“I was having a really, really awful time with my OCD and intrusive thoughts and just feeling super, super isolated, so I decided to deep clean the house.” Sophie May pauses from across the table at Peckham’s Forza Wine, where we’ve met up to discuss her forthcoming project, Deep Sea Creatures. “As I was cleaning, I was playing Father John Misty records. [‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’] came on and he has a lyric about kissing his brother in a dream. It stopped me in my tracks. I know it sounds so stupid and funny, but I kind of felt really seen for some reason.”

Perhaps the lyric is funny in its bluntness and the jarring visual it conjures up, but the power of giving voice to our most absurd intrusive thoughts is far from stupid. And there are few artists who know this quite like May, whose track “Tiny Dictator” went viral on social media earlier this year for its candid conversation on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and anxiety, which May has dealt with for much of her life. Painting a concise picture of a complicated and often taboo topic, the single not only brought solace to its writer, but provided a safe space for listeners worldwide.

“‘Tiny Dictator’ was written from a place, to be honest, of just needing some relief,” May tells me. “I think it was similar to maybe writing a journal entry or going for a walk to try and make yourself feel better. I was writing it as a way of flipping a situation that felt really bad and trying to intellectualise it so that I could feel better. So that I could calm myself down a bit, you know?”

Sure, the inevitable questions ran through her mind – “will people be upset or understand it? Will this be a bit too much for a song to be listenable? Will people be able to actually enjoy the song or will they be too distracted by what I’m saying?” – but at the end of the day, she wrote it for herself. “I just wanted a chance to really talk about it. I think it’s one of the most isolating mental health issues you can have, because it feeds off taboo topics and things that you think that you cannot talk about. And when it did have a bit of a moment or people resonated with it, it made me realise how many people do experience something in that world, you know? Even if it’s not OCD. We’re all humans with weird little animal brains.”

While her songwriting skills and ability to connect with an audience feel innate and long refined, May did not actually step into the world of music until a few years ago. Though a natural storyteller and a teenage slam poet (the YouTube videos are sadly no longer public), it was moving back in with her parents during the pandemic that gave her the financial freedom and unlimited time to turn her thoughts into sonic magic. “I wrote songs every day – it was almost a fast track to getting a bit better sooner. It was such an awful time, but I don’t know what I would be doing now if that hadn’t happened.” She pauses. “And then TikTok happened – that was my entrance into the impenetrable wall of the music industry.”

TikTok success stories often feel like virality happens in a flash, but it took about eight months for May to find her audience. And once she did – gaining 30,000 followers overnight – her determination and craft only grew. “It made me work even harder, to be honest, because it felt like the hardest hurdle was just getting a tiny bit of people’s attention. It’s a constant process building that, but ultimately, initially getting somebody that doesn’t know you or owes you anything to listen to a song that you’ve done is… that’s the best. And I was like, ‘Now just wait there and let me make some more stuff.’”

And now, with her third project wrapped and ready to let out into the world, May still has the same drive and approach – consistently striving to refine her voice and sound to make it feel the most authentic to herself.

“With my first EP [You Do Not Have To Be Good], I didn’t know what was going on. I was just writing songs for the first time and I tried a lot of different styles, production-wise,” she reflects. “They all feel relatively ‘me,’ but I was figuring it out. And then the second one [Half Songs], I kind of reverted straight back to folk and wanted to be really simple. And then this time around, I think I’ve tried to find somewhere in the middle. This time, after practising writing songs pretty intensely for the past three years, they feel like me.”

Whether that is due to the subject matter feeling more intimate than ever, such as with “Tiny Dictator”, or the sonic landscape scratching a career-long itch in her brain, Deep Sea Creatures is certainly a coming-of-age project for May – one that makes us excited for what the future holds. Alongside “Tiny Dictator,” the artist has unveiled “Brian Cox” – a track that zooms out, diverging from its predecessor’s inner monologue-style dissection of the mind to look at the bigger picture of the universe, seeing the self as one small part of something grand. Named after the English physicist (with a sampling of his voice, no less!), it shows a different side to the forthcoming project – though both tracks are equally as personal to their author. “I am so introspective and I often fall into deep pits within myself and look inwards too much. Often that’s what OCD is – thinking too hard. So I find a lot of peace in listening to podcasts and documentaries about space and black holes and physics. I think it makes sense that something quite existential actually makes me feel quite good. It takes you out of the self,” she explains. “I wrote it after ‘Tiny Dictator,’ which was an extremely personal part of myself, more than any love song. But they both come from a deep place within me – just one’s looking in and one’s looking out.”

Elsewhere on the EP, she oscillates between these two concepts – looking inward and out in equal measure to find compassion and acceptance of the self in all its forms. And as a young woman in her mid-twenties, that’s what life really is about. “It’s an interesting time to go through – I think that’s when you start to really figure out who you are, maybe what you struggle with the most, and what’s really important to you.”

If there is a track that sums this up best, it would be May’s own favourite and her latest release, a love song titled “Just Want You.” A blend of the personal inner turmoil of “Tiny Dictator” and the existential panic of “Brian Cox,” it rounds out the releases and shows us the clear throughline of the project: the strive to decipher the world around us, to understand our own minds, and to make sense of what is most crucial and valuable in our lives.

“I think the most important thing in the end is love. Loving other people, loving the earth, and respecting the bad and good things that happen.” She smiles and leans back as I slowly nod in agreement. I think she’s cracked the code.

Deep Sea Creatures is out on July 26.