When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

I'm really into a lot of different music, and a lot of stuff that sounds absolutely nothing like anything on the Mini-Album.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

I tend to keep my mind open to the different forms of art out there and I am always willing to try new stuff.

Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.

I feel like kids that grew up in New York City or in L.A. were exposed to all these subcultures and subgenres, whereas I was only exposed to the poppiest of pop music so I never had this negative connotation towards pop music. That's not South African music having an effect on me, but just how international music was filtered through South Africa affected me. It gave me a not-negative connotation towards pop music growing up.

I had this perfect situation where my studio was a three-minute walk away, and every day I would go to the studio. If I had an idea, I could work on it at the highest level possible.