Reworking a song as iconic and provocative as “Closer” comes with a lot of expectations. What did you hear in the original that made you want to completely change the emotional perspective of the song?
I never wanted to change “Closer” just for the sake of making it sound different. That would be pointless. The original is such a beautifully uncomfortable piece of art, and I think its brilliance lies in how many different kinds of human desperation can exist inside it. Beneath the sexuality, aggression and provocation, I hear an almost unbearable hunger. A need to fill something that feels permanently empty.
I became fascinated with the idea of redirecting that hunger. What if the obsession wasn’t with another body, but with being accepted? Being wanted, admired, approved of? What if the thing we’re trying to get closer to is an impossible version of ourselves?
I wanted to take the song somewhere psychologically claustrophobic. To turn desire into submission, not to another person, but to an entire system of expectations. The original doesn’t need fixing or improving. I simply wanted to open another door inside it and see what kind of monster was waiting there.
Your version turns “Closer” into a song about validation, perfectionism and losing yourself while trying to be enough for everyone else. Was there a particular experience or moment that made those themes feel especially personal to you?
I don’t think there was one moment. It was more like recognizing a pattern that had been quietly growing around me, and perhaps inside me, for years.
Being an artist today feels like a strange psychological experiment. You create something deeply personal, sometimes from a place of actual pain, and then release it into a world that immediately begins measuring it. Numbers, reactions, engagement, approval. Suddenly something that came from your nervous system becomes data on somebody else’s screen.
And the most disturbing part is how easily you begin participating in your own evaluation. You start questioning your instincts. You wonder whether being yourself is enough, or whether you need to become a more acceptable, more attractive, more digestible version.
I’ve experienced that pressure, and I’ve watched it consume people around me. I think many of us have. The tragedy is that nobody necessarily has to force us into that cage anymore. We learn to build it ourselves.
“FEELINGS”, “APOLOGY” and now “Closer” form a trilogy exploring some pretty uncomfortable parts of being human. When you started this journey, did you already know where it was going to lead?
I knew what I wanted to investigate, but I didn’t know what I would find.
It starts with my lifelong interest in the contradictions of being human. Our ability to feel extraordinary tenderness and inflict extraordinary cruelty. Our desperate need to belong and our equally desperate need to remain individuals. The way we protect ourselves from pain by slowly disconnecting from everything that makes us alive.
I didn’t sit down with a perfectly calculated trilogy. It was more like a process. I followed the questions that wouldn’t leave me alone. One song exposed something that demanded another conversation. I think in this case work understood where I was going before I did.
I knew what I wanted to confront, but I had no idea how far it would take me. FEELINGS, APOLOGY and CLOSER became three different examinations of the human condition: our growing emotional numbness, the destructive nature of ego, and the obsession with approval that slowly erases our identities. Different wounds, but all connected. And the deeper I went, the more I realized that these weren’t separate stories at all.
Then came WHITE WALLS, which took everything somewhere much more intimate and unsettling. Because what happens to us after all that disconnection, pressure and pretending? What happens behind closed doors, when the performance ends and nobody is watching? WHITE WALLS lives in that space. To me, it’s the emotional consequence of everything that came before it.
And that’s when I realized I had far too much to say to contain it within a few songs. This whole journey has grown into something much bigger, something that exists beyond music alone. I’ve been creating a rather unconventional world around these ideas, bringing together sound, words, imagery and some very personal reflections that I haven’t shared publicly before.
This being said, I’m preparing something quite unusual for this November. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, because I want people to experience it as a whole rather than explain it away in advance. But what began as a trilogy has become a much deeper examination of who we are, what we’re becoming, and what we quietly sacrifice along the way.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable part is recognizing how much of ourselves we can find in it.
The idea of being reduced to a number, score or algorithm is central to “Closer”. What do you think constant digital comparison is doing to the way people understand their own identity?
I think we’re becoming increasingly fluent in describing our value and increasingly disconnected from actually feeling it.
We know how many people watched us, liked us, followed us, ignored us. We know how to quantify attention. But attention and connection are not the same thing, and I worry that we’re forgetting the difference. There is something deeply unnatural about constantly observing yourself from the outside. Imagining how you appear, how you compare, whether you’re performing your existence successfully enough. It creates a kind of permanent psychological surveillance. And I don’t think this is limited to social media. It’s becoming embedded in the way we work, create, love, age, and perceive our bodies. We’re encouraged to optimize everything, as though being human is a technical problem, the error that needs correcting.
The video takes that idea and puts you inside a completely sterile world where every movement is monitored and judged. What was it like physically stepping into that environment and performing that story?
The environment was intentionally stripped of warmth. No visual comfort, no distractions, nowhere for the character to hide. Just a human body placed inside a space that seems designed to examine rather than understand it.
I wanted to focus on the relationship between control and collapse. At first, I attempted to cooperate with the system, to behave correctly, to become whatever is expected. But the more I surrender, the less of myself remains.
Performing that transformation was fascinating because so much of it lives in very small physical details. A movement that becomes unnatural. A facial expression that stops belonging to me. The tension of trying to remain composed while something underneath is disintegrating.
I wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable watching it, almost as though they were participating in the evaluation themselves.
And then comes the moment of recognition. The possibility that the system only has as much power as we continue giving it. Which feeds right back into the people watching the video and sharing opinions about it. I knew this particular song would become a perfect social experiment involving the audience in the aspects of the story they might not even realize.
You handle almost every part of your music yourself, from writing and recording to mixing, production and even programming your live lighting. Is that level of control empowering, exhausting, or a bit of both?
Both. Absolutely both. Sometimes within the same five minutes.
I have a very specific relationship with the worlds I create. Music isn’t just sound to me. It’s architecture. It’s movement, texture, light, silence, physical space. I hear and see things together, and I have a difficult time separating them.
Having control over so many elements allows me to protect the integrity of that vision. I don’t have to translate every instinct through ten different people before it becomes real.
But there’s a price. I can spend an absurd amount of time obsessing over something most people might never consciously notice. A transition in the lighting, a sound buried somewhere in the arrangement, the exact moment when darkness should swallow the stage. I’m also learning that control and creative independence aren’t necessarily the same thing. Sometimes the most powerful decision is to invite another mind into the process. That’s why I now have a team of amazing humans who understand my vision and help me bring it to life. Working with people I trust, including Johnny K with whom we produce the new material together, reminds me that collaboration doesn’t have to dilute your identity. It can challenge you to reveal more of it.
So, I love building my own universe. I’m just trying to remember that I don’t have to personally manufacture every atom inside it.
Your music exists somewhere between industrial, darkwave, electronic and alternative rock, but your voice gives it a very human and emotional centre. What are you trying to communicate through your voice that production alone can’t express?
The imperfection of emotion.
I love machines. I love distortion, repetition, synthetic textures, sounds that feel almost inhuman. But I’m not interested in creating music that is emotionally sterilized. A human voice carries the story, it’s the evidence. Breath, hesitation, exhaustion, anger, vulnerability. There are things that happen between notes that no perfectly programmed instrument can reproduce in quite the same way.
You’ve worked with people connected to some of the most influential names in industrial music, including Raymond Watts, Rhys Fulber and Tim Skold. Has collaborating with artists from that world changed your understanding of where I Ya Toyah fits within it?
I have enormous respect for the artists who helped shape this musical universe. Industrial music has always appealed to me because it gives permission to explore things that are uncomfortable, abrasive, politically charged, psychologically complicated. It doesn’t demand that beauty arrive in a conventional form. It doesn’t bury the truth, instead it exposes it.
Being able to connect and work with people from that world is meaningful, especially because I came into it with my own perspective, my own history, and a rather stubborn need to do things differently.
But I don’t think my goal has ever been to find a comfortable place inside an established genre.
I’m much more interested in what happens at its edges. Where industrial meets something deeply melodic, where electronic music collides with the physical aggression of metal, where vulnerability interrupts the machinery. I respect the history, but I don’t want to become a museum of it. If anything, those experiences have reinforced the importance of having my own artistic language. I don’t need to sound like the people who inspired me to honor what they created. I need to contribute something that couldn’t have existed without my own particular collection of scars, influences and obsessions.
“I Ya Toyah” means “It’s just me” and “I am who I am” in Polish. In a culture that constantly tells us who we should be, does that idea of simply being yourself become more difficult or more important?
Both, and perhaps that’s the paradox at the center of my entire existence as an artist. I Ya Toyah comes from the Polish expression “a ja to ja.” It’s such a simple declaration, almost childlike in its honesty. I am me. Nothing to prove, nothing to translate, nothing to apologize for.
But the older I get, the more I realize how radical that simplicity actually is.
We spend so much of our lives being shaped. By family, culture, trauma, expectations, love, rejection, success, failure. Some of those influences help us grow. Others quietly teach us to abandon parts of ourselves in exchange for belonging. And I think being yourself isn’t necessarily about discovering one fixed identity and defending it forever. We’re supposed to evolve. We’re supposed to contradict our previous selves, change our minds, shed old skins.
To me, authenticity means being able to recognize your own voice through all those transformations.
As a Polish-born woman building an artistic life in another country, I’ve had to negotiate different worlds and different expectations. But I never wanted to erase where I came from to become more acceptable somewhere else. The name is a reminder, and sometimes a challenge. Am I still being myself? Or am I becoming what the world finds easier to understand?
If “Closer” asks what remains when we stop defining ourselves through other people’s approval, what do you hope listeners take away when the song ends?
I hope they feel a little less willing to betray themselves.
Not in some grand, cinematic moment of liberation. I don’t think freedom usually works that way. Sometimes it begins with something very small. Refusing to apologize for an emotion. Allowing yourself to be misunderstood. Making something beautiful without wondering whether anyone will reward you for it.
I think we’ve become so accustomed to asking the world for permission to exist that we’ve forgotten we were never supposed to need it.
And I don’t want people to leave this song thinking they need to become stronger, better, more fearless versions of themselves. That would just be another demand. Another impossible standard. Maybe the most radical thing we can do is stop treating our humanity as something that needs to be corrected.
I want the listener to remember that they were a person before they became a profile, a statistic, a body to be judged, or a collection of somebody else’s expectations.
And that person is still in there. Somewhere beneath all the noise.
