PHOTOGRAPHY Francesco Zinno
STYLING Francesca Russo
STYLING ASSISTANTS Erica Welhenage & Joanna Walker
HMUA Annelie Bystrom using Milk Makeup
SET DESIGNERS Georgia Fischer & Courtney Page
FASHION ASSISTANT Isenkkel Akhtimer & Vella Akhtimer
PRODUCTION Madeline Reid
SPECIAL THANKS Katie Pilbeam at Chalk Press Agency
If you weren’t already familiar with singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Canal, you might mistakenly dismiss her as an industry plant or decry nepotism – just a quick scroll through her social media reveals snaps with her arm around Bruce Springsteen, flying to red carpet film premieres via helicopter with Tom Cruise, and hanging out backstage at Glastonbury with Chris Martin and Michael J Fox.
In fact, in 2021, thanks to a resurfaced memory on social media, Canal uncovered a mock-up magazine cover she’d made while at music college that read: “Victoria Canal wows Chris Martin”. Through the powers of manifestation (and mutual friends), Martin found her music and has been a significant supporter ever since, acquainting her with a new circle of famous faces including her record label Parlophone.
Despite the budding star’s illustrious contacts list, the 26-year-old’s present-day ambitions are set on more introspective aspirations. The day after her BRICKS photoshoot in November, Canal flew to Normandy to join her family’s renovation, Projet La Rue. For the past four years, they’ve been transforming a tranquil 200-year-old French homestead into her dream artist residency. “I feel like screen time is such a killer of creativity and sometimes city life is just so chaotic,” explains Canal, who currently splits her time between London and Los Angeles. “The goal is to have artists come here and make their albums – write and hide from society – and for me to do the same.”
She takes the interview call from the building site, occasionally getting distracted by her brother’s enthusiastic labradors. “They’re simple creatures and I think in our essence, we are too,” she muses during one interruption. “To reconnect to the simplicity of just being, without having to do… I think pets bring it out in us.”
The renovation, helmed by her brother, includes a newly-finished natural swimming pond and an old barn soon-to-be converted into a recording studio. Canal is in charge of the latter, which she humbly refers to as “a side project along with everything else that I’m doing.” Everything else, in 2024, included winning The Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically & Lyrically with ‘Black Swan’, lending her vocals to a global Dove campaign, and selling out her biggest headline venues to date.
Now a decade into her music career, Canal’s debut album is here. Today, she releases Slowly, It Dawns, a defiant yet delicate offering that encompasses a lifetime of emotions across its 12 tracks as if it were a coming-of-age movie, taking fans through the many fraught stages of self-discovery and self-acceptance that shape our adolescence. Together, the record hears Canal’s signature silky vocals and devastating lyricism shine with renewed conviction, while also unleashing an all-new, candid pop persona to welcome in the new era.
I felt inspired to stretch myself, to lean into the pop side of myself, lean into the more brooding, folky singer-songwriter side, and everything else in between.
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The record is imbued with memories of her international upbringing. Born in Munich to Spanish and American parents, she grew up mostly in Madrid, but – thanks to her dad’s job in medical tech – she had resided in Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Dubai all before adulthood. Her genre-spanning sound has also been the result of abundant creative collaboration, as she was inspired to formally start the album while on tour with Hozier in 2023. “Seeing Hozier up-close and working with Coldplay, I was exposed to bands and artists that make many kinds of music and really stretch themselves in terms of genre and songwriting,” she explains. “I felt inspired to stretch myself, to lean into the pop side of myself, lean into the more brooding, folky singer-songwriter side, and everything else in between.”
She pauses. “At the same time, it is true that your debut album takes your whole life to make,” she adds. To roll out the album’s singles and accompanying visuals, she used the allegory of a house party, embracing the same teenage innocence that once painted Friday nights as the most important times of your life.
The first track and lead single, ‘June Baby’ opens to glittering piano chords and Canal’s soft whispers, as if you’re being awoken by a light breeze as the sun pours in and the hope of a new day rises. The mood heats up on ‘California Sober’ as she flirts with new desires amid sizzling Cuban-inspired guitars and mariachi backing vocals. The deliciously dangerous ‘Cake’ hears Canal descend further into her hedonism, delaying her inevitable return to reality through self-destruction, singing “Fuck the cake, let’s go straight to the vodka.”
She enlisted creative director Abbie Coombs to aid in crafting a universe where ‘Cake’ and the diaphanous ‘swan song’ end up on the same record. Canal discovered that ‘June Baby’ and ‘swan song’ worked best as bookends, saying they felt like “a beginning and an end of a life” that she could then piece together.
“When you grow up, you’re overconfident, you’re naive, you’re really loud about your opinions and convinced about the way the world should be, but you also don’t know anything at all. Then there reaches a point in life where everything flips on its head, and you question: who am I?” she remembers. She asks this on ‘15%’, the album’s keystone track. “It’s looking back and thinking, ‘Oh my God, why did I say those things? Am I amazing? Or does everyone hate me?‘ This social anxiety kicks in but there’s also an understanding that it’s just the way the brain works, and you can’t control it.”
When you grow up, you’re overconfident, you’re naive, you’re really loud about your opinions and convinced about the way the world should be, but you also don’t know anything at all. Then there reaches a point in life where everything flips on its head, and you question: who am I?
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Slowly, It Dawns’ second half reckons with this discomfort and reflects on agency, accountability, and acceptance. On ‘Vauxhall’, Canal speaks to her lover and fantasises of their escape away from responsibilities and repercussions – singing “I wish it was that easy / trading in my dreams for peace of mind” – before realising that she can’t escape her problems as she can’t escape herself. The song is another stand-out from the album, building with discontent until she bursts from frustration, hollering “I wish I had a choice” until it fades to silence.
Meanwhile, the agonising ‘Totally Fucking Fine’ starts out as sarcastic and resentful as its name might suggest, capturing her growing self-belief like weight being lifted from her chest, before transitioning to a meditative instrumental, creating a space to stop and breathe among the chaos. This introspection has undoubtedly been aided by her meticulous commitment to journaling – she’s been writing them since she was six years old, and admits she can get through one every few months.
Canal explains the magic of songwriting, for her, is in its development process and trusting in an idea’s evolution. She needed to create a space “where there are no bad ideas” to sharpen her thoughts, cultivating this with renowned songwriter Eg White who contributed to half the record’s tracklist. “Part of my process – since 2020, when it felt like the world was ending – is to make music where I don’t care if anybody ever hears it. I’m making exactly what I want to make and that’s what matters to me. Then when people hear it and connect with it, that’s an amazing reward,” she explains.
Not caring about what others think is a well-practiced perspective for Canal, who was born without her right forearm due to amniotic band syndrome. Navigating her rise in an industry that “loves to turn you into one thing”, she expresses her mixed feelings towards visible representation and being seen as a spokesperson. “Honestly, if I think about it too much, it’ll give me a headache because it is so conflicting,” she begins. “I feel a responsibility to manage it a certain way, and as I’m becoming more public, I want to get it right. I want to represent without overly identifying with my disability, as it’s just one part of me.”
She recounts an experience almost 10 years ago while shooting with a brand that included an on-screen interview. While passionately describing her creative processes, Canal was abruptly cut-off by a producer who said they’d need to reshoot the entire interview because her right arm wasn’t in shot. “I really wanted to feel like I was there because of my music and my project,” she explains.
I think no matter what, you’re always going to fear that you’re only somewhere because you represent something that fills the space, and it’s just part of what we all reckon with. But I would rather use my disability as a tool to connect with people and as an additional storytelling method for my artistry than be ashamed of it.
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Following her performance with Coldplay on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage last summer, multiple tactless headlines referred to Canal as “a one-handed pianist”. Reducing disabled artists’ well-earned success into a ‘success story’ can have a detrimental impact not only on the artist, but on disabled communities more widely. In November, the Musician’s Union annual census revealed that disabled musicians face significant challenges when it comes to discrimination, financial security and fair pay, as well as poor physical and mental well-being.
“It’s still a question for me – am I here because of my disability, because that’s what’s trendy right now? Or am I here because I am good at music and I’m working really hard?” she explains. “I think no matter what, you’re always going to fear that you’re only somewhere because you represent something that fills the space, and it’s just part of what we all reckon with. But I would rather use my disability as a tool to connect with people and as an additional storytelling method for my artistry than be ashamed of it.”
Showcasing her true, multifaceted self in her BRICKS cover shoot, Canal collaborated with her stylist Francesca Russo to distill these identities into four distinctive styles – pop star, hyper-feminine, hyper-masculine, and the Black Swan. “I feel like in the last year I’ve cycled through all four of those characters, and many more nuanced versions of those styles,” she says.
Working from archetypal characters, Canal considered her performance of self versus who she is when no one’s watching: “I was surprised at just how comfortable I felt in the masculine look, more so than the others,” she shares. “It’s my ‘gayest’ energy, and a part of myself that I haven’t really divulged – the last couple of years, in terms of styling, I’ve leaned more feminine. I didn’t even realize I needed it, but as soon as I was wearing that oversized jacket and I had this 90s Johnny Depp or Matt LeBlanc look going on I was like – this is hot.”
She sees the contrast between these characters as reflective of the two sides of the record, although it’s clear to her which characters come the easiest, feeling most comfortable when she’s at her most exposed. “The real challenge for me is remaining true to a song when I’m performing it hundreds of times,” she says. “Weirdly, It’s usually the saddest songs that I am happiest to repeat performing – I could sing ‘Black Swan’ and ‘swan song’ every night for the rest of my life and be totally happy.”
‘Black Swan’, the magnum opus of her 2023 EP Well, Well and the penultimate track on Slowly, It Dawns, has been particularly emotional for her to perform. “It’s funny how you can sing a song 100 times and then on the 100th time it’ll make you cry, because you suddenly connect with the lyric in a way that you haven’t in a while,” she explains.
The song is her hauntingly heartbreaking reclamation of all that she is, giving up on the endless chase for perfection, and was dubbed “one of the best songs ever written” by Martin. In the second verse, Canal sings: “You said, I like to romanticize 2008 / call it what it is, the youth that I missed felt exactly the same / That’s just the guy that I was and I’ll be / dissatisfied with the nature of me / You breathe the smoke of my constant emotional state.”
“That was when I was at my lowest on tour,” she reveals. “Touring is really difficult for me emotionally and mentally – being on display, but also the grueling travel and then having to keep up with other parts of promotion. I feel like I lose my personality, it goes away and I become the shell of a human, so when I was singing that lyric, I was really feeling it.”
Canal is not afraid to admit the strain that touring for the better part of the last decade has had on her. Among the relentless regime, she finds comfort in rewatching TV shows (her favourites: New Girl, Big Mouth and Bojack Horseman), sitting in saunas, and, when she’s at “an absolute point of desperation”, gummy bears. To refuel, she relies on ginger shots, walks in nature and ice plunges, when she has access to them. She recalls a particularly fond memory from her most recent US tour supporting Sammy Rae & The Friends: “One time after a show, we went midnight skinny dipping in Lake Michigan. That was a real high.”
I’m really grateful for all the difficulties I’ve faced because I’m learning so much about what it means to feel satisfied and accomplished and purposeful.
Looking ahead, Canal is starting the year back on the road, celebrating the album’s release with two Rough Trade performances in London and Bristol, before embarking on a seven-stop US tour, including a stop at Hollywood’s infamous Troubadour. Reflecting on it all, she shares: “The lesson I’m learning in life is that everything will go wrong, but the question is: how do you respond to it? I think success isn’t just things going right in your life, it’s learning how to handle when things go wrong. That’s what success is to me, and that’s something that I’m still working on and finding the strength to live up to.”
To add to her ever-expanding to-do list, the musician has set herself a new goal: to improve the accessibility of music venues on her tour. “There are many venues that some of my fans couldn’t access because they weren’t wheelchair accessible which is so disappointing and something that I think needs to be worked on, particularly for medium-sized and smaller venues,” she explains.
She reaffirms that creative careers are never linear paths to “a Grammy, or 100 million streams, or a million followers” – behind the alluring heights of pop stardom are the stresses of merch shipments getting lost, overbudget tours, and the perpetual fear of flopping. After spending years shrouded in her own uncertainty, Canal has shed her adolescent anxieties to uncover what matters most to her: protecting her peace. She asserts, “I’m really grateful for all the difficulties I’ve faced because I’m learning so much about what it means to feel satisfied and accomplished and purposeful.”
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