Cyra Wirth: Drain My Heart
Cyra Wirth (she/it). Photo by Harrison Morris (edited by Spirit Spectrum).
We originally planned on meeting out in Ravenna Park and I had this whole idea of centering this whole piece on us spending the afternoon in this carefully constructed bit of nature (ancient tree trunks and fallen branches, the crunch of wet trail underfoot and the gentle burbling of a river like royalty-free orchestration) and how I’d juxtapose it with everything electric and ephemeral that runs our lives.
But rain reigns in Seattle, and by the time Cyra Wirth approaches me, huddled under a cafe awning in a jacket too thin for the weather, it’s too cold and wet for a substantial conversation. So instead there are two bowls of pho between us, mine a safe bet of thinly-sliced beef and hers filled with tendon tender enough to buckle under human canines. A tray of accoutrements - bunches of basil, milky tubular bean sprouts, and four rebellious disks of jalapeño pepper - provide a limited customization of our experience. Unlike many places newly surfacing across Seattle, somebody actually took our order and brought it to our table. The bowls are delivered hot but gradually equalize with the temperature of the room, as thin wisps of evaporating broth condensate on our faces and clog our throats. We have to clear them occasionally before speaking.
“My music is very much from my heart. It’s a commodification of my emotional struggles,” says Wirth right before our food arrives. Even if those are truths within every artist, she’s applying it specifically to her debut album, Get a Cup. It’s not a coincidence that all of its songs are about her relationships: with her objects of desire, with her fans, with the state of the world, with her art, with herself.
Lyrically those relationships are less celebrated than interrogated, and the music surrounding them - pop scraps and vocal harmonies warped under ambitious digital manipulation - casts her scrutiny in bold hues and textures them in coarse granules of sugar. But in case you couldn’t infer it from the artwork, which casts Wirth as a glitchy void angel emerging from a nauseating cascade of cool colors, it’s also a dark record. Like a Toxic Shock, it’s bookended by sweetness and hides a sour core. That trajectory makes Get a Cup play like a real Album and not just a collection of songs.
Until recently, however, Wirth had no plans for an album. “It was that I wouldn't want to,” she clarifies. “I just wasn't really thinking about it, really, because it's a lot of work. It was a little daunting.” But during that period, she wrote two tracks that fit naturally into Get a Cup’s interpersonal-focused orbit. “Something That I’ve Got To Tell You,” aches with an innocent longing, and Wirth’s choice to place it at the end of the record lends that sweetness a little defiance, akin to the determination that comes with faith. That’s because the other song, “That Dream,” is so quietly devastating. Entirely a cappella, the track progresses like a two-act play. “That song is about unrequited love,” Wirth explains, “and how I perceived it at the time. It takes both perspectives.” The first is a cool rejection whose terse vocal cords don’t resolve; the second languishes in that ambient cloud of rejection, its spurned figure unable to reconcile the reality. “You might need to tell me one more time,” mumbles Wirth, head down as she drowns.
Both songs were recorded in the summer of 2023, and having banked them, Wirth waited for another spark. It didn’t take long. “After those two, I felt a lot of inspiration really quickly, and that's what got me to think about it as an album, because a number of the songs came together around the same time,” she says. The changing of the seasons contributed: “Fall is usually a very hard time for me, even though it’s my favorite season, oddly enough. I had a really, really hard fall that year.”
A lot of it was that unrequited love, the bitter taste of which kept surfacing over the course of the year. But that’s just one variation of how heartbeats can desynchronize. There’s also the grand misunderstanding between creator and audience, captured on the album’s magnificent opening title track. It begins with a transmission in a lowered resolution, an image coming through pixelated, its sharp details self-censored by a subspace bottleneck. There are no drums (“I think drums are so overrated, especially in the context of electronic music”) but there is still a pulse: a squelching heartbeat side-chained to vocal ambience and synthetic aquatics like a fist pushing against a ribcage. “I just want to drain my heart, get a cup, pour it out, fill it up, fix the drought” - and so my assumption is that the song is a declaration of vulnerability that could be the album’s central conceit.
Part of it is, but it’s also more complicated. “So you think you know me,” goes the vocal hook. “But you don’t,” says Wirth as the dark drizzles outside. “You don’t know what I go through.”
Looking back, I called what I was making hyperpop because it was easy and effective...But I don’t think a lot of what I made is actually hyperpop.
Photo by Patrick Bailey.
I don’t. I think it might be too much for me to know - Wirth mentioned being in some form of treatment, maybe even have been meeting me here after said form of treatment, but I didn’t press. But I do resonate with her, as much as I resonate with anyone who uses their blood and guts as paint. Wirth has only gotten better at it since her first few projects as a teenager, especially after Tug of War, an enchanting six-song EP she released in 2023. So good, in fact, that Wirth was starting to suffer for her talent.
“After the EP came out, I went to a show under the bridge and everyone was super nice to me,” she explains. “Like, that kind of nice, where they were concerned about me. And it’s from a good place, but...”
She pauses as I slurp up a tangle of rice noodles.
“Being a musician is tricky, and being a public figure is tricky, when you struggle with your mental health. I found frustration, until more recently, about feeling that way and writing music about feeling that way and then connecting with others who feel that way, and all that being beautiful, and then some people just totally not getting that. For some people, until you just tell them you’re struggling, they have no idea. I hadn’t really come to terms with that yet, especially in a creative way. It was really hard for me to understand.”
“The other side of that is that I’m very good at managing things at my own level,” she continues. “I deal with very particular struggles that are very intense, and for the longest time I didn’t want to tell people because it’s scary to talk about the things that you deal with, because you want them to believe you and all sorts of shit. It’s just about that friction, on a personal level and on a creative level.”
If there’s a sense of true companionship on the record, it comes from her musical partnerships. Get a Cup is rife with features, from the yearning voice of Thavoron on “Wanting You” to Avition’s atonal hook on “Strawberry Moon” to the confrontational urgency of Lonelygirl15 on “I Don’t Know Anymore” and Oh Nothing on “It Looks So Nice.” More so than typical features, they come across as direct extensions of Wirth’s worldview: beings possessed by her worldview.
But there’s no person more consequential to the record’s equation than the creator behind the eclectic, soon-to-expire Liam’s Neighborhood. His fingerprints are on at least half of the album’s songs, his pedal steel on “Something That I’ve Got To Tell You,” his piano line on “Ad Nauseam,” his voice leading “Strawberry Moon” and embedded in the harmonies of “Buckle Up.”
Liam’s apparent omnipresence isn’t surprising considering how long the pair have been both friends and musical collaborators. “Every time Liam and I hang out, we show each other something we’ve been working on,” says Wirth, “and we talk about it and we give each other feedback. That’s like half the time we spend together. We’re both just so obsessed with music.”
In fact, Liam is top of Wirth’s list of influences - a list that includes pop/rock cornerstones The Beatles, low-bit maestro Yabujin, and the femme melancholic longing of Soccer Mommy (the latter of which directly inspired Wirth’s coming out as trans) - is Liam himself. “He’s given me pivotal feedback on my music, and I’ve given him pivotal feedback on his music. I literally wouldn’t have made One Cold Autumn Evening if it weren’t for the approach he had to Farm Wars, cause he did it by sampling old demos the whole record. I was like, "I need to do that.” So she did, building the title track off of the sample of her previous title track and using the layered vocals from her 2022 single “Animus” as the atmospheric foundation for “That Dream.” “I don’t do a lot of it, but I do it frequently,” she says.
My music is very much from my heart. It’s a commodifica-tion of my emotional struggles.
Photo by Patrick Bailey.
There’s something that catches my ear as we talk; for someone whose music once conjured the wild, wicked dream of the Internet, Wirth is devoted to repping her local community in her music. The NC-based Avition is the only non-Seattleite in the album’s cast, and subtle allusions to the area are peppered throughout, from the references to Capitol Hill’s Broadway on “Something That I’ve Got To Tell You,” to the near-imperceptible Vitamin D sample on “Wanting You.” If the Internet is a region, than how to reconcile the palpable PNW dampness on Get a Cup?
Maybe that’s how Wirth is vehemently trying to escape the “hyperpop” label that she once embraced. Though there are others before it, the playlist-derived label is one of the most significant microgenres to sprout directly from the current iteration of the digital age. But its parameters, like those of the Internet, are almost impossible to define. “Looking back, I called what I was making hyperpop because it was easy and it was effective to call it that,” Wirth contends. “But I don’t think a lot of what I made is actually hyperpop.”
Maybe not: when one thinks of hyperpop, they typically imagine coarse gremlins 100 gecs or the glittery micro abrasions of SOPHIE and PC Music - and of course there’s the unfair assumption that if a trans woman makes electronic music, you can probably just call it hyperpop. “I was talking about this with Junie,” she says, referencing the woman behind Lonelygirl15, “and she had the most amazing insight. People call her hyperpop even though she doesn’t really make hyperpop, and people call me hyperpop even though I don’t really make hyperpop, but she was like, “Together we would be hyperpop.” She would be “hyper,” and I would be “pop.” I had never thought of that! That’s just so genius. I love that woman.
“That’s actually been bugging me more and more,” continues Wirth. “I’ve been called hyperpop, and I really appreciated it. I used that for the longest time in my bio. But I regret calling it that because it put it in this context of being...shallow.” Disposable? “That’s exactly the word I was looking for.”
Get a Cup does has moments that recall the high fructose rush of hyperpop, most evidently its manic centerpiece, “It Looks So Nice.” The track is a centrifuge gradually spinning out of control, starting with the bit-crushed twang of a butterfly’s flight path (“I’ve been searching, looking for a good time/got a big light burning through my mind’s eye”) before suddenly veering into an opalescent nightmare: a DnB beat thrashing against Oh Nothing’s matter-of-factness and Lonelygirl15’s rapid-fire ravings as an ascending arpeggio swims salmon-like up a descending waterfall of chords. There’s just so much going on - rarely does a song so accurately capture what it’s like to relinquish your brain to the greedy feed.
And then, all dopamine having been drained from the system, comes the record’s pitch-black middle section. On “I Don’t Know Anymore,” Wirth obscures her melodious vocals harmonies with crusty production, justified by the acuteness of Lonelygirl15’s rage on the outro. “Fuck The World,” follows with an intense bit of industrial nihilism, its metallic clangs straight out of a Toriyama scumscape. And “Death,” an opaque ode to Wirth’s late grandfather, moves in waves of alternating beauty and terror, as if it were constantly shedding its own skin. You’d be hard-pressed to call any of that “hyperpop,” so what would Wirth call it?
“It’s a great question, because I don’t have a name for it,” she replies. “It’s not great, but for the longest time I considered calling it “post-hyperpop,” because it kind of makes sense.”
Then again, a label might be less important than what the album represents for Wirth: namely, a new benchmark for her vision. It’s that drumless title track, in particular, that evokes the most pride. “I think it best represents my vision, the thing I’ve been trying to make for years,” she says “I feel like I’ve finally accomplished it. It’s like an actualization of my dream.” Even as her clothes are still damp from the rain, she’s beaming.
Photo by Patrick Bailey.