Over the past few years, Xenya Genovese has been peeling back the layers of Freak Slug, digging further down into the rawest, truest parts of herself and doing away with any pretence. A proud Northerner, with a wildly creative outlook and a self-described “avoidant” Leo rising, she’s been learning to be herself entirely: confident, forthright, and – most importantly – honest about who she really is and what she really needs.

“I’ve gone through phases of not representing myself properly, and I’m never doing it again because it takes a while to come back from it,” she says. “I’m not thinking about what people want or what’s gonna do well anymore. I’m singing more in my accent, and I’m just being more unapologetically myself.”

Having first broken through with viral hit ‘Radio’ (24 million Spotify streams and counting) and the dreamier, summery ‘Friday’ and ‘Care’, with last year’s debut album ‘I Blow Out Big Candles’ Genovese started purposefully broadening out her artistry. Barely in her twenties when she made those first tracks, their pop experimentations had introduced her to the world but she knew she had more to show.

‘I Blow Out Big Candles’ was a big step forward, full of grunge influences and nonchalant, devil may care spirit. Acclaimed by the likes of DIY Magazine, Clash and BBC Introducing, with huge radio support on both sides of the Atlantic (BBC Radio 1 and 6 Music, plus heavy rotation on KEXP, KCRW, KUTX, Sirius XMU, Dublab and more), the record sent Genovese around the world on her biggest European dates, with an inaugural full US tour that climaxed with sold-out shows in New York, LA and Chicago. At this year’s SXSW, she was the most saved UK artist on the platform, while back on home soil, she’s played a packed summer of festivals including Latitude, Kendal Calling, Leeds Festival, SXSW London and Rock’n’Roll Circus.

As viscerally exciting live as she is on record, the excitable response to ‘I Blow Out Big Candles’ proved that, when Freak Slug crawls down into the weeds of the human experience, documenting life’s messiest, knottiest parts, people connect to it just as much as when she was out in the sun. There’s still a rich seam of melody to be found, and an innate way with a hook, but Genovese isn’t afraid to tap into the more uncomfortable parts of her brain too. And now, new EP ‘Loose Tooth and a Short Skirt’ goes one further, leaning into her roots with a release that bridges the gap into a whole new forthcoming era.

At the heart of it all is Manchester. Lead single and EP opener ‘Honest Man’ sees Genovese singing in a broad Mancunian accent for the first time, introduced by a sample of her dad, cracking jokes from his hospital bed just days after a heart attack. This intrinsic Northern spirit is a subject that she’s passionate about. “It’s quite a deep thing being a Northern artist because there’s a lot of documentaries and films that depict Northern people in a very stupid manner, and it’s quite upsetting on a subconscious level,” she says. “I’ve been told I sound common before, and it’s just because it’s historically seen as being more working class. But Manchester is full of attitude and grit.”

Lyrically, too, Genovese has been working to access something further within herself, “flowing and not thinking, and tapping into something deeper than the ego”. Writing between tours in London and Los Angeles, she found herself fully leaning into the extremities of both herself and the world around her. “I like to experiment writing with the sun and the moon,” she nods. “The sun is very energetic and the moon brings darkness; as soon as it goes dark, the shadow self comes up. People go to bed and they start overthinking.”

More than ever, ‘Loose Tooth and a Short Skirt’ deals with matters of the heart. “Oh, there’s all kinds of love stories there, different ones – break up, fancy you, hate you,” she says. “But it’s a more real interpretation of it all, maybe.” Across the EP, these five tracks cast their eye over dreamy infatuation on ‘Miss June’ and (un)comfortable need on ‘My Only Friend’, taking very real situations and warping them through Freak Slug’s strange sonic fairground mirror. She likes to write from the middle of the situation. “I write at parties and at gigs and in the toilet cubicles. I like writing around people secretly,” she nods, “putting my phone on the darkest brightness and writing things, that’s my process. Then I’ll get my acoustic out, find some chords I resonate with and look at my phone for some gems that came when I was drunk.”

It explains the unfiltered emotions going on through ‘Loose Tooth…’ – a “visceral” image that felt like something that the multi-disciplinary artist would also want to paint. But around Genovese’s emotional purging, the music here leads Freak Slug in new directions as well. The low-slung groove of ‘Blues Eyes’ was co-written with producer Dom Valentino. “He mostly works with London rappers and that brings such a different vibe to an indie artist like me,” Genovese enthuses. “It brings a spice that an indie producer just wouldn’t bring.” The melancholy closing moments of ‘Does It Matter’, meanwhile take influence from Mura Masa and Tirzah’s ‘Today’, mixing acoustic guitars and electronic elements into a strange and beautiful whole. It leaves ‘Loose Tooth and a Short Skirt’ in a very different place to where the cheeky playfulness of ‘Honest Man’ begins, but such is the duality of Genovese. “I think that’s my life,” she shrugs. “Anything I do feels strong in myself, the light and the dark are very heavy for me. So whatever I’m gonna do is gonna be pretty intense.”

Intense, yes, but most importantly, Freak Slug does it all with feeling. Having shed the weight of external expectation to enter her most authentic creative period yet, Xenya Genovese is cutting to the core of it all in increasingly exciting ways. “What I’m learning is that I’m gonna do what the fuck I want, whether anyone likes it or not,” she shrugs. It’s an attitude that, perversely, is even easier to love.