Spill Tab Distorts Pop, Pain, and Perfectionism on “ANGIE”
After her stop at WERW’s Spring Launch Party in April, Claire Chicha – aka Spill Tab – spoke to 20 Watts about her musical influences, the “bedroom pop” label, and her debut album “ANGIE.”
Words By: Harry Sutton / Photo Courtesy of SB Management / Graphic By: Michael Loya
Claire Chicha has been releasing music since 2019. She’s toured with Sabrina Carpenter and Wallows and played some of the biggest festivals in the world, but on May 16th, she finally released her debut album.
The daughter of a jazz composer and a classical pianist, the LA-based artist was practically preordained for a career in music – though her music sounds nothing like what she was raised around. She learned to play piano at the age of six, started writing her first songs in her bedroom at around 13, and studied Music Business and Film Production at NYU.
Although Chicha’s rise to indie pop stardom – reaching over 100 million Spotify streams and touring as support for one of the world’s biggest pop stars before even releasing an album – might first sound like a fairytale come true, her journey to get there was a turbulent one. Her family went through bankruptcy in the 2008 recession, they relocated a handful of times (moving from LA to Bangkok to Paris), and her father, whom she described as her “whole world,” passed away, all before she started high school.
After graduating, Chicha moved back to LA, where she would release her first songs with longtime friend and producer David Marinelli. After her first few songs caught traction online, she signed a record deal in 2020. She spent the following years working on three EPs, each one increasingly complex and experimental, as she worked to find a sound that resonated with her. But even as she grew more confident in the studio, the pressure to churn out streaming-friendly singles started to mount. In our conversation, Chicha reflected on how quickly she felt pushed to release new music during that period, often chasing a sense of immediacy rather than giving herself the space to fully explore her sound.
After wrapping her last EP in 2023, she realized she needed a change. Signing with a new French label gave her the confidence and freedom to finally approach a project on her own terms. With that freedom came “ANGIE,” her debut album, which came out on May 16th.
“I finally felt like I had something worth making a whole album about,” Chicha told 20 Watts after her performance at WERW’s Spring Launch Party in April.
For the first time, Chicha had a clear, driving concept: a meditation on her creative struggle itself. “ANGIE” is not just an album title, but a personification of the version of herself that felt lost, unsure, and disconnected.
“Angie is a character who represents my older self,” Chicha told 20 Watts, “A version of me who wasn’t sure what to do or where to go in my career.”
That emotional uncertainty became a creative compass for Chicha. As she pieced together the album, she started leaning into extremes — chasing sounds that felt unstable, contradictory, or cracked at the edges.
Her sound lives in the tension between sweetness and static. While her music is often called “bedroom pop,” her musical style has long since expanded past the soft-focus intimacy of the genre’s conventions. Her newer songs fuse bubblegum-pop hooks with grungy, hyperpop-tinged distortion, drawing from both the restless energy of Green Day and Paramore and the electronic flourishes of Bon Iver’s “22, A Million.”
It’s a synthesis of contradictions: heavy bass synths rumble under fluttering falsetto lines, glitchy digital accents collide with dreamy melodies, and moments of buoyant, bright pop can dissolve at any second into decayed distortion. At her most chaotic, Spill Tab borders on trip-hop and electroclash; at her most restrained, she slips into sparse, intimate reflections that feel almost like whispered secrets. Even in her lightest moments, there’s a constant undercurrent of tension — a sense that the song might at any second collapse, splinter, or shapeshift.
No song better represents this dichotomy than her new album’s opener and lead single, “PINK LEMONADE,” which came out last November. The track is just as sugary as it is strange, constantly shifting states: swelling and shrinking, glitching and resetting. Chicha combines slinky, chipmunked vocal melodies with a topsy-turvy beat that oscillates behind a story about hitting her head and rushing to the ER.
Chicha described “PINK LEMONADE” and the title track, “Angie,” as the “grandparent” songs of the album. Where “PINK LEMONADE” is Spill Tab at its most convulsive, the title track takes a slower, sadder route. With airy vocals and a flickering, low-key arrangement, it captures the feeling of revisiting an old memory that you just can’t shake. Chicha opens herself up to Angie, singing “This time I'll tell you everything / So make a fool of me tonight,” before the track spirals into a hectic outro with a howling guitar solo.
While she doesn’t take issue with the “bedroom pop” label that her music has been given, Spill Tab is an artist whose work is more than lo-fi nostalgia or banal high school romance – her work is messier, louder, and more volatile. If her past releases were bursts of static, “ANGIE” is the full transmission — a project that doesn’t just showcase who Spill Tab is, but how far she’s come to find that voice. It’s loud, it’s fragile, it glitches, and it glows.
“I could try to sound cool and say I don’t care what people will think about the album,” Chicha said, “But obviously, I do. It’s the realest and most personal project I’ve ever worked on and I really hope people love it.”