'I'm Still Here': Yours Truly's Mikaila Delgado Talks 'Toxic'
Wednesday, 04 September 2024
Written by Will Marshall
Photo: Max Pasalic
Yours Truly’s rise was a whirlwind. Inspired by viral songs that took off before their debut album was released, they booked huge support tours with bands such as You Me At Six and Pierce the Veil, whom they’d idolised as fans. But whirlwinds do tend to leave damage in their wake.
The past few years have been turbulent for the Sydney band, with personal upheaval and personnel changes combining to make their recently unveiled second LP both a rebirth of sorts and a reckoning with all they’ve been through. “There was definitely a point where there was potentially going to be no album two,” vocalist Mikaila Delgado admits. “When things change so dramatically, and half the project isn’t there any more, that’s a big loss.”
Along with the band’s guitarist Teddie Winder-Haron, Delgado found herself unmoored following the exits of guitarist Lachlan Cronin and drummer Bradley Cronan. Past Yours Truly releases, from their 2020 debut ‘Self Care’ to their 2022 EP ‘Is This What I Look Like?’ were, Delgado says, “written through my life, as situations have been happening.” But with ‘Toxic’, it was different. “It felt like we had nothing left,” she says, reflecting on gruelling tours while relationships, both platonic and romantic, ended.
“We had to take a step back from Yours Truly, and come back when we were ready,” she says. “The songs for ‘Toxic’ were written after those situations, when we’d learned from them. We wanted to make sure we could tell the stories without specifically saying it — instead, we’re saying to people, ‘These songs were written out of a lot of pain…hope you enjoy them!’”
Tellingly, Delgado laughs as she says this. Conversations with Winder-Haron revealed that, despite their fears that fans wouldn’t embrace this new look and new sound, they felt they could make it work as founding members of the group. ‘Toxic’, then, is as much a grieving album as it is a reclamation of Yours Truly.
“That’s how I felt about the year we spent writing,” Delgado agrees. “This project is ours, it has been for eight years. We need to make it ours again…we’re not going to let anyone ruin it for me and Teddie.” Plus, she adds, “It’s so much a part of me that if I didn’t give one more go, I’d regret it.”
A common thread in Delgado’s lyrics has been investigating her identity. Written during Australia’s stringent Covid lockdowns, ‘Is This What I Look Like?’ ruminated over her identity while deprived of her main outlet of live music. On ‘Toxic’, though, she asks, “Who am I without the people that I think make me, me, or the people that are my comfort zone?”
Across 10 tracks, the record charts the journey from losing long-time friends to an acceptance of a new challenge. “Once those people aren’t there, you have to figure it out again,” Delgado says. There are moments of deep hurt here, such as the opener Back 2 U, where she asks, “Where are you? Are you leaving me? Is this the end?”
But by the time the closer, and lead single, Call My Name comes around, we reach the hard-earned realisation that something’s not right and, piercingly, perhaps it never was. This is a shared human relationship experience that, as Delgado explains, comes with “feeling so many different emotions, of learning to accept that you are no longer with that person, and that person is no longer attached to your life.”
Sonically, while ‘Toxic’ remains rooted in the band’s effervescent take on pop-punk, the approach to writing was quite different. “This is the first time we didn’t put any limitations on ourselves as to what we can and can’t create,” Delgado says. That freedom is audible. Songs such as California Sober and Bloodshot Eyes are “Yours Truly through the years” as Delgado describes them, but Love Feels Like is propelled by a drum & bass beat with no electric guitars. On the heavier end of the spectrum, Sinking features screaming, while Call My Name flirts with poppy metalcore.
Pushing themselves out of their comfort zone to write on a short timeframe — from writing to recording inside of a year — gave rise to the realisation that discomfort was, in some ways, welcome. Even necessary. “Nothing good has come out of my life without a little bit of challenge first,” Delgado says.
There is a sense of maturity and acceptance that underpins ‘Toxic’, alongside the feeling that it’s time to move forwards. “All our records are diary entries of what we or I’ve gone through,” Delgado says. “But I’m still here. We’re able to heal, continue living. One day you wake up and think, ‘This day is so beautiful, I’m gonna be okay.’”
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