‘My old label said I was more annoying than lucrative’: painter-musician Issy Wood on her singular, insular world

After a stint in the commercial music world and amid a prolific career as a highly celebrated painter, Issy Wood accidentally released her second album in July. “Four days before it was meant to be, just by not making the files private on SoundCloud,” she says over cigarettes in her spacious east London studio, in the deadpan, semi-self-deprecating tone she’s become known for. Accidental American, named after Wood’s murky relationship with her citizenship, had no trace of a marketing campaign. “Been out for ages I just forgot to post to the grid”, she wrote on Instagram two months later.
“I do it all myself so it came out with like zero fanfare,” she says. “It was more just me wanting to not hold on to it any more.”
This rather unceremonious launch is worlds away from those of two EPs at the height of the pandemic. After a friend of Wood’s shared her demos with Mark Ronson in 2019 – less than a year after she started making music and before it was even publicly available – she signed to his Sony label imprint Zelig. Together, they released Cries Real Tears! (2020) and If It’s Any Constellation (2021), two collections of uncanny pop songs exploring the lows, highs and mids of millennial life through multilayered vocals and sharp, sardonic lyrics.
Songs like Cry/Fun and Muscle became decent successes on streaming, but Wood quickly realised the dynamic of working with a major label felt off: the profit splits felt disproportionate compared with the 50:50 she was used to in the art world and the demands to post “thirst traps” to social media with hashtag-laden captions didn’t suit her. Meanwhile, her relationship with Ronson was turning sour as she felt he shifted from a generous mentor figure to someone who avoided her calls (he has denied this).
“I was naive, and I didn’t know anyone in the music business when I first met him,” says Wood. “I didn’t even know that it was a Sony deal I was signing until I was sat in front of the contract with my lawyer. In hindsight it was kind of ridiculous to assume that this guy who is a celebrity, a very in-demand music producer/DJ and Gucci ambassador [would have time for me], a 27-year-old who is ostensibly a painter.”
In 2021, she terminated the contract, leaving her relationship with Ronson, and her love for making music, in tatters. “Essentially, they [Zelig] were like: you’re more annoying than you are lucrative, so please leave,” she says, laughing.
Wood, now 31, was born in the US to British parents who returned to England just two months later (an ongoing frustration due to her obligation to pay taxes in both countries). She grew up in Portsmouth before moving to London to study fine art at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy, where she was headhunted by Vanessa Carlos of the commercial gallery Carlos/Ishikawa before she had even graduated. Her figurative paintings – snapshots of everyday objects rendered in strange, claustrophobic pastels – have been shown across the world, even attracting the attention of mega art dealer Larry Gagosian, whom she turned down.
The music path wasn’t planned: after a breakup with a boyfriend in 2018 opened up “quite a frightening expanse of time” in her schedule, she decided to put the amateur guitar skills from her teenage years in bands to use. She downloaded Ableton and taught herself how to write and record songs at her kitchen table. By the end of the year, she enjoyed it so much that it became the only thing she wanted to spend her evenings doing.
In the years since leaving Zelig, Wood has returned to pursuing music on her own terms. While she works closely with galleries including Carlos/Ishikawa and Michael Werner for her painting, she writes and records her music alone in her studio. In 2022, she self-released her debut album My Body Your Choice, which contemplated the breakdown of relationships – romantic, familial and musical – in vivid detail. It’s an approach she upholds on Accidental American: a forthright meditation on jealousy, revenge and her unhealthy relationship with both work and men, delivered through catchy hooks and woozy production that recalls Micachu and the Shapes or Okay Kaya. “I’d give both my legs to have her effect on you,” she sings on That I Can Live With, while Behave, maybe the record’s standout track, is about learning how to experience sexual pleasure and desire after being raped.
As someone who has been vocal about her resistance to the spotlight (there are few photographs of her online – a legacy of her body dysmorphia, she says) and who often adopts an offhand, cool-girl persona, it’s perhaps surprising that Wood’s lyrics are so confessional. But the decision to bare all – as she also once did on her blog, collecting her writings into self-published collections – feels natural to her. “Candour is always the language I’ve spoken,” she tells me, lighting another cigarette. “On the painting side of things, it’s so easy to obfuscate your feelings and make allegories or use other images to hide how you really feel. Music just feels like the best vehicle for stripping everything away.”
Though Wood now makes music without the pressures of a label, she says it’s still far from the fun, cathartic experience it once was. A combination of high standards and what she describes as an American work ethic turned her after-work hobby into a “hellish self-imposed duty”. It’s perhaps hard to sympathise – she was fast-tracked into the music industry and gets to paint for a living, making work that sells for hundreds of thousands of pounds – but she seems to know this. “I have one of the best jobs in the world, but because I’ve been depressed in the past and I live in fear of finding myself at 2pm playing Grand Theft Auto and neglecting all my duties, I overshoot my discipline.”
She finds performing live particularly difficult. To date, she’s only ever played four shows, all of which took place in the last year, and she doesn’t have any immediate plans to do it again. “I don’t think it is a sober person’s game,” she says. “Having so many eyes on me for an extended amount of time tripped all the switches of my body dysmorphia and stage fright, and worrying that I wasn’t technically proficient, without being able to hide in the production. Maybe that’s where my tolerance for vulnerability ends: actually having to appear physically.”
She’s committed to detangling music from her work life, and instead making it feel like a hobby again. After all, her career as an artist is hugely lucrative. “I’m trying to remove the pressure and remind myself what I enjoyed about it that wasn’t to do with signing contracts,” she says drily. Going down to her basement music studio will remain part of her daily practice – she can’t see it any other way – but for now her musical ambitions remain low. “I guess I’ll put out an album when I feel like it. And if people listen, then great.”
Her nonchalant manner – so present in her music and online persona – makes you wonder whether her indifference is genuine. After all, Wood does keep sharing her music publicly. But, as she gazes off into the middle distance once more, perhaps part of what makes her output so compelling is that you can’t really tell.