1. Thank you very much for your time! Before we introduce your new release to our readers – what kind of drink would you recommend to sip on while they listen to your new music?
If it’s morning, strong black coffee with a sprinkle of dark chocolate shavings. I like my days to begin with a little decadent intensity. If we’re talking after dark, a lavender gin martini. Floral, sweet yet slightly bitter, with an unexpected edge. I have a weakness for things that don’t quite behave the way you’d expect.
2. Please give us an update about – new single, new album, tour dates, new videos?!
It’s been a wonderfully chaotic year! I’ve been releasing music that feels increasingly personal, sometimes uncomfortable, and probably more confrontational than anything I’ve done before.
My latest single and music video, WHITE WALLS, arrived on World Mental Health Day. It’s one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever created, born out of a moment when the darkness felt almost impossible to navigate. Before that came FEELINGS, APOLOGY, and my interpretation of Nine Inch Nails‘ Closer. Each one explores a different fracture in the human condition.
But here’s the interesting part: these songs are pieces of something much bigger. I’ve been building a new conceptual musical and spoken word release, accompanied by a physical art and lyrics book, bringing together music, visual art, and some rather unsettling thoughts about what it means to remain human in a world increasingly determined to redesign us. ERROR PROSPECT: HUMAN comes out November 20th, with public pre-order starting November 6th, and Patreon and I Ya Toyah Cult subscribers having first access to this limited edition release starting October 29th – 30th.
And there is a UK tour with Little Miss Nasty we are doing in December.
3. We live in times of many conspiracy theories. Which harmless theory would you wish were true?
That octopuses are actually extraterrestrials.
Seriously though. Three hearts, blue blood, extraordinary intelligence, and the ability to change their appearance at will. If anything on Earth is hiding an interplanetary passport, it’s an octopus.
Although I find actual human behavior far more bizarre than most conspiracy theories. We have people seriously questioning whether aliens walk among us while willingly surrendering their own freedom to algorithms. Blaming each other for the downfall of values while practicing the very behaviors that destroy them. Now THAT is a fascinating species.
4. What fashion style or brand would best describe your music?
Imagine Namilia, Nicholas K, Jivomir Domoustchiev and Agent Provocateur combine forces to design uniforms for a rebellion taking place in an abandoned industrial facility.
I love fashion that challenges the body’s familiar silhouette. Exaggerated shapes, unusual construction, asymmetry, something beautiful that looks slightly dangerous. Clothes that refuse to behave.
My music operates on a similar principle. It’s dark and aggressive, but also deeply feminine and vulnerable. I love the collision of things we’re taught shouldn’t coexist. Strength and fragility. Machinery and flesh. Elegance and destruction.
5. Tell us more about your songs! Topics! Message!?
I write about the things we are encouraged not to talk about, or worse, not to feel.
Off my new material, FEELINGS questions what happens when emotional numbness becomes a survival mechanism. Apology confronts ego and the absurd human obsession with being right. My interpretation of Closer examines power, control, and the exhausting performance of trying to become someone worthy of approval.
And then there’s WHITE WALLS. That song is about the invisible distance between people. About screaming internally while looking perfectly fine on the outside. About how loneliness can exist in a room full of people.
There’s a thread connecting all of this: the quiet ways we lose pieces of ourselves while trying to survive, belong, succeed, or simply be accepted.
I think it’s all the result of my fascination with the contradictions of being human. We crave connection but build walls. We demand authenticity but reward imitation. We celebrate individuality until someone actually dares to be different.
I don’t think music needs to provide answers. Sometimes its greatest purpose is to ask a question that makes somebody uncomfortable enough to examine their own.
6. Besides music, do you have any special talents?
I’m exceptionally good at turning a simple idea into an unnecessarily elaborate artistic undertaking. Haha!
I love creating visual worlds, experimenting with fashion, photography, design, and making physical objects that carry stories. Give me something discarded, imperfect, or seemingly useless, and I’ll probably find a way to turn it into art. Or a fashion statement. I also absolutely adore cooking and baking. My kitchen is like a little testing facility, where I create dishes that never existed before, fusing inspirations from my travels and known classics with experimental, personal twists.
7. Name 5 things we all should know about you as an artist?!
1. I Ya Toyah means „It’s just me“ or „I am who I am.“ It’s not simply a stage name. It’s a declaration of independence, including the freedom to be imperfect, contradictory, and impossible to categorize.
2. I’m a one-woman musical operation. I sing, play guitar and synthesizers, write my music, produce it with or without collaborators, and build much of the creative universe surrounding it. What you see onstage is a very real extension of who I am.
3. I was born in Poland and built my artistic life in Chicago. Living between cultures has shaped the way I see identity, belonging, and the strange expectations people place on one another.
4. Mental health advocacy is inseparable from my art. Not because I want to preach, but because I know what it means to struggle silently. If my music makes even one person feel less alone, that connection matters to me beyond anything.
5. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a more convenient version of myself. I believe art should be free to provoke, challenge, seduce, disturb, and occasionally make an enormous mess. Especially when someone tells you to tone it down. It’s a reason why I am independent and started my own record label instead of signing with an existing one.
8. The road so far… who or what was your biggest support?
There have been wonderful people along the way, collaborators, friends, and listeners who have given my work their time, talent, and trust. I’m deeply grateful for them. I think I’m so lucky to have wonderful humans around me. I’ve been meeting extraordinarily good people on this journey!
But I think the most important support has come from two places: the people who genuinely connect with what I create, and that stubborn little voice inside me that refuses to surrender.
9. A question you’d like to answer, but have never been asked in an interview before?! + Answer please.
Question: What is the most rebellious thing a person can do today?
Answer: Be yourself. Unapologetically.
Feel things deeply, think independently even when conformity is easier. Admit that you don’t know something. Change your mind. Question the things you’ve been taught to accept. Refuse to measure your worth by your productivity, appearance, popularity, or the approval of complete strangers.
We have somehow reached a point where being genuinely vulnerable can feel more radical than being provocative.
And perhaps that’s the strangest rebellion of all: refusing to become numb, even when feeling everything hurts.
I think that’s what I’ve been trying to say with my music all along.
Instagram: @iyatoyah @shamelesspromotionpr