Hot Press meets Igor Haefeli from Daughter

Igor Haefeli may be romantically involved with his lead singer, and the creative heart of Daughter, Elena Tonra, but he’s at a loss as to why people would care too much about that. “I don’t relate to musicians in relationships,” he sighs good-naturedly. “So I don’t understand the interest. It’s generally not a thing I like to talk about.”

He does, however, remember what drew him to her, when the two attended Music School in London several years ago.
And it’s possibly a good one to tell the kids: ‘I met your mother in song-writing class’. It began with Igor at home in Switzerland, itching to get out.
“I moved to London because I wanted to get more involved in music,” he explains. “And I couldn’t find that in Switzerland at that moment. Music school was a gateway to meeting people and getting involved. It was a one year diploma and, of course, that’s where I met Elena.
“I saw her perform quite a few times during the year. We were in the same class as well, so we would have to play each other songs that we wrote during the week. She played solo gigs a lot and every time she played live the whole room would go quiet. It was just her and an acoustic guitar at the time but she had that power of getting people interested, which is sometimes hard in London. She put people under a spell. When I finished, I decided to stay in London, get a day job and get on with life. Then Elena asked me if I wanted to play two gigs with her. And that’s how it happened.”
French drummer Remi Aguilella completed the line-up and the trio’s striking His Young Heart EP brought Communion Records on board in 2011.
Igor and Remi have served to lift Elena’s portentous tunes away from the mire of sensitive singer-songwriters and create a churning, powerful full-band sound. Still, it has been a delicate process. Though Igor and Elena are an item, the guitarist is still in the dark when it comes to the more opaque aspects of her writing, and careful not to step on her mystique.
He saw that spell she cast, and says, “That was something I was very conscious of when I started playing music with her, try not to break that original thing.”
That original thing has dark corners, with plenty of angst in her words. She has laughed before that were she not a musician, she might have been interested in forensic science. In Daughter songs, bad partners break her “chest” rather than her heart. It’s an album of anatomy, love, and mortality.
“Elena’s really interested in themes of death. What does it mean for people that die, for people that have death close to them? I really relate to that. I just find it interesting that someone speaks about death in such an honest way. There’s definitely a very dark side to the music.”
In their downtime, they enjoy watching The Killing. Their songs have appeared on Vampire Diaries. He doesn’t come across as a doomed youth...
“No, and none of us are really! But everyone has a dark side to them. Then it’s just whether you accept it and do something with it. You can repress it, you can ignore, but here we’re acknowledging it and turning it into some form of art, as pretentious as that sounds!”
There’s been “progression” as Elena has let her fellow players in more, Igor says, and you can hear it in their full-length debut If You Leave. It benefits from some deft production, too, and the fact they haven’t retreaded old EP songs. They’ve been enjoying the luxury of proper studios, and Igor backs up the suspicion that they are “a band that agonise over every single note”.
Signed to 4AD, Daughter chose the revered label because of their stable and ethos.
“Success is not something that we desperately strive for,” he notes. “4AD are obviously a legendary label. It’s quite stimulating to be surrounded by such great people. More important than being surrounded by people that want you to sell a certain number of records.”