Nessa Barrett

**To access artist presale on Wednesday 26 August at 10:00am, click ‘Got a code?’**

Nessa Barrett has always written about love like it’s life or death. But on her new EP, Jesus Loves a Primadonna, she didn’t just write songs — she built a world. It’s what she calls a “villain origin story” of a woman who has loved until she can’t love anymore, set inside a dark, witchy “gothic world” that mirrors the cyclical patterns of love in her own life.

“It starts off extreme, hot and heavy and passionate, and then like all relationships — well, I guess some people in the world are lucky,” she says with a laugh. “All of mine at least… things start high up, and it comes crashing down.” The seeds for this era were planted during Barrett's sold-out Aftercare tour last year. Before taking the stage each night, she found herself retreating into a "meditation state" fueled by the brooding, noir sounds of Nineties icons Portishead and Massive Attack. The ritual made her realize: “Why don’t I try making music that I like listening to?”

In April 2025, Barrett entered the studio with her long-time creative partner, CJ Baran (Marina, Melanie Martinez), with no fixed plan, only a deck of visuals and a shared intuition. What emerged were tracks like “Moulin Rouge” and “Black-Haired Madonna,” songs that went into a French noir energy, trip-hop breakbeats, and orchestral thoroughlines. It wasn’t until that summer that Jesus Loves a Primadonna started to take shape.

“I’ve been trying not to force anything. All of these songs have just come out of nowhere,” she says. “A lot of them are heavily inspired by what I’ve gone through in life, and probably what I was going through at the time, even if I wasn’t consciously aware that I was feeling or struggling with it until after the fact.”

At the heart of the EP are “Stay With Me” and “Buffalo 66.” “Stay With Me” serves as the emotional centerpiece of the EP, steeped in what Barrett calls a “Twilighty” energy. The song came to her almost instantly. “I wrote this prayer in my journal, asking the universe to help me out with the song and to allow me to be a creative vessel. Two minutes went by, I was smoking a cigarette on my balcony, and then I wrote the verses,” she says. “It just fell out of me. And it was probably the most real and vulnerable lyrics I’ve written in a long time.” Barrett wrote the track from her perspective as “a borderline in love,” reflecting her long openness about living with BPD. “This song is about abandonment issues and past trauma, and I truly wanted to write a track on this project for all of my fans who also struggle with borderline personality disorder to feel seen and safe.”

She released a music video for the song, inspired by the “garden in my mind” that she visits during her hypnotherapy sessions. In it, she’s wearing a vintage Victorian gown and runs around an abandoned house “searching for people that aren’t there because I’m alone,” she says.

For “Buffalo 66,” Barrett turned to the 1998 cult film of the same name. The song unpacks the psychology of staying in something toxic because it feels familiar. “It reflects on the emotional heartache of being naive in a toxic relationship, staying when you shouldn’t stay, loving what you shouldn’t love,” she says. Watching the film helped her articulate feelings she hadn’t been able to name before. “I have been a victim of a lot of things in life, and there’s something so sad about getting out of that and looking back,” she says. “I really wasn't helping myself because I found this terrible comfort in all of it.”

That tension bleeds into the larger world of the EP. Across the project, Barrett embodies different witch archetypes, ideas that first came together in the visual deck she brought to producer CJ Baran at the start of the process. While she initially returned to the studio to begin searching for her next full-length album, she instead unlocked a distinct, eight-song universe that demanded its own space. What emerged fr