They say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes, but you could easily add a pop star describing their latest album as their “most personal yet” to that list. Which perhaps explains the Internet’s gleeful response to a comment made by Ellie Goulding last week, calling her new album Higher Than Heaven, out today, her least personal yet. It may seem like a counterintuitive way to market your music, at a time when the sprinkling of a few juicy (if cryptic) anecdotes about a previous high-profile romance seems a sure-fire method of achieving chart success.
But Goulding, an old hand in the confessional pop genre, was adamant about taking a different route on her fifth album. “Sometimes I’m just not in the mood to sing about myself,” she tells me with a shrug. It’s a few weeks before the album release and well before her remarks went semi-viral. “To be honest, there was definitely an element of escapism, but I was also trying to move away a bit from the very personal, introspective side of my last record, Brightest Blue. I just wasn’t really in the mood to write ballads.” Fair enough.
Goulding’s offhand comment about the album might have sparked a broader conversation about the current state of pop, but it’s clear that wasn’t really her intention. If anything, her aim was to create something that was firmly not a state-of-the-world address in any way. (Because who could write a state-of-the-world record when looking at the current state of the world, anyway?) Instead, Goulding just wanted to dance.
So on Higher Than Heaven, she’s doing just that: its 11 tracks offer a jolting shot of wall-to-wall bangers, each one more assured than the next. Opener “Midnight Dreams” teams aqueous disco synths with a propulsive, funky bassline (“Take me, let’s fly away / Midnight dreams, every time you look at me,” she sings); album highlight “Cure for Love” features swooping disco strings over a four-to-the-floor thump and stacked layers of Goulding’s fluttering, powdered-sugar vocals; there are the Janet Jackson-esque orchestra hits of the oh-so-’80s “Temptation”; and then the industrial thump of “Better Man” towards the end of the album, which feels like the fullest expression of the confidence Goulding explains she’s developed over the past few years.
As with so much joyously transporting pop of late, Goulding’s pivot has a little something to do with the pandemic: her previous record, Brightest Blue, did actually feature some of her most personal music yet, but when it was released in July 2020, she was denied the cathartic process of performing it to a live crowd. “I felt Brightest Blue was my best album, really, in that I was the most honest on it,” she says. “It was my favorite to write, my favorite to perform—and it just so happened to be the one I couldn’t do much with.”
So when she returned to a studio near her home in Oxfordshire during the second major wave of lockdowns in the spring of 2021, she and her early collaborators on Higher Than Heaven, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wells (she also teamed up with hitmakers Greg Kurstin and Sigala during the recording process), decided to let it all hang out. “Everyone was on edge, but we’d just get in the studio and put some fast beats on and synths and just start writing, like, the poppiest dance we could do,” she says, sipping mint tea at the apartment she’s renting in west London while searching for a place to put down more permanent roots.
On the subject of putting down roots, Goulding has undergone a number of major life changes over the past few years: she married the art dealer Caspar Jopling in a fairytale ceremony at York Minster in 2019, and the couple had their first child, Arthur, two years later. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the tears-on-the-dance-floor moments on Higher Than Heaven were mostly plumbed from stories her friends have shared with her, or even anecdotes from strangers. “It’s always about storytelling for me,” she says. “I was on a plane recently, flying back from somewhere by myself, and I met someone in the queue and we just chatted. I think we both had nervously had a few drinks before flying, and he just talked about his life. It sounds cheesy, but it’s just little moments like that. I don’t go out actively seeking dramatic stories from people, but even if I was at my very happiest version now, and nothing else bad ever happened to me, there’s still loads of things I could draw from.”
The ability to inhabit these other personalities signals progress, as Goulding sees it. (She’s also keen to dip her toe into acting, and has been taking classes.) “I think an artist, going through a different phase is a sign that they’re doing it for themselves, which is important,” she reflects. “People can just make music for fans, and I mean, that’s part of what we as pop singers do at the end of the day: knowing what our fans want, knowing what the label wants, knowing what is expected of us. You can just keep doing that—and there’s nothing wrong with doing that—but if it doesn’t fulfill you, then ultimately it doesn’t really serve you in the long run. You have to do certain things for yourself. That doesn’t mean doing, like, a seven-minute instrumental. But for me, I just knew when I was writing this that I wanted to make music where I would be able to go up on stage and sing and just enjoy myself.”
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For Goulding, who has been open about her struggles with anxiety (when we meet, it’s in the aftermath of the Brit Awards, and she notes that the intensely social nature of the event still has her on edge), being able to lose herself in the music—and yes, enjoy herself again—was of paramount importance. Even after her wedding and foray into motherhood, the new album isn’t without its (vicarious) nods to heartbreak. But aren’t things ticking along pretty well, I ask? “My life is so far from perfect, and things are changing all the time, and I’m always dealing with those changes,” she says, fiddling with her Oura smart ring. “This tells me how I sleep, by the way… usually badly.” She laughs. “It took a while for my heart rate to get low last night, but then I was watching Titanic before bed randomly, so maybe it was that.”
While the birth of Goulding’s son was joyous, it also led to a more turbulent period for her mental health. It’s one that she’s still grappling with as she figures out how to tour the album in a way that protects her own wellbeing. “I’m not allowed to call the anxiety an enemy, apparently, and I’ve not been diagnosed with postpartum depression, but having my son made things a lot worse at times, and so it’s ever-changing,” she says. “I think it will always be there, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to just overcome it. That’s just the card I’ve been dealt. I would love to wake up one day without it, but it seems that no matter how much therapy I have, and how many lavender pills I take, it’s not going anywhere.” One of the most important coping strategies has been fitness: Goulding is into weight training and is a keen boxer, while also taking long daily walks in her local park to clear her head, where she mostly goes unrecognized.
Indeed, another observation going semi-viral online at the moment reflects a mild surprise at just how many hits Goulding has pumped out over the years. In the U.K., Goulding’s stats are particularly staggering: she even scored her fourth number one earlier today (alongside long-time collaborator Calvin Harris) with the fiendishly addictive “Miracle.” When the song hit the Top 40 for the first time last month, it gave her the most chart entries from any British female solo artist ever, surpassing Dame Shirley Bassey. And yet, somehow—apart from a few high-profile relationships that saw her briefly enter the crosshairs of the notoriously rabid British tabloid media—she’s managed to do all this while keeping her private life, well, private. “I don’t actively go out, like, please get to know me,” she says. I’ve been making fairly successful songs for a long time, and a lot of people know my songs, and not really me, and I’m fine with that. I get to do exciting things and I get to do what I love. Who could complain about that?”
One of the new creative muscles Goulding has been able to flex on this album cycle—and the one she seems particularly enthusiastic about—is becoming involved with the visuals on a more granular level. She felt emboldened to take the leap after shooting herself for the Brightest Blue video “Power,” in which she chose to wear some more skin-baring looks than usual, wholly on her own terms. “It was nice to feel in control of my sexuality,” she says, noting that in the past, she’s occasionally felt boxed in by the image created for her by her record label. “I hate to use the term ‘girl next door,’ but I can’t think of any other way of describing it,” she recalls. “I do remember wanting to pick certain outfits and not being allowed. Everyone was sort of heavily pushing me in another direction, which was often just blonde, cute, pretty, floral. And I obliged to it, because I just always felt grateful to be signed to a major record label and to be in the position I was in, so I wasn’t going to question anything.”
Meeting her current stylist, Nathan Klein, a few years ago came with a lightbulb moment. “He was really honest with me and was like, ‘These things just aren’t you,’” she remembers. What did feel like Goulding, in terms of her personal style at least, was something sleeker—she’s a regular at Stella McCartney shows, whose sustainability credentials are closely aligned with Goulding’s own, and also worked with Natacha Ramsay-Levi during her tenure at Chloé for Goulding’s elegantly simple choice of wedding dress. (Simple within the world of bridal, anyway.)
But when it comes to her videos, Goulding has been leaning more playful. The visual for Higher Than Heaven’s debut single, the common-cold-catchy “Easy Lover,” sees her in the kind of weird and wonderful setups that could only come from her own imagination (in a glass box in some kind of old people’s home, she’s wearing playful ’70s tailoring, slicked-back hair, and fishnets), while the video for “Let It Die” features her dressed in a grittier series of looks, including what appears to be a frayed burlap bustier and mismatching sports underwear, while she throws shapes with a contemporary dance troupe in an industrial gallery space.
Yet the root of what she wants to put into the world—sonically, visually—is her lifelong love for nature, which stretches back to her childhood in rural Herefordshire. “I went to Sharm El Sheikh recently and swam in the most beautiful corals I’ve ever seen,” she says of the inspiration behind the album cover, which features Goulding floating in a water tank, illuminated by twinkling, celestial rays of light. “It’s like the only fully functioning coral that hasn’t been bleached to death, essentially, and it’s like a whole new world—there are combinations of colors you never thought you’d see, even in a dream.”
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Goulding’s outspoken environmentalism—she’s an ambassador for the UN Environment Programme and WWF, and has spoken at events from Davos to Cop27 to Billie Eilish’s Overheated climate change conference about the issue—has also led to the odd moment of backlash from (guess who?) the British tabloid press. “I will always get called a hypocrite for flying and eating meat and things like that,” she says. “But look, nobody is perfect, and I don’t pretend to be. I really believe that if I’ve reached out to 100 people, and 10 people call me a hypocrite, then it’s still worth doing.” One of the non-negotiables for Goulding ahead of her tour—and somewhat linked to her album’s multiple delays, as she was waiting to make sure the vinyl could be produced with recycled cardboard and plant-based wraps—is being as eco-conscious as possible. “No plastic whatsoever, because oh my God, the plastic thing on tour is just horrendous,” she says. “You walk backstage and just see crates of plastic bottles and cartons. Plastic is just foul!”
Still, Goulding is visibly excited to get back on the road—she perks up when describing the muscle memory you develop to become a “performing machine”—and reconnect with her community after many moons apart. It helps the excitement, of course, that she has a whole host of new pop tunes to start the party with. “My nana was playing a couple of my old songs to my son Arthur last night, and there’s a ballad called ‘Explosions’ I wrote about my dad, and God, it’s just so sad that I sang that night after night after night,” she says, before adding: “No wonder I need so much therapy now.”
The night after we speak, Goulding is to play her first official Higher Than Heaven concert: an intimate (by her previous standards) show at the 1,400-capacity Koko in North London. Whenever she steps onstage, she says, the anxieties seem to fall away, and the endorphin rush reminds her exactly why she loves doing what she does—namely, being a pop star—so much. “I’ve been having so much fun playing the Higher Than Heaven songs in rehearsals, so clearly it’s not just a phase that I was in. That’s not to say that my next album won’t be quite different. I’m actually making some classical music at the moment that no one knows about, but maybe next time I’ll want to go back to the doom and gloom,” she adds.
Worry not, however—she has no plans to give up the exuberant spirit of Higher Than Heaven quite yet. “We’re all coming out of difficult situations from the pandemic—some people lost people, and didn’t see family for years. It was just fucking weird, the whole thing, wasn’t it? I don’t think any of us processed it properly. But now, it feels like an exciting time. I’m just extremely grateful that I’m still here, and still playing music,” she says, breaking into a warm laugh. “And still somewhat functioning.”