Declan McKenna tells us about his new album and working with Sigrid at Glastonbury 2022

Declan McKenna spoke to NME backstage at Glastonbury 2022 about a “crazy” unreleased song he wrote with Sigrid a couple of months ago. Watch our video interview above.

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Earlier this year, the pair hit the studio with producer and vocalist Sam Tsang – who works under the moniker Congee – to work on material for McKenna’s forthcoming third album. The result was “wild”, as McKenna explained: “I wrote a tune with Sigrid recently, which I don’t think is going to be on the album, but afterwards we were left thinking, ‘What the hell did we just do?’”

He continued: “We were all in [a studio] together, and we’d never met each other before. We wrote a song from the perspective of a clown who is losing [their mind] at a group of children, and becomes super pissed by the end of the song. It gets really aggressive!”

The former NME cover star told us that he believes the currently-untitled track “needs to be released into the world at some point.” Could an official Declan McKenna and Sigrid collaboration be on the horizon, then? “We’ll have to write more tunes together, and see if we can come up with something a little more obvious and accessible,” he responded. “But you’ve got to go for strong content sometimes…”

Over the weekend, McKenna made his third appearance at Glastonbury since he won the the festival’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2015. Bedecked in a Scouts uniform and Willy Wonka-esque sunglasses, he took to The Other Stage to perform tracks from his 2017 debut, ‘What Do You Think About The Car?’ and its follow-up, ‘Zeros’, released three years later.

The set also featured ‘My House’, a standalone single that dropped last year. Prior to his performance, McKenna talked to us about the new music that he’s been producing, and confirmed that we can expect to hear it within the next 12 months. “I really want it to be [released] this year, but it could be next year,” he said. “I’m a good way into [the album], however, and I’ve written a lot of songs that I’m very happy with.”

Will the new music be worth the wait? “Easily,” he said. “It’s going to be the best album ever made… by anyone from Hertfordshire.”

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