Little Miss Sunshine

EAVES WILDER: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

“At my lowest, I just wanted to be unhuman, unfeeling and unmoved. Like a mountain or a tree. Or the sky. These are all things that have a purpose but I didn’t know what my purpose was. And so what I had to do was figure it out, song by song.” – Eaves Wilder, January 2025

Sometimes you have to tear everything down and start again. In 2023, Eaves Wilder found herself on stage before a crowd that included friends, family and the fans who had been following her progress in the three years since her first release. “Halfway through,” she recalls, “the gear stopped working. I didn’t know how to fix it and I didn’t have the experience to front it. And with the music, it was like I was copying someone else’s idea of what it is to be in a band. I realised I had two options. Either be braver or stop doing it altogether.”

For a while, it seemed as though the latter option would win out. Paralysed by her own feelings of unworthiness, Eaves decided that if she wasn’t good enough to do the only thing she had ever wanted to do, then she needed to go into full retreat mode. “Late one night in my bedroom, I mistyped a word into a search engine and found myself on the website of a convent in Barnet. So obviously, I took it as a sign. I mean, in that moment it all made sense! I’d quit as a musician, so I was unemployed – which meant I’d never be able to afford a place to live. I’d totally lost my purpose.”

It’s perhaps important to note that Eaves is laughing at the high drama of the scenario she describes. Such feelings of profound unworthiness might seem surprising to fans who had followed her progress since the self-recorded lockdown release ‘Won’t You Be Happy’ which brought Eaves – then still only 16 – to the attention of longtime supporters such as Lauren Laverne and Chris Hawkins at BBC 6 Music, John Kennedy at Radio X and ultimately to her label Secretly Canadian.

As a young woman navigating a path out of your teens, you see a lot – often more than you would ever ask for. Eaves Wilder’s debut album Little Miss Sunshine is both an unflinching chronicle of that change and a memorial to lost innocence. It’s right there from the opening seconds of the album’s sonic establishing shot ‘Hurricane Girl’. The vertiginous sense of scale is impossible to miss, even in those deeply evocative strummed chords, which give way to what Eaves calls “the beat drop moment”: the synergy of harmonies that evoke the diaphanous dream pop of Lush and My Bloody Valentine suddenly coming head-to-head with the superheavy glide of Pearl Jam.

In sketching out the protagonist of ‘Hurricane Girl’, Eaves took inspiration from documentaries about storm chasers, using the metaphor to shine a light on friends who have been compelled to seek out tempestuous relationships. For ‘Just Say No’, she drew from both her own and her friends’ experiences of abusive relationships. Its three verses poured out as she made her way home from her first ever EMDR session, the first two written from the perspective of the female trying her best to be what her coercive partner wants her to be before the narrative emphasis shifts to the abuser’s pleas in the third verse. Here and elsewhere, Eaves took inspiration from the queasy mechanised attack of Jane’s Addiction – a group she says she finally “truly got” on her first trip to Los Angeles in 2022.

“We’d had the idea, some friends and I, that we’d run away and claw back some of what had been taken away by lockdown,” she explains. Sometimes though, friendships fracture and dormant tensions explode to the surface. The sense of being overwhelmed by this new environment had a pivotal effect on Eaves. As she has done ever since she first learned her way around a piano, she used the keyboard to try and make sense of her situation. With chords borrowed from Lana Del Rey’s ‘Ride’ and a nod to George Harrison’s Los Angeles song ‘Blue Jay Way’, it’s all there in the sore, emotional postmortem of LA – but the experience also finds its way into much of what surrounds it. Eaves recalls: “With this record, that was the epiphany. I looked up at the sky over L.A. and I was like, ‘I want to make songs that work in places as big as this.’”

Certainly, it’s hard to listen to ‘Daisy Chain Reaction’ – which hits a sweet spot between early Bangles and Celebrity Skin-era Hole – and not yearn to be at the wheel of a freeway-bound Ford Mustang. Beyond the powerpop sheen, however, is a lyric centred around Eaves’ experiences around teenage eating disorders – both hers and others – “the way some people aspire to them and, in one case I saw, even to the extent of lying about it.”

The achingly mellifluous ‘The Great Plains’ sees Eaves retreating to simpler times in order to set out the album’s central manifesto. What started as a “fanfic tribute to The Little House On The Prairie” morphed into a bittersweet reflection on her childhood relationship with older sister Dora. “She was so demure and mermaid-like,” recalls Eaves, “and I was ruled by my emotions – and the harder I tried not to be, the more I realised I could never be like her.” In the song, self-acceptance of sorts comes as Eaves looks to the natural world to tell her what it’s ok to be: “As I erupt into a blaze /It’s ok the sky will do the same/Let no-one bat an eye when /Every year I’ll hibernate till May/Because no-one blames the clouds for rain/So take me as I am, tears down my face.”

Formative memories also form the burning core of ‘Summer Rolls’, a curdled remembrance of the summer she entered puberty: “Every day I get a little taller, life’s a little harder, days a little shorter/I feel like a mother, and less like a daughter.” With its recurring, anguished question “Where did it go?” ‘Summer Rolls’ sounds like an oversaturated Kodachrome slide of its owner’s final carefree seconds. Another extraordinary moment in an album awash with them.

Throughout the sessions for Little Miss Sunshine, Eaves’ also took inspiration from contemporaneous releases. Cases in point included Wolf Alice “who are only band that’s achieved the balance I’m always trying to get, which is the combination of guitars that go that heavy and vocals that go that high and ethereal”; the Riot Grrrl energy of Mannequin Pussy “which felt like it was giving me something of what I missed the first time around when L7 and Babes In Toyland were touring”; and CMAT for “her just straight-up brilliant songwriting”. After reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel (and subsequent TV miniseries) Daisy Jones & The Six, Eaves drew on her own experiences of “falling properly in love for the first time” and “wrote the song I would have made for that movie if I’d been asked.” In love she might have been, but ‘Ropeburn’ swerves sentimentality, instead taking inspiration from Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb “which is about this couple that were buried holding hands.” I wanted to be frozen in this moment, but in some ways that also felt like the worst thing that could happen.”

For ‘Mountain Sized’, she referenced Lily Allen’s 2009 single The Fear – “because you’ve got this one woman casually listing all the worst things about herself, the kind of stuff you should be too embarrassed to admit.” On Eaves’ song, the fomenting anxiety is obliterated by a panoramic chorus which sees her smash through the membrane of her real-world restrictions in order to declare, “But in my mind/But in my mind/I am taller than the highest mountain sides.” That explosive sense of release can also be heard on the single which heralded Eaves Wilder’s return back in November 2025. Upon its release ‘Everybody Talks’ was Eaves’ most widely played song to date, picking up support, not just across BBC 6 Music and Radio 2, but also across prominent Apple Music playlists and influential US stations such as KEXP.

For Eaves, the feeling of hearing the song find such instant favour was one of overwhelming relief. Between that decision to start again and the final session for Little Miss Sunshine were some 700 long nights in her shed with her guitars, keyboard and laptop trying to better understand her own interior world so she could reassemble it in notes and chords and words. Asked about the title of the album, she explains, “To most strangers, I have a sunny disposition. But I feel like the words ‘human’ and ‘nature’ need to be reacquainted with each other. People – and women especially – live in cycles. We’re constantly growing and shrinking, shedding and building. So much of this album is about that and what happens to us when it’s stifled or suppressed.”

Co-produced with Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, The Killers, The Horrors), all ten songs on Little Miss Sunshine were written and arranged by Eaves Wilder. When it came to the album’s sleeve art, Eaves and her sister Dora went to Greece where Dora – now a photographer and video director – captured the beguiling cover image of Eaves on an olive tree, holding a mirror into the midday sun. But it was only finally at the end of 2025, when the test pressings came through that she allowed herself to believe that finally other people might finally get to own the music that had been consuming her waking thoughts in the preceding years.

“I remembered when I realised I’d written a concept album and that it was a whole self-contained world. It was like ‘Holy shit!’ And in that moment I realised that’s why I had almost walked away. At my lowest, I just wanted to be unhuman, unfeeling and unmoved. Like a mountain or a tree. Or the sky. These are all things that have a purpose but I didn’t know what my purpose was. And so what I had to do was figure it out, song by song.”

Little Miss Sunshine is released through Secretly Canadian on 17th April