Cobrah is becoming her own fantasy

Cobrah is poised and still under the white glow of the office lights in Mixmag’s London HQ. Not because she chooses to sit this way, but because the bindings of her corset are pulling her waist into a tight V-shape, forcing her to sit unmovingly upright. The corset is part of a long, silky black dress that stops at a pair of high-platform stilettos – a casual mid-week outfit for the Swedish popstar. Between controlled breaths as she finds a comfortable position, Cobrah, real name Clara, tells me that feeling constricted in clothing is all part of her grand persona. “I like the idea of pushing myself to the limit with this aesthetic,” she says. “If I'm breathing comfortably, I don't feel like I’ve put myself to the test. I need to feel the pain.”

Since forging the Cobrah project in 2018, the latex-loving dominatrix labels have stuck with Clara. Fetishwear hasn’t just been a prop that gave her this lingering reputation, but a genuine fascination and form of liberation. Where music and fashion intersect, Cobrah meets it. “Music has an equal impact on culture as fashion does,” she says. “They take from each other all the time in so many ways.” In a self-referential tone, she smiles: “Almost like a snake eating its own tail.”

Though she gives scarce details on her younger years, Clara shares that she’d frequent metal concerts while growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city. Dark and subversive clothing drew her in, and would later inform the surreal, techno-tinged pop music that she began releasing at the age of 21. When she was introduced to erotic clothing, her world shifted. “When I tried it on, I could feel everything buzzing a little,” she recalls. “I always felt really uncomfortable being female, because when I was growing up, it was too soft for me. All the pink and fluff made me feel weak, but with this, I felt like such a woman.”

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In order to become Cobrah, Clara needed to step into her own vision. The image she’s created over the past eight years is one that has led her, in many ways, to stardom. In the accompanying music video to her 2018 breakout hit ‘IDFKA’, two computerised figures clad in red latex share tongues, while later visuals paint a very similar picture of the Cobrah aesthetic. She might be dangling from chains, seen covered in a viscous white goo or being tied down by extraterrestrial tentacles (yes, she’s a self-professed alien fanatic), and almost always, she’s dressed in tight, shiny garments and harnesses while doing so.

“I have to become my own fantasy,” she says. “You’d never see me on the streets of New York filming a video, because the fantasy needs to be otherworldly”. Over the years, the visuals that support Cobrah’s bolshy, bass-heavy music and soft, sweet vocals have told a story of her progression, building the lore that she’s crafting around this fabled world. “When I’m home, I like to be in slacks, I like to bake, I like to do my comfy things,” she confides. “But as soon as I go to perform and become Cobrah, I need to feel that tension and force.”

After almost a decade spent gaining eminence as a kinkstress, Cobrah is eager to veer the fantasy in a different direction. The box she’d often been placed into was starting to feel like a celebration of image, rather than sound, and not a testament to her musical talents. Recognising that this lifestyle is still very much part of her, this wasn’t going to be a complete reset, but a chance to show fans her rarely-seen softer side. “I felt a little locked into a niche,” she says. “When you see the word BDSM, a lot of people turn away because it can sound scary and aggressive. I want to be a musician in the first room, rather than being in handcuffs in the first room.”

"I wanted to be my own vessel, and now I feel like I've established that,” she explains. “It's much more exciting to try to not compete, but to experiment. I envisioned the biggest of things for the Cobrah project at the start, even though it was very niche in the beginning,” she continues. “I didn’t see myself as niche, but maybe that’s because I'm so consumed in what I do. I'm like, what do you mean I’m avant-garde? I'm Britney!”

On her forthcoming debut album ‘Torn’, Cobrah is toning down the eroticism and opening up in a more romantic, lyrical way. The first singles released as part of the wider project, ‘Hush’ and title-track ‘Torn’, have a more subdued, more delicate approach, where her usually brazen club production takes a backstep, and her vocals come to the front. At the same time, visuals feel stripped-back – she’s dressed in nude colours, wrestling with a mirrored image of herself, or dancing in a shadowy silhouette – all nods to how she’s letting this past version of Cobrah phase out.

It’s taken time for Cobrah to put her efforts into a full-length album following a gradual progression of EPs over the years, from 2019’s ‘ICON’, 2021’s self-titled ‘COBRAH’, and 2023’s ‘SUCCUBUS’, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. When COVID stunted an opportunity to perform at Texan showcase festival South by Southwest, which promised to be her breakthrough moment, Cobrah felt the hit, but sees it as a blessing in disguise retrospectively. “It had an impact on my career, but I’m also really grateful for that pushback. Now I can do my debut album, and many more things that I wouldn’t have been able to five years ago.”

At that time, and even before she grew to prominence, Cobrah longed for a taste of fame. “As a child, I remember hearing these kid stars on the radio, and I knew I wanted to be that. I was really drawn to the artist lifestyle early on,” she recalls. Though still young when she broke out under the cloak of Cobrah in her early 20s, she couldn’t help but feel late to the game. “You always think that you're the oldest in the room, but looking back, I was so young. I’ve felt this longing to do what I'm doing now since I was a child, so to be 21, I felt like I’d already missed decades of doing music, and I had to figure out a lot of things for myself.”

Figuring things out for herself was something she would do for the next five years. Mostly releasing music under her own imprint GAGBALL, a largely-defunct label that has since pivoted to events, it wasn’t until 2023’s provocative single ‘SUCK’ that Cobrah signed, for the first time, to a major label. Atlantic Records had taken notice of the rising singer-songwriter, and is now putting its backing behind her with the release of her debut album. “I wanted to do something epic. When I did my first two EPs, nobody wanted to sign me,” she says. “You learn when you're independent just how much work it is.”

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“I still work very much as an independent, though. Nothing's ever sorted for me, because I know it will be wrong. For the album, I was the creative director on the whole thing, and for the videos, I sent the director all of these ideas. I even produced this cover shoot,” she laughs. “If you want to stay very true to your core and your vision, you have to know what to say yes and no to, and how to navigate your own path. I see a lot of people getting lost in what they do because they don't see how integrated and connected they need to be with their artistry. Either you have all of your rights or you have none of your rights, you can’t breathe in a corset or you’re too comfortable. Life really has to be felt to be lived.”

On ‘Torn’, the album, Cobrah operates with the same level of self-direction – she’s assured in herself and still working with an independent mindset. Since 2018, she’s worked with the same small pool of friends and turned down features with big names (though she counts the likes of Ashnikko, LSDXOXO and VTSS as past collaborators), because the vision, she tells me, is entirely her own. And it’s worked in her favour, because ‘Torn’ is authentically Cobrah at its core. It’s her most vulnerable work yet, with themes of attraction, lust, fear, desire and romance running across its 12 tracks.

“This album is called ‘Torn’ because it's a little scattered, it's a little torn,” she says softly. “I feel like it will have more connection with the audience because it's more of a pop album, so there’s less of a backing track, and more of a conversation. It's just 100% me,” she adds. Like its namesake, the cover imagery for single release of ‘Torn’ represents one of Cobrah’s points of inspiration when writing the album, depicting stretched skin breaking and splitting. “I was really inspired by stretch marks,” she says, “and in the beginning, I was inspired by mud and dirt. Usually everything is so polished – there’s latex and clean lines – but this feels more gritty in a sense.”

For Cobrah, ‘Torn’ is a vessel for transmutation – it parks some of the more seductive and explicit language of tracks like ‘WET’, where she moans: “I wanna fuck you like you're mine / Rub me right and bring me to cloud nine”, or the unambiguous lyrics of ‘SUCK’: “Suck my clit / You'll love it”. “It's exciting to say things that you're not supposed to say,” she smirks. “Especially for female artists, to be a little provocateur and play on the forbidden. But I was starting to feel unchallenged,” she says. “I think that's why I'm doing something different now, because I feel like the culture has caught up to that sound. We can't all drink from the same pond, because then it becomes empty. Even if I sing ‘suck my clit’ 15 times, if it's being done a lot, it’s not exciting anymore.”

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Feeling like she was no longer progressing, Cobrah wanted to challenge the skills she’d honed for almost a decade. “‘Torn’ was a good opportunity to do that,” she says. It also became a marker for this development in her musical output, and something that she hoped would give her a second wind. With it, she’s transformed from Cobrah, the queer, BDSM-adoring popstar, to Cobrah, the full-fledged artist whose vulnerability gives her a new sense of empowerment. “I feel terrified about it, but so proud and excited,” she says. “Who the fuck creates their own sound for half a decade, and then on their debut, switches it?”

In just a few weeks time, Cobrah is set to head to the US where she’ll finally get her big moment on the American stage, but rather than performing at a festival for emerging talent, she’ll be hitting the big time at Coachella. She has ambitious plans for it, though she won’t let those slip. She’d like for it to be a “more dynamic show”, which is as much as she’ll say for now, but the extended album tour that will follow is a planned “progression of the story” from her music videos. “I would love for it to be very cinematic and show a journey,” she says. “Live shows are the whole point. It feels quite empty when you put out music and then you go home alone.”

It seems like the new music is resonating with fans in a different way, too. On her last club tour, she describes “spitting on and humping everything” as fans watched on in joyous awe, dancing and doing drugs. But when playing tracks from ‘Torn’, there’s a “completely different vibe” in the room. “I've never felt it before,” she says. “People sort of tilted their heads a little bit, and you could sense that they were just listening contentedly.”

In ancient mythology, the ouroboros was an icon of cyclical rebirth – it’s the image of a snake eating its own tail, a symbol of renewal, life cycles, creation and destruction. For some, it represents an eternity-long cycle, but there are only so many opportunities in this life to begin again. In this next phase of transformation, Cobrah is entering the next vision of herself, and fulfilling self-progression. “I always want to be a better artist than I was before,” she says. Where the latex she once wore was polished, ‘Torn’ is textured, stretched, pulled apart. It’s an oeuvre that shows Cobrah, after almost a decade, is becoming her own fantasy.

Cobrah’s new album ‘Torn’ is out via Atlantic Records on March 6, pre-order it here

Gemma Ross is Mixmag’s Associate Digital Editor, follow her on Instagram