much more freedom. “I think that's partly why I started making heavier music because you just can't hold back, the cobwebs just get blown out. Like as soon as the first fucking note hits, you can do whatever the fuck you want.” Musically she finally felt that she was on the right path. “The moment something stuck was when I started making music that I loved, as opposed to making music because it was easy.” In 2020, everything changed. Coronavirus gradually swept its way across the world putting all plans on hold and then Cassyette’s father died. “It was really sudden. And the trauma of that was such a big catalyst for the music,” she says looking back. Pop songs didn’t seem deep enough to hold the emotions she was experiencing, the lightness of their touch completely out of step with how she was feeling. “My influences have always been in rock. My all time favourite band is Motley Crue. So the music got a lot darker and angrier all of these new songs are really about working through trauma. It just felt the most me and I suppose after everything that happened, I think you just sort of want to go back and reminisce.”

Cassyette has spent the last few months locked in her makeshift home studio. Lit by fairy lights and watched over by Baby Yoda and Hello Kitty, she has been finessing the last of the songs for her upcoming album, all in a little pink box room in her home in Essex. “I think now the music has turned this corner it’s so, so heavy now. You could even compare it to dance music in ways, at its core.” Working with The Prodigy collaborator Olly Burden has also brought those hardcore dance sounds out. “So then it became so clear in my head to draw from what I was making when I was DJing as well as the rock influence. So now I combine the two, with all the pop top lines.” The songs themselves are heavy in more than just sound. They address issues close to Cassyette’s hearts, from her grief and the void where spirituality should be, to toxic relationships and sexual assault. “I've always drawn from everything that's going on in my life, so quite a lot of my songs are quite situational,” she says. “The first lot of songs is quite painful because a lot of what I’ve written has been drawn from the trauma of losing my dad and then a lot of it's based on lockdown and anxiety and mental health problems.” Songs are full of allusions and suggestions that maybe don’t become clear to the listener until the album is experienced as a whole; ‘Behind Closed Doors’ is more than just a song name, it’s the key to the songs themselves. The blanks are filled by the secretive, private things that happen out of view