Errunhrd - The Voice From The Void
Sometimes the algorithm works. It does its thing the way nature intended – we’ve written about this before. Sometimes you’re watching Instagram stories and an ad of an artist pops up. This isn’t a video with a production budget. There’s no crew behind the single camera angle. It’s a live performance from a bedroom producer, possibly even from their bedroom itself.
The performer is stood behind a keyboard playing a song from their debut album, and something about that music was captivating. Was this a dance track? Is it trip-hop? There was real depth behind the music. I was compelled to buy the artist’s discography and find out more - this was May 2022. Now, three years later, Errunhrd releases her second album ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’.
That video was beamed to Moths and Giraffes all the way from Niagara Falls, Canada, where Shirin Ghoujalou has been writing and producing since she was a teenager. Her solo project Errunhrd (pronounced ‘Err-unheard’) began in 2016, her chosen name a combination of the ‘error emotions’ like pain, worry and fear and the ‘unheard’, the unspoken emotions we feel but struggle to express.
Shirin released her debut EP as Errunhrd in 2018 called ‘I Liked You Better When You Were Mine’. We included its closing track in our collaborative playlist Moths of Flight with Leeds duo Lines of Flight in 2022. Of ‘I Want (Someone)’, we said at the time we loved how ‘the lead synth line climbs, like scaling a cliff where you keep slipping, but you keep on climbing regardless.’
Cover art for ‘I Liked You Better When You Were Mine’ (2018, left), ‘Apprehensive Memories of a Romance’ (2019, centre) and ‘You Can Be You, I Can Be Me’ (2021, right).
In 2019, Errunhrd released her second EP called ‘Apprehensive Memories of a Romance’, while during the pandemic she was awarded funding from the Ontario Arts Council to make her debut album. ‘You Can Be You, I Can Be Me’ arrived at the end of 2021. It’s this record from which we saw the live video for ‘Friend’ the following year, and became hooked on Errunhrd’s flowing synths, uncompromising drum patterns and shifting sense of musical reality. One moment you’re stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean, the next - you’re in the club, eyes closed, but equally alone.
More recently, Errunhrd was given additional funding by the Ontario Arts Council to help record her second album. In 2025, Shirin was awarded ‘Best Original Artist’ by the Niagara Music Awards, where she was shortlisted in the category against six other artists.
The work of Errunhrd is lyrically personal, fluid in genre and melancholy in nature. Her songs present to the listener a series of questions – what if things were different? What if I was different? What if I was more accepting of myself as I am? Her latest album, ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’ goes further down this rabbit hole…
‘I had it all, your world, my world. I took the fall, ‘cause you were my world.’
One thing you’ll notice about this record relative to Errunhrd’s first is that this one goes harder, but in a subtle way. The synths are fatter, the sound is more expansive. The concept of Errunhrd is bigger. Her voice at times is imperial, broadened by production experimentation. To hear Errunhrd’s voice is to be let into her world. This song is an invitation from the void – ‘Can You Hear Me? Calling your name from my head…’ There is desperation, and helplessness across ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’.
But there is also drive. ‘Can You Hear Me?’ is a song of two halves. Pad synths bridge the gap, then the beat arrives at a hard shuffle, the melody branches out into piano octaves. Finally, a mantra: ‘Don’t look back stay alive, no matter what they say, if it feels right let it be okay.’ In this short rap, Errunhrd goes where ‘Better Days’ on her debut album hinted. That too had melodic piano and a beat reminiscent of hip-hop. Towards the end of this song, Errunhrd’s voice moves like a synthesizer, like the vocal notes are being bent by an unseen hand. She has the uncanny ability to be all at once haunting and comforting.
Throughout this album there are glimmers of hope, glints of blue through the surging clouds. ‘Can You Hear Me?’ sets the scene for Errunhrd’s mindset on ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’.
Across her catalogue, Errunhrd is an excellent purveyor of darker dance music. Not everyone who wants to dance is also happy. ‘Fades (In My Head)’ captures anxiety without making the listener anxious – ‘When I am scared, you shake my hands.’ It’s the use of her timid voice, weathered synths and a beat that seeks not to pummel you with its presence but set the scene.
All this is combined to calm the listener – awareness of anxiety is the first step to recovery. I myself have fallen asleep at night to the music of Errunhrd. Her repeated line of ‘Ooh, you’re in my head,’ drawn out with reverb is like medicine. You’re not pretending to be ok, but eventually you will find peace.
‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’ is as abrasive as its capital lettered title. Distorted synth pulses with yet more keyboards expressing a melody so stricken like The NeverEnding Story if Fantasia had succumbed to The Nothing.
‘Tell me the reason I should stay with you, say that it's fine but you won't face what's true.’
Errunhrd’s lyrics are often sparse, but the wordier ‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’ reads like poetry set to this track. The words themselves are hard to discern through her voice obscured by vocal manipulation, but they embody the emptiness alluding to the existential questions we ask at the start of this article. What completes the genius of this track is its lack of drums or beat of any kind. It simply doesn’t need it, its intensity fulfilled by the myriad of synth layers and Errunhrd’s android-esque voice, like a part-person/part-machine kept alive by technology in the far future.
‘To know myself and feel the things there are to feel, feel something that's in my heart, for real.’
‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’ is brought to life visually by director Noah Brown using a combination of stop motion and performance footage of Errunhrd. The unnerving way in which the character’s hollow eyes look right through the viewer makes you forget this is a subject made of clay. The video’s gothic colour palette, surging clouds and dank feeling to the character’s house is an extension of the song’s mood – easily making it the best of Errunhrd’s videos.
‘I’m sorry if I’m scared to let you in my heart. I’m sorry if I said anything to push you down.’
The musical tone is stripped away for ‘I’m Sorry’. The buzzing synths are replaced by string textures, and Errunhrd’s voice is at its purest yet on ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’. Her lyric is honest and confessional, even to her own detriment: ‘I can be, I can’t be someone who you want.’ This track is contrasting too by its reintroduction of a beat reminiscent of trip-hop, much of which can be heard on ‘You Can Be You, I Can Be Me.’
Errunhrd delves into self-doubt, and how this can affect relationships. In her self-produced music video, Errunhrd places her hand over her heart as she sings, ‘Can we make this work out, again? Will you love me? For everything I am?’ Relationships are a recurring theme on ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’, and Errunhrd’s struggle to reconcile her own place within them.
‘When I lay awake, I picture your heart entangled with my own, you’re not very far.’
The mood is carried forward for ‘Please Leave Me’, though this time Errunhrd is more guarded, asking her lover to make their exit if that’s what they plan on doing – ‘Please leave my heart, if you’re not going to stay.’ Errunhrd even hints at the album title in the lyrics, ‘I feel like I’m home, a needle through my heart. This is all I’ve known, love crumbs in the dark.’
‘Please Leave Me’ is one of the simpler songs on ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’, but there’s more to the arrangement if you dig deeper. Though the song is driven by guitar, the deep cello patches used on ‘I’m Sorry’ continue on this track, with Errunhrd mimicking the notes with her voice beneath her lead. This halfway point in the album is the most telling, combining the doubt of ‘I’m Sorry’ with the anxiety of ‘Fades (In My Head)’ and the resolve of ‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’. Will they? Won’t they?
‘When all I want I’ve got it, here. And I don’t want to make it right, but I’ve got it.’
Errunhrd returns to a more synth-based sound for ‘Waiting’, including blending her voice with vocoder in the song’s chorus. Narratively, as suggested by the title, ‘Waiting’ is the in-between moment, like the jury is out – ‘I’ll wait for you, I’ll wait for you, again.’ An early favourite of ours from this record, the chorus isn’t just personified by its words, but by the monotone, static way in which they are performed and produced. Time really is standing still until she has a resolution.
Sonically, Errunhrd is able to craft a flowing, organic sound as if inspired by dark clouds passing overhead. Beneath the beat and arpeggiated synths is a rumbling, like Errunhrd is illustrating the passing of time, helped by the song’s creative and interactive mix by Alex Gamble that ebbs and flows around the listener. Alex is someone that clearly understands the music of Errunhrd, as he previously mixed her ‘Apprehensive Memories’ EP and her debut album with equally brilliant results.
‘I made mistakes and then I've been spent, I ran away and then I've been had.’
Errunhrd picks up the pace for ‘To The Surface’. Like her single ‘Ruminate (Meditate)’ from her debut album, this track was recently played on BBC Introducing in Scotland, where it was warmly received by the show’s presenters. With ‘To The Surface’, Errunhrd captures the feeling of a panic attack with its heart-pounding beat and choppy synth.
But there’s still melody here, as the track lifts for the chorus, ‘I know in my heart I will go, I feel in my veins I will know.’ Her inward vocal gives the claustrophobic sense of feeling trapped, as if everything is happening around her and the overwhelm makes her world smaller, ‘I could stay here, I could stay, and I could stay here, today.’
‘When I met you, you were shy, just wanted to be your friend, and figure out the things you like, so I could keep you in my life.’
‘Maybe I Still Love You’ is undoubtedly the most honest and transparent song on ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’, a cathartic reminiscing and emotional outpouring that catches you in the throat. The longest track on the album, Errunhrd performs exclusively on guitar, with vocal atmospheres that conjure a dreamy flashback montage. Despite the plethora of synth-based music on the album, Errunhrd’s primary instrument has always been guitar, her roots going back to folk and rock. Later, she expanded her knowledge by studying jazz, classical and flamenco guitar alongside music production.
‘And I miss laying on the couch with you, playing Sims all day, staying up all night. And I miss the day we got caught in the rain, we kissed, I gave you my shirt.’
With this song, the tension is broken. Lyrically, the anxiety falls away in the face of clarity. The middle eight above is the most uplifting moment on the album. ‘Maybe I Still Love You’. Notice there isn’t a question in there.
‘When I breathe in, don’t breathe out, get stuck thinking that you’ll find out that I am not enough for you and this would never work.’
After the realisation of ‘Maybe I Still Love You’, Errunhrd arrives drenched in the rain, on the doorstep where this album began – with a series of questions. Errunhrd continues on guitar, but hangs up her electric in favour of its classical variation.
‘And I just want to hold you close, so we can feel invincible and build a home inside ourselves that only we can see.’
Though the album both begins and ends on a serious note, ‘Can You Hear Me?’ feels like the words you say into the void, while ‘Will You?’ is what you actually say when someone is there to listen. The journey through this album is finding the courage to finally ask, ‘Will you love me for the rest of my life? ‘Til I see all this beauty inside?’
Through the darkness of this record, Errunhrd has crafted an entirely empathetic album, full of emotions we can all relate to. Am I enough? Can people possibly love me as I am? The constant questioning and terror at putting a foot wrong can spiral into anxiety. What if I’m never enough? What if you leave me for someone better? For some, this is everything they’ve ever known.
Continue reading for our Q&A with Errunhrd. We ask about following up her debut album, the songwriting behind ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’, the stop motion video for ‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’ and using a vocoder to enhance her voice. We also ask about winning ‘Best Original Artist’ in the Niagara Music Awards and her plans for the future. All this and more below!
1. Your new album, 'Everything I've Ever Known' arrives more than three years after your debut. Was there a 'dust-settling' period after your album came out, or did the writing continue from where you left off? Do these new songs come from a different place emotionally?
That's a great question - it's interesting because I never really stopped writing since my debut album, but I wasn't in the process of actively finishing any songs until about two years ago. I had a bunch of ideas ready to go after writing You Can Be You, I Can Be Me, but my life changed a lot, and some of the songs I wrote just didn't feel relevant to what I wanted to create anymore. I ended up taking a few of the demos I wrote and experimenting with some new production techniques (recording with different vocal mics was a big one for this album - I did a lot of trial and error with condenser mics, dynamic, and ribbon mics, and then tried my hand at getting a good unique sound from them). And then with those experimental sessions, I ended up creating an entirely new sound/vibe for a lot of the songs. So I guess, it's sort of a continuation, except maybe with a different viewpoint/angle I'm coming at the songs with? Emotionally, there's still a lot of darkness in Everything I've Ever Known but there's more room on it coming from a place of curiosity as opposed to just self-martyrdom.
2. This record definitely feels more expansive than your last - was this all recorded at home? What kind of recording set-up are you working with?
Thanks! Glad the expansiveness comes across in the tracks. I worked really hard to carve out more of a bigger feel for this album, but still remain intimate too. It was all recorded in my bedroom studio, and the vocals were recorded in my basement. My usual setup: I have a little studio in my room that has some budget monitors, a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 audio interface, Audio Technica ATH-M20x studio headphones, and my MacBook. I record and do my production in Logic Pro.
Usually, I'll lay down the synth/piano melody first on my Akai Mpk Mini (huge fan of minimalistic gear), then add some bass, more synth layers, and drums if necessary for the song. I'll do a rough vocal demo, and then usually record final vocals in my basement with a few different mics (been loving the Aston Spirit lately). Then usually I go back into the session, comp the vocals, solidify the track instrumental, and then add automation effects/one shots to the final production.
For the final completion stages, I like to work with external mix and mastering engineers because it offers a different set of ears on my songs and helps clean things up/tighten everything to keep my tracks as clean and pristine as possible (shoutout to Alex Gamble for mixing and Kristian Montano for mastering this album!). So that's pretty much my process from start to finish in terms of setup/completion. It's been a great exercise in trusting my own ears in terms of production/songwriting, and knowing when to hand it off to someone else to polish up anything that might need a little extra care.
3. In your debut it felt like you could've ventured into hip hop territory, it's great to see this happen in 'Can You Hear Me?' - where does that influence come from? When writing this track, what took those closing words in a rap direction rather than a sung one?
That was really just an experiment to see how my vocal flow is. I'm not a rapper by any means, but I've always loved hip hop and rap and have been listening to it since I was a kid. I remember hearing Hate It Or Love It by The Game ft. 50 Cent when I was 11 and really liking the fact that the song told a story about struggles and trying to make sense of the world when you're growing up and are exposed to a lot of different things that maybe you're too young for/grew up too fast/thrown into things not by choice, and just connecting to that.
It was weird, when writing Can You Hear Me?, I wasn't thinking of rap or hip hop at all, I was leaning in a more synthwave direction, but I felt like the song needed a bit of a push at the end to really glue the song together. Since Can You Hear Me? is about feeling helpless and that life is just life-ing you so hard, there's a lot of helplessness/powerlessness in it looking for something external to make you feel okay. And I guess at the end of the song I wanted it to be a response to that "can you hear me calling?" and say "if it feels right, let it be okay." As in, if it feels like you're just going with the flow of life's shit right now and feeling helpless, it's okay, it'll pass, it always does, let it be okay. And I guess when I was thinking of that, it sort of came out as a spoken word/rap verse, so I just went with it. It's meant to be like the older wiser part in you going, 'ah, don't worry dude, it'll be okay."
I think I've always wanted to tell a story in my songs where it's like 'okay yeah, life can be shit right now, but what am I going to do about it? Do I want to sit in this and suffer for a while, or do I want to try and create space to get out of this situation/feeling?’ So the rap part was meant to show that push/pull a bit more blatantly.
4. I love how you manipulate your voice across this record, whether it's using a vocoder, pitch shifting or sampling it. Was this an experimental process as you crafted this album or did you set out to produce your voice in this way?
It was a very organic experimental process. I think I wanted to do something different with my vocals because as I was learning about different production styles, I started to see just how many great plugins there are out there for vocal effects processing.
I knew that for Fades (In My Head) and Can You Hear Me? I was going to do something more experimental because I wanted the tracks to have a bit more weight in the vocals, and that just happened naturally as I was testing out some convolution reverb impulse responses and delay effects. I found that when I added a bit of pitch shifting to these, that it made the vocals sound just right for both tracks. I definitely pushed the autotune super hard in Can You Hear Me? so that was a first, but hopefully it's well received as I had a lot of fun doing that!
‘DON’T DRINK CHEMICALS’ single cover artwork.
5. There are moments on 'Everything I've Ever Known' where it goes harder than any of your previous music. What was the genesis of a track like 'DON'T DRINK CHEMICALS'?
DON'T DRINK CHEMICALS was an interesting one. I originally had the synth demo/melody created years ago. At the time, I was really obsessed with the Resident Evil films, and those really inspired me to want to create something as dark/eerie as that but in terms of music. I was also listening to a lot of CRIM3S and Crystal Castles (Alice Glass supporter here) at the time, so from those influences this weird electronic track came out. It didn't have any lyrics, but I knew I wanted something that went hard for the vocals. I don't have as cool a vocal style as Alice, but I figured I'd try something out. I ended up finding a neat vocoder in Reason and using that to change my vocals, and it sounded phenomenal with the instrumental. And the interesting thing was, I wasn't in the same headspace as I was when I made the instrumentals years ago, but once I added the vocals/vocoder effects, I knew this song was going to be about helplessness and feeling stuck in a tumultuous relationship. It felt super cathartic when I finally finished it.
6. The music video for that one is absolutely captivating. Tell us more about the making of that video, did you and Noah Brown come up with the story together? How long did this take to bring to completion?
Thanks - really glad you like the video! I met Noah Brown through a mutual friend, Phorie, who is an amazing artist. When he and I started talking, I was supposed to play a show that he was organizing but couldn't make it, so we ended up chatting a bit about his directing/career instead. I asked him if he wanted to collab on something, and he said yes.
We started talking about DON'T DRINK CHEMICALS and he absolutely loved the song. He came to my house to do some filming for it, and we got on really well after that. He had the idea of having a doll in the music video and going through this whole discovery/eerie recollection of memories/being trapped in a house, and I agreed it sounded like what the song feels like.
We talked a lot about how we loved David Lynch's work, and since he passed away around the time we were working together, we decided to name the doll in the video, David, in his honour. I saw some of Noah's stop motion work before, so I knew I wanted him to create something in this vein. I mentioned something about the Tool video for Sober and wanting something like that, and he took that and ran with it. I'm really happy with how it all turned out. It took about 5-6 months I think? I wouldn't quote me on that though! But, that seems right time-wise from when we met/discussed working together to finishing the video.
7. One of my early favourites on 'Everything I've Ever Known' was 'Waiting', how did you begin writing this song?
Glad you like Waiting - it was one of the tracks on the album that I finished last and was feeling very experimental/exhausted from processing heavy stuff from earlier tracks, so this one was just a nice lull/chill resting point where I let my imagination run wild.
It initially started as just the arpeggiated synth from the beginning of the song, and then I added more of a wide synth to have more of a floating/atmospheric feel to it, and the drums just came naturally after that. The chorus was the trickiest to create because I knew I wanted to do something with a vocoder, but I couldn't get it to sit the way I wanted it to in the track. I think I experimented with 3-4 different vocoders and solidified the melody before reaching out to Alex Gamble to help chisel out a solid coherence of the vocoder effect I was after. I remember having to ask for a small tweak in the mastering stage as well as I wanted it to sound as natural/smooth as possible without it being too robotic/gritty. I was listening to Kacey Musgraves' Oh What a World a lot at the time and really wanted to shape the chorus into something similar to that vocoded sound (which proved to be more difficult than I thought!).
It was really satisfying to finish Waiting, as I learned a lot about the whole vocoding process and how delicate the blending process can be in crafting a sound that really feels like you, and not just a computer. Will definitely be experimenting more with vocoders in the future. The Benny Benassi/The Biz track Love Is Gonna Save Us has always stuck out to me as great work in vocal processing. Might try and experiment with something like that in my own style one day in the near future :)
‘Will You?’ single cover artwork.
8. There are some beautifully contrasting moments on the album, like 'Maybe I Still Love You' and 'Will You?' Was it an obvious production decision to keep these arrangements more sparse? Were other tracks written this way but developed further?
It's interesting, Maybe I Still Love You and Will You? were probably the first tracks I had written for this album, and I knew I wanted to keep them both raw to show a more vulnerable side to my writing/tell the story of the album better. I started off making this album from a place of grief and sadness, and sometimes with those emotions it's something that comes across better with only a guitar and voice as opposed to something bigger. So I made sure to keep these more raw because they were an essential starting point for Everything I've Ever Known.
To be completely honest, I thought this album was going to end up as a singer-songwriter sort of thing, because I had no motivation in the beginning to write anything electronic at all. But, the funny thing I noticed is, once you start exploring your emotions and processing your feelings, it's hard to hold onto grief because it eventually lifts. And so, that's why the rest of the album is so musically diverse - it's kind of me going through a cycle of feeling helpless, then gaining a bit of clarity, and then wanting to keep exploring and moving through those feelings.
Please Leave Me was the only other track that was written more raw like this, but I decided to add a bit of strings to it to fill out the space a little/give it more of an impact. So I guess, these are just meant to be little sprinkles of vulnerability throughout the album to sit and have a break with. I find without this contrast I don't feel like I could complete an album because every story has a climax, but it also has more mundane/slow moments too, and I think those can be easily forgotten or something we rush to try and push to the side as it comes up.
9. There's a lot of processing of emotions with this album. Having been a songwriter for a lot of your life, is it instinctive to turn thoughts and feelings into music?
I guess when I was a kid, I felt a lot and I didn't have the proper tools to express what I felt. I picked up a guitar at 12 and ever since then, if I ever had something sitting heavy on me, the best way I knew how to clear that was by playing guitar until I felt better. I don't tend to cry a lot, but just sitting with my classical guitar and playing when I feel really upset/stuck always brings tears to my eyes (both happy and sad). I used to fall asleep with my guitar in my hands pressed against my chest as a kid as it was my safety blanket for everything. But, as I grew up, I realized if I wanted to improve the relationship I have with myself and the people closest to me that I had to do more than just cry/play out my feelings.
So I guess, yes, it's very instinctive to turn my thoughts/feelings into music and just retreat into that, but for this album in particular, what was interesting is that I not only just created from those heavy moments, but also from moments where I just wanted to come at a situation from a perspective of curiosity as opposed to powerlessness.
Fades (In My Head) is a great example of that. It's a song about struggling with overthinking and getting caught up in your thoughts: when I am scared, you shake my hands / at night it's time you want to raise me, from my bed, faded, dazed and hazy / in my chest, no I can't breathe' but also having the awareness that it's all in your head, 'ooh you're in my head'. Which I think is why it came out a bit more chill and relaxed, because it was more of "okay cool, I'm really overthinking and on the verge of a panic attack right now, but I can recognize that I'm safe, and this is all just in my head."
So I think retreating into my music has always been what's familiar for me, but I'm more aware that I do that now. I still love processing and writing songs on guitar like this for sure, but I also started making space to just create from a more relaxed mental state, and from maybe a more observer point of view as opposed to being completely in the "stuckness" if that makes sense. Those two different perspectives of taking a very inward/fixed experience approach, and also an outward/open experience approach helped me write this album from varying angles.
10. With that said, are there songs or pieces of music that didn't make the album? Are there wayward experiments that wouldn't have fit stylistically?
Definitely! My phone is filled with demo recordings as well as my laptop - there's a never-ending archive of demos, haha. It's a really weird thing to think about putting songs on an album, and I'm still not entirely sure what the cognitive process is because it's never been linear for me. Sometimes I go back to demos I found from 10 years ago, and clean them up/produce them to fit into something that I feel like I can relate to in the present. And other times it's just a brand new song I've created based on the present.
The most important thing has always been to just keep creating, and if something doesn't resonate right now, that's okay, I can be happy that I got out whatever needed to in that moment, and it might turn into a song or it might not - both are okay! I think there were a few more tracks I would have loved to include on this album, but I didn't have the funds to put more than 9 songs together. Hopefully for the next album you'll get to hear some of those tracks that I wanted to include!
11. Going further back, a track of yours I've always loved is 'I Want Someone'. Is that written around the synth loop playing throughout? What was the reason for splitting it up and revisiting it for your debut album?
It's funny, I get that a lot about I Want Someone. It's always a fan favourite during shows, which I love as it's really cathartic to perform. At the time when I wrote it, I had just bought my Roland FA-06 synthesizer and was going through a tough heartbreak. I started testing out the loop feature on my synth and messed around with the arpeggiator for a few hours. I Want Someone most definitely started from that synth looping session, and then I added the bass under that, and the soft drums.
The reason I wanted to revisit the song and split it up in You Can Be You, I Can Be Me was because it always felt like two parts of a story that I wanted to convey with more of a split view. So the first half of the song being more about, 'this person is gone and I feel super lonely and non-functioning without them', and the second half is more of that feeling you have after a breakup, and just wanting someone to be close to you so you don't have to experience the pain of that breakup by yourself (Haha, and PSA: I regret my actions in my early 20s doing this, and definitely do not support using someone new as a commodity to try and bypass your previous heartbreak).
I Want Someone was a big eye opener for me with how I was treating others and also how I was being dishonest with myself and not wanting to sit with my discomfort. It's still hard to sit with discomfort, but I'm less resistant to it now as opposed to when I was younger (I'm 31 now, so hopefully I learned a thing or two since my early 20s!).
12. Congratulations on winning Best Original Artist at the Niagara Music Awards! How does receiving an award like this one fuel you as an artist?
Thank you very much! I was very surprised to win Best Original Artist in all honesty. I was really grateful to receive the award and was just more in shock than anything. I mostly think about creating music as a way to help me process my own feelings and also connect with others who might share a similar viewpoint to me. So when I won this, I guess it just solidified that I'm doing something right? It's helped me fuel my passion and purpose, and to keep going as it seems like there are folks who can resonate with what I make, which makes me really happy. I've always wanted to stay genuine and true to my heart with the purpose of creating to show that learning to sit with ourselves, even in the darkness or discomfort, is the best gift we can give to nourish our lives and help us show up better in our loved ones' lives too. So, very very grateful to win! I'm happy to keep creating and see what happens next.
13. It would've been cool to see Joy Division/New Order be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year as they were nominated. I know you're a fan of New Order particularly, is this something you've given much thought? Is it important for artists to have an accolade like being in the Hall of Fame?
I love the genesis of both Joy Division and New Order, but definitely have always related more to New Order's music. I think they both deserve to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Ian Curtis had a very unique vocal style, stage presence, and impact, and so does New Order. I don't think it's necessarily necessary for artists to be recognized in the Hall of Fame, but leaving a legacy behind is something I consider very important. It's great to see how many people wear Unknown Pleasures album cover t-shirts (some teens too that don't even know who Joy Division are), and how Ian has such a huge impact on post-punk and pop culture still today.
New Order also has an outstanding legacy in the synth pop/post punk communities, and in films and pop culture too. I think it's more important for fans to keep carrying forward an artist/band we really love so we can carry that on to new generations. I remember seeing Finn Wolfard and his band Calpurnia doing a New Order cover of Age of Consent and thinking that was a really cool way to honour them and bring their music to younger generations. Might have to do a New Order cover soon!
14. What are your plans for the rest of 2025? Is it possible to tour? Will there be more music videos?
That's a great question - I'll let you know once I've figured it out, haha. Been feeling very attached to my studio at the moment, so creating has always been happening on and off over the last few months. Aiming to hopefully play a few shows this summer, but I'm trying to hone in on a good live setup first. There may be a few more music videos on the way too!
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Listen to Errunhrd’s latest album ‘Everything I’ve Ever Known’ in all the usual places.
Explore her previous works on her Bandcamp page.
For more information about Errunhrd, visit her official website.
Follow Errunhrd on Instagram and Facebook @errunhrd.
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Follow and interact with Moths and Giraffes on Instagram and Facebook @mothsandgiraffes, and on Twitter @mothsgiraffes. Follow us where the Sky is Blue, @mothsandgiraffes.bsky.social.
We have a Spotify Playlist! Featuring almost every artist we've written about on Moths and Giraffes, find some new music here.
For submissions, or if you’d just like to send us your thoughts, don’t hesitate to contact us via our social media accounts, our contact page, or via email at mothsandgiraffes@outlook.com. We receive a lot of emails though, so please bear with us!
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Do you like what you heard here? Then check out the music from these artists we’ve written about!
