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Finley Clark’s Illumination era feels built from neon mythology, emotional spectacle and the cost of candour. In this interview, the Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter opens up about launching the tour in Paris on Valentine’s Day, testing unreleased songs such as Mystery Punch and Berlin Baby live, and taking her conceptual world through Copenhagen, Bucharest, Rome and Palma. She also unpacks the deeper architecture of Illumination, an eight-song album shaped around identity, desire, performance, self-creation and the fragile search for real connection beneath the glamour. From nightlife excess and radio sessions to Mark Haugegaard Nielsen’s full-album production and her upcoming London reveal, Clark frames the record as one connected world rather than a scattered set of singles.

The Illumination Tour began in Paris on Valentine’s Day at Tennessee Bar, where you performed Mystery Punch live for the first time. What made that city and that night feel like the right place to start this chapter?

Paris felt symbolic because Illumination is an album that explores fantasy, desire and the stories we tell ourselves about who we need to become. Starting the tour on Valentine’s Day added another layer to that. The record is ultimately about longing. For love, for recognition, for transformation, and Paris has always carried that romantic mythology.

Performing Mystery Punch there for the first time felt like opening the curtain on a new era in the most fitting setting possible. It was also the first glimpse into the wider world of Illumination. People already know about songs like Berlin Baby and Mystery Punch, but they’re only part of the story. The next chapters of the album include tracks such as Good Cop, Bad Cop Routine, My Muse Maria, and Bleach Blonde Bitch + some extra surprise songs, each exploring different forms of obsession, identity, performance and desire.

Paris felt like the perfect place to introduce those themes because it’s the city of lights,  that exists somewhere between reality and myth. Everyone arrives there carrying a fantasy, whether it’s about romance, art, success or reinvention. That’s very much the emotional landscape of Illumination. Looking back, debuting Mystery Punch in Paris on Valentine’s Day feels less like a coincidence and more like the natural beginning of the album’s story.

After the Blood Drinker Tour across Scandinavia, this second headline run reaches further into southern and central Europe. What feels different about carrying your music into these new rooms?

The Blood Drinker Tour was about building a foundation and finding my audience. The title came from Blood Drinker, the last song from High Priestess that explores transformation, ambition and the way people reinvent themselves in pursuit of power, status and desire. Lines like “Life doesn’t get easier, you just get better, faster, stronger” and “You either get to die a hero or you live long enough to turn into her” capture that idea of constantly evolving, sometimes into someone you never expected to become.

In many ways, that first tour reflected those themes. I was throwing myself into unfamiliar situations, learning quickly and figuring out how to survive on the road. There was a sense of chasing something larger than myself, which is also at the heart of Blood Drinker. The song moves through a surreal world of glamour, excess and self-mythology, from “Hollywood Babylon” to “drinking blood in the club” and becoming “the queen of my palace.” It’s about the fantasy of reinvention and what happens when you fully commit to it.

With the Illumination Tour, I’m walking into rooms where many people may not know my music at all. That’s exciting because every show becomes a first impression. Having the concert interview at Radio Guerrilla in Bucharest on May 20th, then playing in Rome at Studio 26 on May 24th and La Movida in Palma de Mallorca on May 26th, all within a few days of each other, was a surreal experience.

What I love is seeing how different audiences connect with the songs through their own cultural lens. The themes in Blood Drinker: ambition, transformation, excess and self-creation, seem to resonate in very different ways depending on the city. The Blood Drinker Tour felt like the beginning of the story. The Illumination Tour feels like taking that story into entirely new worlds and discovering what it means to other people.

You premiered Berlin Baby back home in Copenhagen at 4Tallet. How does it feel testing unreleased material in front of an audience before the full album reveal?

It’s one of my favourite parts of the process. When you’re working on a record for months or years, you can become trapped inside your own perspective. Playing an unreleased song live gives it a completely different life. You can feel where people lean in, where they react, and where the emotional moments land.

Berlin Baby was especially meaningful because I got to share it first with the audience that inspired it. Both Berlin Baby and Mystery Punch came from observing how chaotic people can become when they’re deep in nightlife culture. Copenhagen fascinates me because it seems to contain two extremes at once: people waking up before dawn for cold plunges, gym sessions and bike commutes, and others disappearing into days of partying, addiction and excess. That contrast became a huge part of the DNA of both songs.

I wanted the writing to feel visceral and immersive, so I wrote from the first-person perspective. It’s similar to the effect of films like Trainspotting: you’re not standing outside judging the character, you’re inside their head experiencing the highs and consequences alongside them. On Mystery Punch, lines about vomiting on a party dress, losing cigarettes, sleeping on a friend’s couch and treating every mistake as a victory are all part of inhabiting that mindset. The narrator glamorizes chaos.

Testing songs like that live before they’re released is invaluable because you immediately find out whether people connect with the character and the world you’re creating. It helps me understand whether the emotions I’m trying to capture are actually reaching the audience.

Illumination follows a woman constructing a dazzling persona because she believes she must become extraordinary to be worthy. Where did that concept first start taking shape?

The concept first started taking shape when I looked back at the journey of High Priestess, particularly the trajectory from Graveyard Shift to Blood Drinker. Those two songs almost function as opposite ends of the same story.

In Graveyard Shift, the protagonist is restless, uncertain and searching. She’s looking for meaning, adventure and a sense of identity. Throughout the album, she moves through different places, relationships and geographical fantasies, trying on new versions of herself in songs like Catalina Island, My Own Private Montana and Father Jared, Louisiana By the time she reaches Nights in Helsinki, she’s built an entire mythology around movement, ambition and reinvention.

Then Magic Strawberries acts as a kind of fever dream before the transformation is completed in Blood Drinker. The uncertain woman from Graveyard Shift has become someone larger than life. She’s no longer asking who she is. She’s declaring who she is. In Blood Drinker, she sees herself as the queen of her own palace, moving through a world of glamour, power, ambition and self-created legend.

That transformation became the starting point for Illumination.

The protagonist of Illumination takes that impulse even further. She keeps reinventing herself, creating new personas, new stories and new myths around her own life.

Across Illumination, that shows up in different forms. In Mystery Punch, she turns nights out with friends into mythology, where every mistake becomes part of the legend and chaos becomes something to celebrate. In Berlin Baby, she immerses herself in nightlife, excess and the contradictions of a city that feels both disciplined and decadent at the same time. Good Cop, Bad Cop Routine explores how identity can be shared and strengthened through friendship, where two people succeed because they complete each other rather than compete. My Muse Maria shifts the focus toward authenticity and inspiration, finding meaning not in status or spectacle but in real human creativity and connection. And Bleach Blonde Bitch pushes the idea of self-mythology to its extreme, where the protagonist fully imagines herself as a cultural icon, a fashion figure and a legend-in-the-making, almost indistinguishable from her own fantasy.

What connects all of these songs is the idea of self-creation. She’s writing herself into existence. There’s something deeply empowering about that because she’s refusing to accept a role that somebody else has written for her. The women in these songs are not passive muses or supporting characters. They’re the authors of their own mythology.

If High Priestess tells the story of a woman becoming her own legend, then Illumination asks what happens after that. What happens when you’ve successfully transformed yourself into the person you’ve always dreamed of being? Do you finally feel worthy, or do you simply create another version of yourself and keep chasing the light?

The album seems to wrestle with glamour, pressure, performance and the need for real connection. How much of that story reflects the emotional cost of being seen as an artist?

There are definitely personal elements in the record. As an artist, you’re constantly balancing visibility and authenticity. People see the performances, the photos and the releases, but there is a lot happening beneath the surface that remains invisible. Illumination isn’t autobiographical in a literal sense, but it draws on feelings I’ve experienced: the pressure to keep evolving, to keep proving yourself, and the challenge of staying connected to who you are beneath the performance.

That tension didn’t start with this album. It’s something I was already exploring in High Priestess, especially on The Master Dropout. That song captures a refusal to conform to systems that feel constraining or dehumanising. Lines like “They keep cutting corners from their corner office, they might as well cut all those cubicles into coffins”  reflect both late-stage capitalism frustration and escape at the same time. Even the surreal, coded imagery throughout the track carries that instinct of stepping outside prescribed structures and refusing to participate on expected terms.

What makes that even more interesting is how different it feels compared to Hotel Bonanza. If The Master Dropout is about rejecting systems, Hotel Bonanza is about dissolving into spectacle, excess and theatrical identity with lines like: “69 on the marble floor, made you spritz like Aperol. Spread your legs like Pietà  by Michelangelo”. It exists in a world of heightened glamour and unstable intimacy, where everything feels staged yet emotionally charged.

The song leans into extreme cinematic imagery, luxury, decadence, myth-making and emotional intensity pushed to the edge. Desire, ambition and chaos all blur together until the protagonist is no longer observing the world but actively directing it like a film she is inside of.

Taken together, those two songs sit on opposite sides of the same impulse. The Master Dropout wants to step away from everything. Hotel Bonanza wants to become everything at once. One looks for freedom in withdrawal, the other in immersion. But both are ultimately asking the same question: how do you escape a system without creating another one inside yourself?

That’s where Illumination really begins to take shape. The pressure isn’t only external anymore, but internalised, how to be seen, how to evolve, how to keep up with your own image. The protagonist isn’t just escaping structures like in The Master Dropout; she’s now constructing her own, and living inside them.

So while Illumination isn’t autobiographical in a literal sense, it deals with the themes that I wanted to talk about as an artist, when you feel like you are going to open your mouth because you have something to say and I feel like through these 3 albums I said everything that I needed to say, so I’m very excited about what I’m going to do next and express myself in the next years as an artist.

Mark Haugegaard Nielsen produced the entire album. What made him the right person to help shape such a tightly connected eight-song concept?

Mark Haugegaard Nielsen produced the entire album, and what made him the right collaborator was that he immediately understood Illumination as a complete narrative rather than a collection of individual songs. I needed someone who could think in terms of emotional arcs, atmosphere and continuity, not just production on a track-by-track level. Mark has a strong instinct for storytelling through sound, and he helped shape a sonic world that feels cohesive while still allowing each song to exist as its own character.

That sense of working across perspectives and building shared language has actually been part of my life for a long time. I grew up in a German-speaking environment, studied foreign languages, and later worked in corporate settings within multinational companies in my early twenties. I was also involved in Erasmus programs throughout school and college, which meant constantly moving between cultures, people and ways of thinking. So I’ve always been used to collaborating internationally and adapting creatively across different contexts.

That continued very naturally into music. During the pandemic, while working on my first album Teenage Magic, I was collaborating remotely with artists across Vancouver, Texas, Nashville and London, often across completely different time zones. Songs like The Hometown Blues and Why Does Anyone Do Anything? came out of that period, where the creative process itself was fragmented geographically but connected emotionally. It taught me how to build songs through distance, communication and shared intent rather than physical proximity.

Working with Sir H.C. on Magic Strawberries during High Priestess also expanded that idea further. The way the lyrics move between English and Danish, shifting from lines like “Told me that she hates the cold, well so do I” to “Tænkte hun var træt af kulden, det er jeg os”—created a natural dialogue between languages and perspectives. That fluidity between cultures and expression felt very aligned with how I approach collaboration in general.

With Mark, that background became especially important. He’s Danish, I work primarily in English, but the communication around Illumination has never really been limited to language. It’s always been about tone, emotion and structure, how something feels rather than how it is literally described. Because Illumination functions as a tightly connected eight-song narrative, we had to think carefully about flow, atmosphere and emotional progression from track to track.

The result is an album where each song feels like a different scene within the same world. That cohesion is not just thematic, but cultural and collaborative as well, built on a shared understanding of how to translate emotion across borders, languages and creative environments

You have radio moments woven into this tour, from Radio Frederiksberg to Radio Guerrilla in Romania. What excites you about performing in that more intimate broadcast setting?

Radio strips everything back. You’re often performing in a much smaller environment without the distractions of a full concert setting, which puts the focus entirely on the song. I enjoy that intimacy. There’s also something special about knowing the performance is travelling beyond the room itself and reaching listeners wherever they happen to be. It creates a different kind of connection that feels very direct and personal.

That dynamic also highlights different emotional layers in the catalogue. Some of my songs are built for spectacle and transformation, but others become almost more revealing when performed in stripped-back environments like radio sessions. Call 4 Me is a good example of that. It’s one of the most vulnerable moments in my writing. At its core it’s about doubt, attachment and emotional dependency: “Will you forgive me for ever doubting you,” and “They tryna break us, they tryna spin the truth”; but also about faith in connection despite distance or instability. There’s a softness underneath the imagery of glamour and movement that becomes even more exposed when it’s just voice and performance without production around it.

In contrast, My Own Private Montana carries a different kind of vulnerability. It looks at identity through performance and distance, where desire, power and insecurity blur into something theatrical. Lines like “Don’t I look pretty giving up on you” and “Naked on a cross, dying for my sins behind the glitz and glamour” reflect a character who is both performing and questioning the role she’s performing at the same time. Even the more provocative or exaggerated imagery is really about exposure, about being seen, judged and mythologised all at once.

That contrast becomes even more striking when you go further back to High Priestess. In Graveyard Shift, the vulnerability is quieter but still present beneath the surface of control and fantasy. The idea of isolation:“I answer the phone with my sad song, as I’m all alone on my cyber throne”, already hints at someone performing strength while feeling detached from real connection. And in songs like Catalina Island, that emotional openness becomes more surreal and mythic, where love, loss and fantasy all merge into a kind of dream logic.

So when I perform these songs in a radio setting, what excites me most is that those emotional layers become harder to hide. There’s nowhere for them to disappear into production or scale, they’re just there in the voice. Even in songs that were written with larger worlds in mind, the emotional core still comes through very directly.

That’s what makes radio performances so special in the context of Illumination. The album is built around glamour, performance and self-creation, but radio pulls it back to something much more human. It reminds me that beneath all the narrative and imagery, the songs are ultimately about very direct emotions: love, doubt, longing, ambition and the need to be understood.

With the official Illumination album reveal planned for London this summer, what do you hope people finally understand about Finley Clark when they hear the full record?

Next Friday on June 5th I am releasing the next 3 chapters from Illumination: Good Cop, Bad Cop Routine; My Muse Maria and Bleach Blonde Bitch, alongside 3 music videos, as a trilogy, the same way these 3 albums were released 3 consecutive years apart with no record label behind me: Teenage Magic 2024, High Priestess 2025, Illumination 2026. I believe in trilogies and I hope people understand that I’m interested in creating albums, not just individual songs. Illumination is an album about identity, desire and the search for meaning beneath appearances. On the surface it can feel glamorous and theatrical, but at its heart it’s about very human vulnerabilities. If listeners come away feeling understood, questioning some of the stories they tell themselves, or simply finding a piece of their own experience reflected in the record, then I’ve achieved what I set out to do.

That sense of world-building is something I’ve always been drawn to, even beyond this album. Across the catalogue, each song exists like a fragment of a larger universe, whether it’s the drifting, transient relationships in Taxi Friends: “Baby we are friends by chance / Taxi friends of circumstance”, where taxi drivers call and face time each other 24/7 so they don’t fall asleep while driving; Or Father Jared, Louisiana, which deals with longing, contradiction and confession in a way that feels almost theatrical in its vulnerability: “Forgive me Father Jared / For I tried to pray away the crazy”, for which I already released a self-directed music video on my Youtube Channel.

Nights in Helsinki carries a different atmosphere again, one shaped by distance, projection and memory. The imagery of neon lights, winter stars and emotional warmth in cold environments: “You only ever saw me after midnight / Dancing in the snow”: creates a sense of someone being partially real and partially mythologised depending on the moment they’re seen in. It’s about how identity shifts depending on context, light and perception.

Then there’s Love and Evil, which explores the tension between devotion and destruction, intimacy and freedom. It’s about choosing connection even when it feels unstable: “I told my people what I came in here for / I’m here to risk it all”, and recognising that love itself can contain contradiction, beauty and chaos at the same time. It’s one of the emotional cores of the record in terms of understanding how deeply the characters are willing to go in order to feel something real.

All of these songs from High Priestess feed into what Illumination is ultimately trying to do. They all exist within the same universe of people trying to understand themselves through other people.

So when the Illumination album is finally revealed in London, I hope listeners don’t just hear individual tracks, but recognise the continuity between them. Because for me, the record isn’t just a collection of songs, it’s a connected world where identity is constantly shifting, and where every character is, in some way, searching for meaning beneath the surface of how they appear.

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Stream Finley Clark’s latest releases on Spotify.

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Interview by Amelia Vandergast