Emerging alt-pop artist Bar Pandora shares 'The Model', an ode to choosing resilience

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“Cathartic alt-pop that manages to be simultaneously off-kilter and melodious” The Times

“Featuring dynamic beats and rich undercurrents, it’s a bold statement that sees Bar Pandora ready to confess on her forthcoming EP.”
LOCK Magazine

Last month, Bar Pandora released ‘Ultramess’, a playful slice of alt-pop that saw her appear as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and receive airplay from BBC Radio 6 Music. Now she is preparing to release new single ‘The Model’.

Bar Pandora is the stage name of UK alt-pop artist Charlie Tophill. The project was named after a literary cafe in La Latina, Madrid, where in 2017 Tophill used to hang out with her friends talking literature, life and feminism over red wine and fizzy sweets. Retrospectively inspired by the empowerment these friendships engendered, she created Bar Pandora in 2021 as a musical project seeking to redress the balance of a life shadowed by self-imposed limitation and baseless inhibition.

Bar Pandora’s melodious alt-pop is playfully sewn together from the offcuts of personal experience. Field recordings, journal entries and improvised fragments bop bewitchingly along to a rich undercurrent of harmonic synths, guitars and dynamic beats.

New single ‘The Model’ started life as a wayward drum and synth sample that Tophill’s co-producer Simply Dread sent to her. She then sliced up the sample and rebuilt it incorporating her own instrumentation, ending up with what she described as “a juiced up chimera” which she absolutely loved, but had no idea what to do with.

Then, after Christmas 2022, Tophill went to stay at her friend’s house in the Forest of Dean. “At that time I had all this post stressful-family-Christmas noise buzzing around in my head, and after all the intensity of writing solidly for a few days without a break I was feeling a little unhinged,” she says. “I was dealing with some personal issues at the time, and one of the things I was getting really frustrated with was other people’s over-willingness to wade in on my problems, and to rehash past events over and over, way beyond the point of usefulness,” she continues.

“I hear a lot about toxic positivity, but as someone who grew up in challenging circumstances with a lot of anxiety around me, I’ve always known the opposite problem. I don’t think you should ignore or deny bad experiences, but you shouldn’t model your whole identity around them either. Don’t constantly remind yourself that you’re damaged. You’ll only feel hopeless,” she says.

This is where her head was at this winter, whilst wandering around the forest and listening to the instrumental that would later become ‘The Model’. “What started to emerge was a little defiant voice in my head saying ‘I don’t have to live in the shadow of all this shit’  and that was it. This song emerged as my defiant ‘no’ to that cycle. ‘What if I refuse to live in shadow?’ was a question I kept asking myself, and one that I really needed to explore.”