There aren’t many records you can honestly describe as life-changing. The Universe Is Loading is precisely that. The product of a period of momentous personal upheaval, Wyldest’s fourth album examines the world on a macro and micro level, pairing existential probing with intensely intimate reflections, and revealing an artist born anew. 

The truth is, we’ve never really known Zoë Mead – the woman behind Wyldest – until now. Ever since her debut, 2019’s Dream Chaos, the London-based singer-songwriter has largely let her music speak for itself, generously leaving space for listeners to imbue with their own meaning. On 2021’s self-produced follow-up Monthly Friend, she discussed the physicality of womanhood against a sonic backdrop of tender dream-pop. For 2022’s cinematic Feed The Flowers Nightmares, she explored the idea of losing yourself and starting over, while switching up her creative process, collaborating with Luciano Rossi (Idlewild, Dama Scout) and taking influence from the compositional work of Mica Levi, Jon Brion and Jonny Greenwood. 

Looking back on her journey so far, Mead admits that lingering insecurities had led her to shrink her true identity and conceal her background. “It wasn’t out of shame,” she clarifies. “It’s more that I felt like an outsider, thinking that who I was and where I was from wasn’t valid. I just really wanted to fit in.” 

Though based in Hackney now, Mead grew up in a working class household in Swindon, the youngest of three children. A self-proclaimed “late starter”, she began writing songs around the age of 16, inspired by her idols Cat Power, Joni Mitchell, Laura Veirs, Laura Marling and Sharon Van Etten. She cut her teeth gigging locally, before moving to Bournemouth for university, and then to London to pursue music. 

An autodidact, Mead credits her parents’ formidable work ethic as the root of her own industrious approach, teaching herself production and audio mixing. She shrugs, “Whether you’re from a privileged background or not, there’s nothing that can really replace the hard work that needs to go into your art. It’s like, you either sit there and play for hours until your fingers bleed, or you don’t.” 

Mead founded Wyldest in 2016, bringing in two musician friends to help her maintain the façade of the project as a band. Looking back, she puts this concealment down to imposter syndrome and feeling isolated amidst a wave of hyped, female-fronted outfits. The truth is, Wyldest is – and always has been – a solo endeavour, and when she made that official circa Monthly Friend, a weight was lifted artistically.

Co-produced once more with Rossi, The Universe Is Loading signals another pivotal shift in Mead’s approach as she lets down her guard and confronts difficult experiences head-on. Powered by motorik beats, chiming guitar and synths, self-proclaimed “ode to endometriosis” ‘After The Ending’ confronts a health scare that caused her to temporarily pause production on the album. Forced to contemplate the terrifying prospect of a life-threatening illness, and then sit with her eventual diagnosis of a chronic disease, Mead emerged from the period with first-hand experience of the fragility of life – a realisation painfully reflected in world events and ongoing