When Clara Kimera made her first EP, she was an eleven-year-old kid in her bedroom in France, tinkering with Cubase and writing lyrics about her best friend, her dog, and why people in the world were so sad. Yet even then, her lyrics were tinged darker. They captured the confusion she felt at being different from the kids around her, hinting at the OCD she suffered from, but couldn’t yet name. Playing the piano, guitar, and drums, she built dreamscapes of sound, and whole realms inside The Sims too, running a blog on these reimagined worlds which pulled in thousands of followers.

That same combination – saccharine fantasies shot through with dark undertones – still defines Kimera’s sound today: a pull towards the surreal, the ghostly and the uncanny. It’s there in the labyrinthine reach of her visual references – the childhood nostalgia and horror distortions of Creepypasta, the comforting devotion of Plushies or, more recently, the Eastern European scores of gothic visual novels like The House of Fata Morgana. It makes sense, too, that she takes her name from the mythical chimera: lion, goat, and snake binding to form one fantastical creature, because hybridisation of form is exactly what she does. From the folk harmonies of her first high school band, to the shoegaze-y garage rock of her next one, Cannery Terror, to the more staticky electronic textures of the duo Agar Agar, every sound she ‘fucks with’ is pulled through the prism of her mind, morphing into the cyber-fuelled punk alt-pop she now dreams up under Clara Kimera, and her latest EP, the plushies.

Shana Chandra: I’m really interested in your upbringing, where in France did you grow up?
Clara Kimera: I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, then I went to high school in the South of France. I graduated there, in this little surfing spot called Biarritz. It was just such a different atmosphere from the suburbs of Paris. Growing up near the seaside feels quiet and was inspirational, for sure.

SK: Your upbringing is super musical too. You were playing the drums and the flute and in the choir, and then all of a sudden at age eleven you picked up a guitar and started producing your own music – tell me about this shift?
CK: I was just really lucky to have parents that were into music as well. I was making so many songs with my guitar and piano, my dad – who also plays and loves computers – thought we should find someone who could teach me how to produce. So, this guy taught me how to make a whole album. I did a little EP when I was eleven – I think it had nine songs. I was so young that all the lyrics were about my best friend, and my dog, and why people are sad in the world. I had really severe OCD at the time, so some lyrics were quite dark as well. It’s really about the confusion I felt being so different from other children. When I was surrounded by them, I felt that something was off, but I was too young to really conceptualise it.

SC: It’s amazing that you started at such a young age. You’ve probably spent such a long time tinkering.
CK: I feel like I really had that in me. I really had to compose songs; it was what I was drawn to.

“If it were just me and I didn’t care about the industry and what works and what doesn’t, I would go medieval crazy.”

SC: It’s almost like creating worlds, because I know you love The Sims as well – maybe being able to control things helps with OCD.
CK: For me, OCD is about feeling your anxiety in any way possible. I feel like it’s really a coping mechanism for all of your fears that you have no control over. It’s the fear of the fear, and this huge vicious circle of parasitic thoughts that [burrow] so deep that at some point you can barely function. But I also feel like it’s a really big fuel. It’s very paradoxical. It’s this thing that helps you survive at the same time as it destroys you. It really gave me a lot of creativity. It also gave me a lot of anxiety. When I had my band, I had to cancel shows sometimes because the panic attacks were too strong. It was really hard, because part of me was really ashamed and felt so guilty that people would see me as a spoilt brat or a diva. And it wasn’t that at all. So, I really grew from that.

SC: I’ve heard your music described as ‘cyberfolk’ or ‘glistening electropop’ but I’m interested in how you’d describe it.
CK: That’s the thing: I don’t really know how to describe it. I would say alternative pop for sure, but I have so many differences in what I do, and I feel like my project is still pretty young in terms of searching for my identity with all my inspirations and making them my own. That’s also why it’s hard for me to describe the music because there are so many layers to it. I really do feel that I haven’t found my coherence yet. I want to tell some kind of big story and make it my own, but I’m searching for it.

SC: I love that you draw on so many inspirations – anime, tarot cards, Pullip dolls, Sims, even writing lyrics based on memes. Your inspirations are always changing, so I’m interested in what’s driving your creative process at the moment.
CK: I’m in Brussels right now because I did a DJ set for a radio station. As I was preparing, looking for tracks, I realised I haven’t really been listening to any music. When it’s your creative path, and you make music as well, I feel like you need some silence at some point to start a new chapter. I realised that the only music I do listen to these days, that really touches me to my core, is the soundtrack to visual novels that I play.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to do some medieval shit for real.

SC: What are those soundtracks like?
CK: I’ve been playing this visual novel called The House of Fata Morgana and the soundtrack is so beautiful and inspiring. It’s Japanese, but it takes from Eastern European sounds – it’s very hybrid – there are lots of piano, choirs, and hidden languages. It’s really strange and kind of haunted. [When you play these visual novels] you make choices that change the path of the narration. It gathers imagery, it gathers characters that are very well written, and also there’s this sound that really puts you within the narration in a different way than reading a book or watching a movie.

SC: In these visual novels, when you choose a route in the story, do you ever go back and choose a different route to see how the story changes or are you pretty secure with your decision-making?
CK: It really depends on the visual novel, but I always want to know what would’ve happened in another scenario. I just finished Kara no Shōjo, which was quite long, and I spent hours and hours going back and forth with all of the choices I could get in the story.

SC: You don’t really get that chance in real life.
CK: Exactly.

“You know they thought unicorns were a real animal [in the Middle Ages]? They were absolutely certain of it, even if they hadn’t seen a unicorn ever.”

SC: Cannery Terror was your first band, which was more garage rock…
CK: Actually, it was my second because I had a folk harmony band when I was in high school.

SC: So you’ve gone from folk to garage and then to electronic. Tell me about that transition. Do you see it as stages or phases?
CK: No, honestly, I don’t see those projects as phases at all; they’re all part of what I wanted to do in music. I always want to explore different scenarios. It’s like the visual novels. I started with folk because classic guitar is really my jam, it’s always been the first thing that was obvious to me in terms of creating music. Then I thought we should make it electric, a little bit more punk.  Agar Agar was different because it wasn’t really my instrumental set-up. I had no idea what a synthesiser was and how it worked before Agar Agar. So it was such a good experience to explore that as well. [With the band] Amande [Bultheel] had a lot of influence in terms of sound-making. Not in terms of composition, but more the choice of the instrumentals. That’s why it feels really refreshing for me to start this solo project because I wanted to go back to something more organic, to something more punky, more guitar, more folk. All of those projects are definitely not phases. All of those, I still fuck with.

SC: I’m so interested in the name of your project, because it comes from a lethal insect in Hunter X Hunter, but also the mythical creature. I was wondering why you chose that name symbolically?
CK: Kimera is a word that evokes, at least for me, the creature that’s part of some kind of illusion, or part of a dream that one can make up any time in their heads or a fantastic scenario. Every time I create lyrics, it’s almost like some kind of dream, some kind of fantasy, some kind of a little Lynchian horror tale. So it’s just really symbolic of all of the subjects that inspire me the most.

SC: With the plushies, your new EP, there are references to Blonde Redhead, the film Martyrs, Reddit threads, Doki Doki Literature Club. I love that there’s darker material, despite it being called something so light and happy. Can you talk to me a bit about that?
CK: I love when there’s a dichotomy between darker aspects and very soft things – that can be pursued as little fairy tales for children. I’m just very childish, but then horrorcore is probably my biggest inspiration of all time. I always write little visuals, little dreams, little images in my head that I probably would’ve experienced in my childhood.

SC: I want to talk a little bit about Dial 8, your EP before the plushies. It touches on medieval literature. I was interested in how you wove in this reference when you were writing.
CK: I was reading a lot of stories about the Middle Ages, the imagery of it and all the history about the animals back then.

SC: Tell me about that.
CK: You know they thought unicorns were a real animal back then? They were absolutely certain of it, even if they hadn’t seen a unicorn ever. They were positive it existed. So they had a lot more imagination because they believed in so many different things like this; they believed in fantastic animals. I was really into that because I get really obsessive with the references I have. I get really passionate about [things], I spend months on that subject and then it kind of goes away because I have another subject in mind. But the Medieval [period] has always been a huge part of what I like.

SC: What’s interesting is how they believed in so many things they didn’t know, and nowadays, we know so much because of the internet, but you almost use that as a springboard to create your own magical creatures. It’s like you’re creating medieval mythical figures for us now.
CK: That’s nice. Honestly, at some point, I’m pretty sure I’m going to do some medieval shit for real. But I feel like I need to find my public, my crowd first. I mean, if it were just me and I didn’t care about the industry and what works and what doesn’t, I would go medieval crazy.

Follow Clara on Instagram.