About

Mental health struggles are rough. They’re messy and unglamorous and isolating and – as Beth Cornell began to realise all-too-well in 2021 – not ideal terrain to be navigating when you’re on the cusp of breakthrough pop stardom.

Crack open a window into Beth’s brain around that time and you’d have found two sides at war with each other. One, the sparkling musician Litany who’d watched early single ‘Bedroom’ rack up tens of millions of streams; who’d recently had national treasure Joe Lycett direct her music video for ‘Uh Huh’ and was trying to push forward with that year’s ‘Adult Movies’ EP. The other, just Beth, heartbroken and locked down in London far away from her Harrogate home, struggling beyond belief but trying desperately not to admit it to herself for fear that everything she’d worked for would come crumbling down.

“From the minute I started singing in front of people, I wanted to be – for lack of a better word – a pop star. I get no bigger buzz from doing it, but the pressure that comes from that is mental. You have to pretend you’re always good – you’re more than good; you’re this beacon of positivity,” she says. “I was forcing myself to stay in London because my gut was telling me it was the right thing to do for my career but it got really dark for a minute. I was crying down the phone every day to my parents and eating myself into oblivion. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I thought it was a blip and everyone was going through it because of the pandemic – what makes me so special? But, in the end, they all-but forced me to come back home. I didn’t write music for about a year. I did therapy. I went onto some strong antidepressants. I needed time to heal and to rekindle my love for music because I’d lost every sense of who I was completely.”

It’s easy to understand why Beth tried to ignore the signs for so long. Since emerging as Litany back in 2015, she’d put in the hard yards to get the project to the rapidly escalating place she found herself in. Thanks to a placement on a Wrigley’s Extra commercial, ‘Bedroom’ kept getting bigger and bigger (now, the track stands at nearly 60 million Spotify streams). “It was only [in the advert for] 20 seconds, but the song went nuts,” she recalls. Then, Lycett got in touch – hilariously, at the exact moment that Beth was reading his ‘Parsnips, Buttered’ book in bed. Having grown up outside of the industry scrum, her first London years had been everything she’d hoped: a riot of “parties and the big, bright lights of the city”. But as 2019 ticked over into 2020, anxiety and stress and depression started to take their stronghold. A relationship put a “band-aid” over the problems for a while, but when that broke down, so, at last, did Beth.

‘Sadgirl’, then, might be an unlikely title for a debut album of sonically buoyant pop, but it’s an album written from the front line; an album that doesn’t shy away from the total mental mire that Beth found herself in, but that’s also come out the other side, and hopes to offer a hand to anyone stuck there too. “I knew in my mind I wanted to talk about this period of my life and explain why I’ve been away for so long,” she says. “As I was getting into a better place, melodies and lyrics started spewing out of me. This thing I knew I loved, and knew I was good at doing, just exploded back into my life.”

She began writing ‘Sadgirl’ slowly, on Zoom sessions from Harrogate, gently testing the waters of what she was able to handle. Perhaps surprisingly, the first of those sessions was with her ex-boyfriend. A producer himself, the familiarity enabled Beth to fully engage with that period of her life alongside someone who’d lived it with her. The result, ‘Hello Anxiety’ – a spacious, melancholy synth-pop gem that cuts to the quick (“Somewhere in the dream / I lost all sense of me”) – became a benchmark of honesty for the record, with Beth then enlisting fellow rising star Kai Bosch to contribute a verse to the track.

Throughout the record, Litany digs into all facets of the last few years, allowing the overwhelm to take hold one minute, and then rising up against it the next. ‘Sadgirl’s’ title track, she describes knowingly as “the denial anthem of depression”. “It was a real turning point in terms of acknowledging that I wasn’t just sad, I was going through something quite severe,” she says, “where everything is screaming that you’re depressed, and everyone around you is trying to help, but you’re like, ‘I’M TOTALLY FINE!!’” Conversely, on the HAIM-like strut of ‘Kingpin’, she stares down the toxic industry men she’s met along the way and rebuts the horrendous conversations she’s had to endure (“I dress too drab for his tastes / Too large of a waistline”).

“It was written about meetings I had whilst in that headspace with bigwig industry folk – men, obviously. They’d just say shit that, as a woman, you just think, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’” she says, before acknowledging the power of Self Esteem’s anthem ‘I Do This All The Time’ as something that gave her the confidence to speak out: “I’m so grateful to Rebecca for bringing that song out. Women being fearless is great. The minute someone says something that you’ve felt for so long, it’s so validating, and it feels like our duty as musicians to do that because we all feel it.”

The joyful bounce of ‘Future Us’, she laughs, is “probably the only song on this record that isn’t really really depressing!” Written from the fictional perspective of a long-distance couple that decide to give it a shot (her own relationship, sadly, did not work out that way), it adds Vampire Weekend-influenced saxophones to the track’s glimmering hooks. New single ‘Jelly Tot’, meanwhile, was written late in the process as a kick up the arse to herself to get back in the game. A sassy, cheeky highlight, it’s the sound of Beth shaking herself down and finally feeling ready. “I was sitting on this body of music that was about suffering, and I was still wallowing, so this was me saying, ‘If I’m not ready to back myself, what’s the fucking point?” she says. “It’s a confident song about coming out the other side.”

‘Sadgirl’, then, is a journey. Beginning with the emotional dependency of ‘Vertigo’, on which deceptively breezy melodies bely tales of running back to her ex, relying on others to make her happy, it ends with ‘Alright’ – the only song she wrote in the present tense – that realises that the key to healing is to look after yourself and trust that you’ll get there in the end.
These days, Beth is looking at things differently. She knows she’s made a great album, and she still wants Litany to thrive, but she also knows what she needs for herself. “I want people to hear this music and understand where I’m coming from. I want to tour it and for people to scream it back to me,” she says. “But I also want to be content knowing that I’m enough as I am.”