John Glacier: “Music is a process not a product”

John Glacier warns me at the beginning of the interview: “I’m quite shy,” she says, laughing. Yet, when John talks about music and her work, she is effusive and giggly, with a laugh that is completely infectious. She is careful with her words, and waxes poetic in every throwaway sentence. Glacier’s new album ‘Like a Ribbon’ is composed of three consecutively released EPs, marking an almost diaristic sense of change in emotions, moving from something light, to something with a darker edge: the eponymous ‘Like a Ribbon’, ‘Duppy Gun’, and the currently unreleased ‘Angel’s Trumpet’. Glacier says, “I wanted to create an album that changed with the seasons. It’s weird, I don’t know why I just felt that ‘SHILOH’ wasn’t an album, it was a project, but ‘Like a Ribbon’ is an intentional album – I knew it would take three-parts and be made across this long period of time. The running thread throughout is just life throughout the year.”

‘Like a Ribbon’ unfurls exactly like it’s set out to do, threads of the everyday – of the happy, of the insecure, of the fun and silly, and the more melancholic episodes clanging and meshing together. “The idea of a ribbon,” Glacier explains, “is something that takes shapes, changes form, when and as it pleases, but it also flows and comes together and apart.”

In the first triad of ‘Like a Ribbon’, Glacier opens with what she describes as a “re-introduction”, showcasing a bold experimental electronic sound. This serves as a platform for Glacier to declare her artistic journey—marked by challenges and growth—while maintaining a grounded perspective, wary of false idols and glittering promises. “I am a very honest person, and I'm not the person that seeks this approval from others,” she quips. And she marks it poetically from her tracks. In ‘Emotions’, against a delicate-synth reverb, she brags, “I’m the hottest in the game” while also acknowledging her sense of wariness and isolation surrounded in “the garden full of snakes and envy”. Glacier is quick to admit to her own sense of insecurity in ‘Neva Sure’, with a sensorial heaviness to the electronic synths that brings her voice to the foreground as she repeats, “On the rocks, on the way, feeling like I’m never sure (never sure, never sure)”.

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Over the past year, Glacier has experienced a meteoric rise. In January, she signed with the prestigious record label Young, home to acclaimed artists like FKA twigs, Sampha and The xx. By summer, she was playing sold-out shows at Field Day and the ICA in London. Simultaneously, she cemented her status as a fashion icon, modeling for multiple brands and becoming a standout in Daniel Lee’s first global campaign for Burberry. Last year she walked the runway for Marine Serre during Paris fashion week and now graces the front row at Louis Vuitton. Reflecting on the whirlwind of success, Glacier acknowledges the intensity: “I’m still building something, but it’s already taken off before I have. It’s like a rocket heading to the moon with no astronaut on board. I’m just like, what the fuck is going on up here?”

Throughout the first part of Glacier’s album and particularly, in her self-directed music video for ‘Money Shows’ (feat. Eartheater), Glacier is keen to reveal both the alternating glamour and alienation of her reality as an artist, which could be perceived as somewhat of a double life. In the video, we first see John on the sofa of a modest front room in Hackney, then perched outside council flats, before being transposed to an austere performance hall with Georgian columns, women in cocktail dresses holding champagne flutes, as the camera circles around Glacier, as a gaggle of people peer on. “I felt like it was important for me to show this reality because it’s funny when you meet people in these spaces and they don’t know the first thing about you. I was going off and jet-setting, doing all these amazing shows to come back and sleep on the sofa in my family house.” This was the first time Glacier has appeared in her own music video – and she’s made her message crystal clear – she is in control of her own narrative and image.

Glacier was born and raised in Hackney, London, to Caribbean parents, the second eldest child of seven. Glacier is a London artist to her core – perhaps one of the most London-defining artists of her era. All her music videos are shot in London, revealing the city’s distinct urban landscape, of its diaspora. Her new tracks bear all the marks of her city – Kwes Darko’s production of ‘Money Shows’ emphasises London’s post-punk and romantically gloomy atmosphere, while ‘Home’ creates a safe haven to shield herself and her loved ones from its biting cold. “I am a Londoner, always have been. And it’s my London that comes through my expressions. It’s a Caribbean London that I draw on,” Glacier proudly declares. Her connection to her roots also shines through in earlier works, such as ‘Trelawny Waters’, which pays homage to ancestral hometown in Jamaica. “My music is strongly tied to my identity.”

Growing up, she also remembers how music was always playing in the house – from her parents who brought reggae, country, soca and calypso into her life, to how Glacier and her siblings brought 2000s grime and rap into the house: “We were all born in London and we love grime, we love More Fire Crew. I remember my dad got us a signed disc. But apart from that, I love Britney Spears, Shania Twain, Dolly Parton, it was a bit of everything.”

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As long as she remembers, she has been writing poetry. “It’s really hard to talk about writing, because it’s just something you just do,” she ponders. For Glacier, her music has always been about process rather than a desire oriented towards result. When she first started making music a few years ago, she taught herself GarageBand and Logic for fun, making beats and uploading them to her SoundCloud which, in its early days, resembles a bricolage diary with tracks titled ‘A Child was Sad so I made this infront of her to make her laugh’ or some more simply titled like ‘Saturday morning’, as if to mark the passage of time and her changing moods. “It’s about a process not a product”, she says. “To be honest, even now, my process of making music is not so different. Only difference is that producers want to work with me,” she laughs.

For this album, she worked with Kwes Darko as the executive producer, but there are contributions from a number of other producers - Flume, Surf Gang, Andrew Aged. “It was really important to work with people I am attuned with, like we just have an understanding. You can feel it in the tracks.” Sampha, in particular, is a friend and artist Glacier has admired for a long time, and he reaches for the celestial with Glacier on ‘Ocean Steppin’’. “He just took so much care with how he treated his verse. I was taken aback because I realised how much he cared to listen to what I had to say,” she shares. “To this day, I’m still kind of emotional thinking about it. At the end of his verse, he says, ‘Ocean stepping on a daydream,’ How beautiful is that?”

Throughout the album are nature motifs, marking her blooming with the seasons, but even when winter comes there is promise of renewal. Her love of nature comes partly from her roots in Jamaica, and while we speak, she waxes lyrical about flowers and the recent autumn with its remarkable colours and the childlike joy of crunching leaves underfoot.

From the beginning, Glacier transports us to a floating, minimal dreamscape of reverberating strings and the soft whispers of her guiding voice on ‘Satellites’: “floating in the wind, let the birds float by.” The mood then shifts, becoming more grounded with the introduction of the album’s second part in ‘Steady as I Am’. Here, her voice is low and languid, layered against dictaphone guitar loops and crisp beats, as she sings “New life, new leaf,” evoking spring’s budding sense of renewal and possibility.

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“I wanted the mood to change from ‘Neva Sure’ to ‘Steady as I Am’, showing how I’m constantly changing with the tides. Even when you feel stagnant, we are reminded that we never truly are—like the grass grows, the trees grow. The trees have been growing for years, and they don’t move anywhere,” she explains. Even Glacier’s stage name reflects her artistic philosophy, embodying both preservation and revelation. “When glaciers melt, there is more that is revealed—information stored in its glacial form for millions of years. But I also love how they’re just icy!”

A self-designated ice queen, Glacier nonetheless loves performing. “I have grown to love performing so much! It’s a space where you can be so vulnerable.” She admits that she is always quite nervous beforehand, “I'm very sensitive. Sensitive to energy and stimuli, I don’t like many people around me before, and you know, I have to remember so many words,” she laughs. “During performances, I laugh a lot. And then people will laugh with me. And that’s when I realise, ‘Oh, I’m really shy’. But then, once people see that side of me, I feel the audience also drop their guard, and we realise we are all in this together. Performance is so special to me, because you’re in a specific moment, every line has a space and every line has a tone, and I’m just being vulnerable with my music. Even if it isn't the cleanest or the best performance that you've seen, that was the song at that moment. And that's what live performance is about to me.”

The final part of the album concludes fittingly with ‘Angel’s Trumpet’, transitioning from the warmth of summer to a more autumnal and wintery tone—perfect for the current season. "I decided to go deeper, to be more lyrical," Glacier explains, contrasting this phase with her summer release, where she “deliberately left more space for the tracks to breathe – for meditation or dancing. In the last part, it’s like all the words are just coming at you," she says. This culminates in the closing track, ‘Heaven’s Sent’, a divine piece woven with delicate, light strings and Glacier’s hushed, poetic delivery: “Looking to the sky, and I think ’bout heaven sent, everywhere I’m going, not everywhere I’ve went.” With this track, Glacier opens the door to the future—boundless as the sky and infinite as the galaxy. Even in winter, renewal whispers its promise, beckoning an artist who continues to evolve, redefine her sound, and embrace endless possibilities.

When speaking of the year ahead, Glacier says, “Funny enough, I do my New Year resolutions on my birthday. I’m a Libra, so I had my birthday in October. The main key thing is balance – next year, I want to be able to find balance, take breaks when I need to, and set the pace.” Now, she’s mainly looking forward to planning her Village Underground show in February. “For the ICA, it was the first time I was working with set design with the amazing Issie Furness who turned the stage into a magical garden,” she says, “and for Village Underground, I want to go even bigger, and think of what works with the space – with the acoustics, the visuals.”

When probed about the rest of the year, Glacier returns to a coy reserved tone, admitting that there is a lot in the plans, but of course, in the name of balance – you will only find out in due time.

'Like A Ribbon' is out via Young on February 14, pre-order it here

Cici Peng is a freelance writer, follow her on Twitter