Milkie returns with “Crystal”
Crystal is a song about wanting it all at once (“a ring, a fling, a crystal on a string”) and the dance we all do around the thing we already know. It’s sung in English and French, over synths, samples and a string quartet.
Milkie began the song at home with a synth riff and the footsteps of the Madison dance, and as it turns out, most of her first demo made it onto the finished record: you can still hear the original synths, guitars and vocals. Producer Benjamin Satherley-Johnson and the band later added drums, bass and a string quartet in the studio (oh and the dance too!) Crystal was mixed by Benjamin Satherley-Johnson and mastered by Matthew Bentley.
The single comes with a limited run of matchboxes, available on Bandcamp and handmade by Milkie: the artwork on the outside, ringed with diamanté crystals. Inside there’s a match, a crystal pendulum (no two the same) in a little bag sewn from fabric scraps (no two of those the same either), and a lyric zine that unfolds into a divination mat, should you want to work out what it is you really want. The whole thing is a nod to teenage Milkie, who spent her evenings poring over Tori Amos liner notes, researching love spells on LiveJournal (she really wanted to be a witch but liked pink too much), scouring eBay for Veruca Salt bootlegs and Jean-Luc Godard DVDs, oh and sewing miniature teddy bears. She really is the same girl!
And for the bootleg hunters: the Bandcamp edition pairs Crystal with a b-side, History Repeating, an entirely self-produced demo that would never otherwise have left the archive.
ABOUT MILKIE
Milkie is Hannah Millie Phipps, a songwriter and producer from Bristol who has been writing songs for as long as she can remember. She grew up the eldest of eight, so there was always some sort of family band on the go, though given the distinct lack of musical skill or interest among the rest of them, it was more Von Crapp than Von Trapp.
These days she writes and records at home in Ableton, developing pretty much full arrangements before taking them to producer Benjamin Satherley-Johnson or a live band to complete. The results are indie pop, more or less, but rooted in a songwriter’s sensibility and drawing on far wider ground: dance music, classic chanson française, industrial rock… whatever the song is calling for, really… She has been releasing music as Milkie since 2022, and before that she fronted a band called Jemima Surrender.
