Beneath the soft glow of stage lights, Ava Joe exudes the intoxicating glamour of Hollywood’s golden age. There is something of Rita Hayworth about the London-based singer-songwriter; big, bouncy hair, cat-eye flicks, and vintage dresses. Her songs, however, betray the illusion, cracking the veneer to reveal a more complex, Lynchian figure. Shaped by heartbreak and driven by a cast-iron will to tell her story, on her brand-new EP she transforms lived experience into a cinematic showreel of intimate soul. “I’ve always just worn my heart on my sleeve,” she tells me as we sit down together ahead of the release of her new project. On Big Beautiful Mess, that emotional directness becomes central and the songs are all the stronger for it.

Last year, she released her debut EP Try Me, a project that offered a gentle introduction to her emotional, sensual brand of songwriting. Rich with double entendre and tinged with a desert rock sensibility, the record quickly drew attention, with listeners noting echoes of early Lana Del Rey and unmistakable parallels to one of her most important influences, Amy Winehouse.

Less than a year later, she returns with Big Beautiful Mess, an EP that sees her further refine her sound while simultaneously sharpening the contours of her artistic identity. “I’ve got a story, I’ve got a message, I’ve got a vision,” she says. “I know what I’m trying to say and who I want to say it to.”

Part of an exciting new wave of BRIT School alumni currently making their mark, Ava Joe emerges alongside an impressive lineup of diaristic songwriters. On this latest offering, however, she strikes out on her own. Where many of her peers lean into a more polished aesthetic, her work feels achingly searching and more fractured, rooted in an intense outpouring of feeling. “The best poems or the best songs come from being in those really overwhelming moments,” she reflects. Listening to Big Beautiful Mess, it’s hard to disagree.

In many ways, the EP marks a significant leap forward, a tight collection of tracks that channel both the hedonistic reverie and emotional turbulence of life in your early twenties. Juggling those dissonant feelings, she masterfully shapes the contradictions into something cohesive, crafting a project that feels more expansive and enthralling than her debut.

‘Am I A Dreamer’ was the first track to really catch our attention. Here, Ava is still finding her footing, but asking the bigger questions. Gentle and meandering, it drifts through existential longing, meditating on love, loss, and the finitude of life over the hum of crudely plucked acoustic guitars, playing out as something reminiscent of early Corinne Bailey Rae.

Time will defeat us
End this loneliness
Consuming me
Am I a dreamer
Or did you leave her
For me?

Across the rest of the EP, there are countless opportunities to sink into the depths of a ruminating mind. A sense of excavation, almost exorcism, runs through the heart of the project. As the tracks unfold, Ava gradually lays herself bare, revealing more with each individual cut, ultimately arriving at a place of release while offering listeners something to anchor their own emotions to. There’s a quiet sense of communion here, a mutual recognition. You see her, and she sees you.

That instinct has been there from the very beginning of her journey as an artist. “I remember writing a song when I was 14, my parents had just divorced and I wrote something for my mum’s birthday. My whole family came round to watch me sing it in the living room, and everyone started crying,” she recalls. “Looking back, it was a really bad song, but I feel like it’s always a good sign when people cry to music.”

Like many, Joe’s early understanding of love was shaped by the rupture of her parents separation. “My whole world came crumbling down,” she says. Naturally, that experience stayed with her, distorting ideas of relationships in the years that followed and drawing her into unhealthy patterns. “I feel like when you’re in that kind of state, you attract the wrong kinds of men or people in general. From there, I got into quite a few toxic relationships.” These themes, present on her debut in tracks like ‘Eleanor Close’ and ‘Polly Pocket’, continue to form a key source of inspiration today.

Our twenties are crucial formative years, often defined by the slow collapse of our expectations, of love, life, and who we thought we might become. In Dubliners, James Joyce captures this disillusionment in ‘Araby’, a story driven by romantic idealism that ultimately gives way to something starkly sobering. There’s a similar tension running through Ava Joe’s music. Like Joyce’s narrator, her songs trace a misalignment between fantasy and reality, between a wide-screen vision of love and the quiet, often painful recognition of what it truly looks like.

That kind of upheaval can often leave you questioning your place in the world, something Joe has been contending with of late. “I’ve always felt like I’ve never really found my place in the world, and then I realised that is my place, and I love it,” she says. It’s a perspective that feeds directly into the emotional core of this new record, the idea of finding solace on the fringes. The misadventures of misfits and mavericks. Here, we sense that she isn’t searching for any form of resolution, but instead finding acceptance, not just as an artist, but as an individual.

Reaching that point, however, required an internal shift, a new kind of radical generosity toward herself. “For this EP, and just in general, how I was feeling when I was writing it, I was more accepting. I’m being warmer to myself, more loving to myself,” she explains.

‘Milk & Honey’ is perhaps the purest distillation of this newfound warmth, forming the silver-screen centrepiece of the project. Borrowing subtle stylistic cues from 60s acts like The Ronettes, the track plays out like a runaway romance. Star-crossed lovers speeding down an open freeway, Ava’s hair caught in the wind, suspended in a state of ecstasy. The imagery is unmistakably cinematic. Built around hazy guitar lines and a slow-burning rhythm, the track immerses you in a dreamlike trance.

Dreamers
No one can reach us
I’m his bad girl
He is my leader

That sense of sepia-toned nostalgia becomes a key motif throughout Big Beautiful Mess, shaped in part by the way the record came together. A self-confessed “old soul,” Ava explains, “I had Woodstock on my mind, that sense of freedom, and we were writing while watching videos of people dancing in fields during the 60s. It just kind of made itself.” That influence is perhaps clearest on the EP’s title track, a euphorically psychedelic number, perfectly suited to the languid euphoria of those long summer nights.

Whatever comes next for Ava Joe feels like an exciting prospect. Having experienced an extended period of creative release that culminated in this project, her inspiration shows no signs of slowing. “At the moment it’s just flowing out of me, and I love being in that state, not overthinking the lyrics, just letting the feeling take over and speak for itself.”

It’s not always clear where Ava Joe the person ends and the artist begins. For some, creativity takes the form of a constructed persona; for others, it flows as a natural extension of the self. In her case, the two feel almost inseparable. As romantic ideals fracture and yield to lived experience, what emerges is something more honest, the gradual unfurling of a young woman learning to inhabit the intensity of her own emotions and discovering the beauty within them.

“My life is not very boring, I feel like my emotions keep it entertaining,” she says. “I’m very up and down and all over the place. I love that about myself. It’s hard, but I really do love it. That’s kind of the point of the EP, things can be intense and chaotic sometimes, but I think there is a beauty in it.”

Big Beautiful Mess by Ava Joe is out Friday 10th April.

AVA JOE - BIG BEAUTIFUL MESS

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