Earlier this week, Elle Varner released the video for her vengeful ballad, “F–k It All.” The song grabs your attention immediately with an explosive title and raw, wounded vocals. The video doubled down on the track’s intensity by cutting out right before the singer is about to hit a cheating boyfriend with a shovel. Don’t mess with Varner.
Fans of Varner’s first album, 2012’s Perfectly Imperfect, might be surprised by this side of the singer. After all, that album featured the song “Not Tonight,” where she sang wistfully, “Maybe in another life I could be the girl who walks up to a guy.” Perfectly Imperfect came filled with shiny and modern soul, and it earned the singer a Grammy nomination for her single “Refill.”
Varner sees “F–k It All” as part of her natural progression — both as a person growing up and as an artist digging deeper into her craft. “When I wrote most of Perfectly Imperfect, I was really young,” she points out. “I hadn’t really been in too many relationships or experienced breakups.”
“[‘F–k It All’] doesn’t mean I’m sad or I’m dark,” she adds. “It just means I’m capable of this as well.”
Varner’s second album, Four Letter Word, due this fall, features the singer opening herself up to a wider range of influences and collaborations. This included working with a large group of producers and writers — Boy 1da, Hit Boy and Da Internz — in addition to Pop & Oak, who oversaw much of Perfectly Imperfect.
When discussing the theme of her upcoming release, she also drops a tantalizing hint, suggesting that Eminem inspired something on Four Letter Word: “There is a bit of a thread. It’s telling a complete story. I haven’t fully decided how deep i wanna go with it as i’m finishing up the little sequences and interludes. i’ll just leave it at this: Eminem is one of my favorite artists of all time.”
The singer explored new recording this time around, recording her vocals on a microphone traditionally reserved for a kick drum. “A lot of the vocals on the album were kind of like a performance in front of six people in the control room,” she remembers. “‘F–k It All,’ for example, I have this one video of me singing the song with a mic in my hand in the control room while I’m reading it off my laptop, ’cause I just wrote it a few minutes ago.” This contributes to the immediate, vulnerable feel of the track.
This kind of quick transfer by Varner — writing a song and singing it basically on the spot — was characteristic of the recording process for Four Letter Word, which took place in a feverish burst of energy. “Most of the album we did in a matter of about five days,” she says, fueled by “all kinds of fattening food.” But this doesn’t mean that the result is haphazard or rushed. Varner’s paying close attention to the details, and she wants the album to tell “a full, complete story.”
“It’s definitely gonna be different from the first album, but I feel incredible about it,” she tells Billboard. “What’s more freeing than saying ‘F–k it all?'”