Words by Hollie Geraghty
Just a few years ago, French-Korean artist and producer Spill Tab was riding high on life. Signed to a major label and racking up millions of streams with her chic alt-pop singles that slinked casually between English and French, everything was looking up for Claire Chicha – but on a deeper level, something wasn’t sitting right with her. “My trajectory was ascending and things were going objectively well, but I didn’t feel that way,” she explains.
She performed support shows across the US for Sabrina Carpenter and Wallows, all while collaborating with artists like Gus Dapperton, Tommy Genesis and Jawny. “That time of my life, I loved so much,” she clarifies. “I don’t regret anything, because I learned so much from that experience.” Yet, she also admits candidly, speaking to NME from her home in sunny Los Angeles, that she had “dug myself into this little hole by not communicating my needs and what I wanted”.
After laying the foundations with three EPs – 2020’s ‘Oatmilk’, 2021’s ‘Bonnie’ and 2023’s ‘Klepto’ – she decided it was time for a shake-up. “Once that partnership dissolved, I just felt so much more empowered in my own taste,” she explains, confident that she could take her experimental, bilingual pop offerings to a place that could make music execs sweat. “I was like, ‘Fuck it. I’m just gonna make an album the way that I want to make it’.”
True to her word, Spill Tab set firm boundaries and independently created her kaleidoscopic debut album ‘Angie’, only presenting the project to her new indie label Because Music when it was nearing completion. The title of her debut isn’t someone Chicha has met on her travels or crossed paths with in LA; she’s the well-behaved people pleaser who lives inside the musician, coming to life in a time when she was working tirelessly on her art, but not feeling good about the outcome.
Unencumbered by industry pressures that might threaten to bend her deliberately off-kilter work back into shape, her first truly independent body of work is a sonic splatter painting of experiences that have shaped her over the past few years. The result is a smorgasbord of glitched-up electronic synths, funky French-language grooves and unguarded semi-acoustic confessionals, sprinkled with a “gazillion” fleeting details. “I hope that with this album, I get to cement this time of my life into this project,” she says with newfound optimism, “and I can remember it for the rest of my life.”
It makes sense that Spill Tab’s music is as colourful as it is, given the many lives she’s lived so far. She spent her early childhood in LA, where her pianist mother and composer father owned a post-production studio together. “I get a lot of stuff from my parents, just how minutiae and detail-oriented I am,” she shares, “and how I won’t quit it until it is exactly what I want it to be.”
But the 2008 recession left the family in financial hardship after the collapse of the business, after which Spill Tab relocated to Thailand to live with her mother’s family for a year. It was a tough change for a 12-year-old who had to uproot her life to move 8,000 miles away. “I was really rebellious, and I was at that age where I just wanted to do the exact opposite of what my parents were telling me to do,” she remembers. “My friends and I would sneak out of our houses at one in the morning, take a cab, meet up somewhere, drink, go to the club. For five bucks, we would just have the night of our lives and then go back home and go to school the next day.”
“I don’t regret anything, because I learned so much”
While those pre-teen tricks wouldn’t fly back home, it did give Spill Tab a head start in collecting the kinds of life experiences most people embark on a gap year searching for. “I’m surprised I wasn’t murdered, but here I am today before you, a full-fledged woman who’s experienced much life,” she proclaims with a laugh. It was around the same time that she started learning guitar – having previously been enrolled in piano, violin and harp – in an attempt to emulate her favourite guitar bands like Green Day and Paramore.
She spent a further year in Paris with her auntie before returning home, where Chicha dedicated her teen years to performing in one of America’s top show choirs with Burbank High School – the very same programme that inspired the hit jukebox musical TV show Glee. She describes that chapter as a “truly formative time” in her life, adding that it taught her “so much about showmanship and performing”.
At one point, it seemed like a career in the corporate side of the music industry could be in her future, after she studied music business at New York University and interned as an A&R at Atlantic Records. She was even tempted to become a tour manager post-college after selling merchandise for Gus Dapperton and Brockhampton. But as she began to release music independently, label interest found her and she signed a deal with Arista Records (Måneskin, Tom Grennan), an imprint of Sony Music.
Initially starting out as a duo with her collaborator David Marinelli (Billie Eilish’s former drummer), they landed on the name Spill Tab after learning of the snappy bartending term referencing how a spilt or free drink is accounted for. Eventually, Marinelli encouraged Chicha to spread her wings as a solo artist, but he remains her closest collaborator to this day.
“Being around Sabrina Carpenter on tour was really impressive – it really does take a village to do this job”
As time went on, though, it became clear that maybe Spill Tab’s music wasn’t suited to a traditional label structure. “Although I don’t think my shit is that crazy and that experimental, I think the music that I put out in the past showed that I had a leaning to do something that was a bit more weird and maybe not so down the centerline,” she explains, nevermind the oft-repeated notion of “momentum” adding pressure to be continuously releasing. “The way you don’t lose momentum is by always putting something out and it’s this never-ending stream of shit that you have to release and keep the machine fed. I feel like I was doing too many sessions with too many people, and was losing my identity in that.”
Offbeat leanings are a big part of Spill Tab’s musical identity and run deep into the fabric of the songs that make up ‘Angie’. ‘By Design’ assaults the eardrums with an ominous bassline and manipulated vocals before completely transforming midway, as Chicha softens and revisits the situation in the lyrics from a whole different perspective. “That song is about giving everything to somebody to try and make it work, and literally trying fucking everything to not have to call it quits,” she explains, emotions still close to the surface.
We’re placed in the tension of the push and pull of heartbreak throughout the record, like in the melancholic jazz-pop blend of ‘Hold Me’, which reveals the aching confession: “I’m just a person and the breaking has no glory.” “These songs are written in different periods of my life, and I’ve found love, had to walk away, found it again, had to walk away,” she continues. “It’s really interesting to see how I process that grief, or how I feel about that initial desire very similarly, even though it’s across different times of my life.”
Some feelings required a different language altogether. On the French-spoken ‘De Guerre’, a clanging bassline relentlessly grates and screeches to resemble the experience of being “in a warehouse listening to heavy music, sweating and dancing” and “going hard and letting go”, cathartic moments that Spill Tab has always experienced in Europe.
Hitting all those right beats sonically and emotionally required a gentle hand, which Chicha was able to preserve in her role as co-producer among her wider team. “I’m so grateful for all these people who have helped me take up that space with confidence, because it was really intimidating,” she says earnestly. “I want to become a better producer, and I want to learn that language more and more. So it was really nice to take that step towards that with this album.”
Learning is something Chicha has been doing in all facets of her music, not least when she hit the road with one of the year’s biggest pop stars back in 2023. “[Sabrina Carpenter] is a beast to be running these hour-and-a-half sets vocally night after night. She really takes care of herself and her body, because that’s her instrument,” Chicha shares. “It was really impressive to be around that. Even back then, they had a pretty hefty production. So seeing that it does take a village to do this job, it’s like, you don’t do anything alone, right? You can’t, and it’s really beautiful to see how collaborative everything is in music.”
With her own UK tour coming up this month and first-time visits to a string of British cities, Spill Tab is ready to embrace everything this next chapter holds on her own terms. “I didn’t get to enjoy a lot of those really beautiful moments that I wish I could have in retrospect,” she says. “But all I have is the present and moving forward, so I can only hope that I can better deal with all that pressure and stress, and be able to stop and smell the roses.”
Spill Tab’s debut album ‘Angie’ is out May 16 via Because Music.
Listen to Spill Tab’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Hollie Geraghty
Photography: Deanie Chen
Makeup: Ali Scharf
Styling: Branden Ruiz
Label: Because Music