Q&A: Spill Tab’s ANGIE is a Fearless Debut That Redefines Genre on Her Own Terms
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Jade Sadler
SPILL TAB IS UNAFRAID TO BREAK ALL THE RULES — With her debut album ANGIE, songwriter, producer, and vocalist Spill Tab (Claire Chicha) has fully arrived—bold, inventive, and completely unafraid to color outside the lines. Across 12 electrifying and emotionally textured tracks, ANGIE is an album that thrives in duality. It’s playful and pained, otherworldly and grounded, maximal and minimal. At the heart of it all is Spill Tab’s ability to interlace intimacy into intricate production, creating a listening experience that feels both expansive and deeply raw.
Built with an ear toward spontaneity and emotional clarity, ANGIE feels like a sonic scrapbook—personal yet unbound by rules. The album’s focus track, “Athlete,” floats with dreamlike ease. Its delicate layers of ambient sound and soft-spoken vocal delivery highlight Spill Tab’s signature balance of vulnerability and meticulous craftsmanship. It’s a track that quietly demands attention, unfolding like a secret in the listener’s ear.
“I’ve never felt like a project is more mine,” Spill Tab says of ANGIE, which was brought to fruition with her tight-knit LA-based creative circle including producers David Marinelli, Solomonophic, Wyatt and Austin, and John DeBold. The record pulses with the trust and chemistry of collaboration, but the vision is unmistakably hers—eclectic and refreshingly unfiltered.
Raised between cultures and surrounded by music from the start—her father a French Algerian composer, her mother a Korean pianist—Chicha grew up absorbing a wide spectrum of musical styles at her parents’ post-production studio. That eclectic foundation pulses through ANGIE, where no two tracks sound alike, and a musical identity that transcends categorization.
Now taking her sonic world on the road, Spill Tab embarks on a headline tour that kicks off on May 23 in Toulouse, France at Le Weekend Des Curiosités Festival, followed by stops in London and Paris before hitting the US for a June 11 show in New York. Additional tour dates include Toronto, Chicago, and a homecoming show in Los Angeles on June 17.
Photography Credit: Jade Sadler
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what kind of atmosphere or sonic world do you aim to create for your listeners?
SPILL TAB: I feel like for the most part, my creative process is really based on how I'm feeling that day, and wanting to create music that feels exciting to me and that feels different to me. I want my music to feel explorative and exciting.
LUNA: Are there particular moods or themes you find yourself gravitating towards when writing and performing? How do you channel these into your music?
SPILL TAB: I just gravitate towards what things I'm trying to process that day. Music is such a sacred space, and I find that it's really difficult sometimes to find time in my day to just process and be mindful and meditate on what's going on in my life. I feel like music's always been that space to just be able to do that and find time to think about how I feel about certain things. It’s like free therapy, essentially.
LUNA: You just released your debut album ANGIE and huge congratulations! I love how it continues to push sonic boundaries and feel like such a natural evolution to your vision. What is the inspiration behind the album and what themes and emotions do you explore?
SPILL TAB: A lot of the songs were made during a period where I was wanting to explore and discover what my sound would be. I'm drawn to so many different kinds of music and so many different genres of music. I felt that the most exciting thing that I could possibly do for myself was to explore all of that, and not necessarily put myself in a box or tell myself that I have to stick to one sound or one thing, and that might always change. I feel like I'm always wanting to. I just feel like I have it. I owe it to myself to just do what I want to do at that moment. It's an ode to all these different genres of music that I love, my way of putting them all together, and my version of weaving all these different influences together for myself.
LUNA: You collaborated with a tight-knit LA community on this record. How did working with David Marinelli, Solomonophic, Wyatt and Austin, and John DeBold influence the final sound of ANGIE?
SPILL TAB: So much of it really takes a village, at least in my experience, for making a project that's a full length situation. All those people bring so much to the table, and they all produce really uniquely and really differently. Everyone has their touch to the production and it adds their perspective on sound design and music making and all of that I wanted.
I wanted all those things to be really clear and audible, because I respect and love all of these producers and I think the world of them, so it's really nice to hear them also put their stamp on the music and create very unique dynamics depending on who's making the song and who's in the room. It's really cool to create a third entity between the two of you. It's like the dynamic between two people or three people in a room. It's different than what it would be if there was one less person or a different person or a third person. It's always going to be a different energy. I really wanted to capture those different dynamics and bring them forward and see what different people in a room can make together. That was the fun side to making a lot of these songs and exploring what we all bring together when we're just wanting to try something new.
LUNA: Do you have a favorite track on ANGIE—either one that felt the most fulfilling to create or that you feel represents you most right now?
SPILL TAB: It's changed so much over the course of making the album. I feel like I initially was really, really drawn to “PINK LEMONADE” and “Angie.” Those were the two initial pillars of the album and those two songs were the reason why I wanted to make an entire project. Those two were my initial favorites.
I feel that after a lot of time, “wet veneer” has become one of my favorites. “Adore Me now has become one of my favorites. “By Design” is creeping up into first place and is one of my favorites. That's also the reason why I picked all these songs is because they all, at one point, were my favorite song that I've ever made. To me, that’s the most motivational and I find the most drive when I'm making something that I'm so excited about that I just can't imagine not putting it out. All of these songs had that place in my mind at some point. It's really nice to have this album be an amalgamation of really special songs to me.
LUNA: What’s something you learned about yourself while making this record that you didn’t expect going into it?
SPILL TAB: I think something that has come up throughout this process is realizing that I do have a tendency to be a bit of an over perfectionist when it comes to vocal takes. I come from a choir background where all we did was be nitpicky about the vocals, the tone, the textures and the pitch. I think I brought a lot of that past into my music making, and I realized that it wasn't always necessarily in service of the song to be so nitpicky and to be a perfectionist. I feel like a lot of what I'm proud of in terms of vocal production has been the ability to let go of it a little bit and be less militant about pitch and timing and being on grid. I realized that a lot of the soul and a lot of the life that comes from tracking live instruments, including vocals, is the human error that's built into that. That was a really beautiful thing to learn.
LUNA: Did finishing your debut album feel like closure on a chapter, or more like the start of a new one creatively?
SPILL TAB: That's a really good question. I feel like a little bit of both. I wanted to prove so much to myself on this debut album. I think with that pressure came from so many different aspects I wanted to cover where I wanted this album to represent all of my musical influences and all of the people that I love working with. I think it was very maximalist in many ways, which I don't regret. I love that about the album.
My music making has this maximalism and wanting it to represent everything, and wanting to feel all of these different emotions on the album and that's awesome and really special. But in some ways, I feel like that chapter for me has maybe passed. I think for me, moving forward, I'd love to make something that's perhaps more intimate and tightly wound around one or two things. I feel like after mixing and mastering this and listening to it so many times over and over, it's exactly what I wanted to make, but it's also exactly what I don't want to make again, which is interesting.
LUNA: Between the jazz and classical music you absorbed early on and your current pop stylings, is there a genre or sound you haven’t explored yet but want to in future work?
SPILL TAB: I feel like a lot of the album has small elements that I've pulled from a lot of different things. I don't think there's anything that I haven't necessarily explored, but I think there's many, many things that I haven't explored more deeply. I feel like for me, it's more of a degree of exploration, versus a genre that I haven't touched on quite yet.
LUNA: You’re about to head out on your summer headline tour—starting in France and wrapping in LA. What are you most excited to share with audiences on this run of shows?
SPILL TAB: I haven't played a lot of these European shows. I've never been to Glasgow. I've never been to Manchester. I've never been to Bristol. There's a lot of cities that I've never even been to, so performing in them, and that being my first experience in them, is really interesting and very special. And then, of course, New York and LA, because I've lived in both those cities for a chunk of time, like LA is my hometown, so playing a home show is always so much fun. Then playing a show in New York, where I spent so many formative years in terms of being a human being, and then also in terms of ingesting music and creating my musical palette, is really rewarding. I’m excited for those two shows.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
SPILL TAB: It's a lot of playing shows. I feel like I've spent so much time thinking about this album coming out, and now that it's out, I never gave much thought to where my mind would be once it was out. I'm trying to be more present and more mindful of celebrating all the victories—the small and the big—and enjoying time with my friends and my partner and just trying to be a little bit less stressed than I have been in the past about releasing music, because that's been a weird journey for me. Mental health and the music industry is something that you have to spend a lot of effort and time paying attention to.
Photography Credit: Jade Sadler
