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‘Chasing a high through rave music got dark’: Aya on hexes, Huddersfield and her hardcore horror electronics

A revelation at Pontins fuelled the producer to avant garde acclaim. But with ‘sublime’ sounds came struggles with substances. Her intense new album peels back the plaster

“And someone said: ‘This is the holy spirit.’” The experience led her to join a Pentecostal congregation for a couple of years, but after confiding in a church friend about some “feelings” – Sinclair would later come out as a trans woman – she was “kicked out for being queer, essentially. These included Iceboy Violet, with whom she formed the collective boygirl under her previous moniker Loft, and Tom Boogizm who she says “can DJ for 10 hours, but then make the most heartbreaking ambient record [as Rat Heart] you’ve ever heard – that dual energy represents Manchester to me.” Sinclair relocated to London in 2020 to move in with her partner, but the north still looms large on her new record, down to the regional slang in Off to the Esso: “I’m sizzled, sozzled, hen.” She found a way to “tell the past through the present” by marrying the rock of her Huddersfield teenage years with the hardcore dance music she discovered later.

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