Victoria Canal is manifesting her destiny

Manifesting your wildest dreams is a worthwhile pursuit, but one it’s sensible to assume will fail more often than it will pay off. For an 18-year-old Victoria Canal, the best way to go about it was to be extremely literal. Off the back of her first-ever photo shoot, the singer, born in Munich to Spanish and American parents, decided to mock up a cover of Rolling Stone with the caption: “Victoria Canal wows Chris Martin at a clown’s birthday party.”  

In 2021, Canal — still striving to launch a musical career — saw the photo resurface “on one of those haunting Time Capsule posts” and popped it on her Instagram grid. At the time, she was gaining traction online for posting covers in her own unique style, and a fan of these covers happened to be working with the Coldplay frontman at the time. Upon hearing her track ‘Swan Song’ via the friend, Martin was immediately obsessed and said to his friend, as Canal remembers, “Holy shit, I love this girl — her music’s amazing. Let’s get in touch with her. Let’s help her.” 

A phone call followed, with Canal on the other end “about to throw up”. In December 2021, she signed a deal with Parlophone — with Martin her biggest cheerleader. Fast-forward three years and she has recorded vocals for Coldplay’s 10th album, Moon Music, and played piano on ‘Paradise’ during the band’s headline set on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury last summer. “This is a full circle moment,” she beams to Rolling Stone UK around the corner from her north London home, relaying the story of how an absurd dream became blissful reality.

Across three EPs — 2020’s Victoria and follow-ups Elegy and WELL WELL — Canal had begun as a budding pop star before finding her groove with slower and more minimal ballads on piano and guitar. It’s her debut album Slowly, It Dawns, out in January, that shows the full breadth of Canal’s ambition though. 

She describes the album as being intentionally “all over the place” sonically, which left the questions: ‘how do I package it? How do I tell the story?’ Canal says: “What I arrived to was the idea that there’s this totally unhinged, brash, pop side to me, and then the sad, introverted, slightly wiser, less naive version of me.” 

The first half of the album traces the trials and tribulations of the first version of Canal. Its glorious opener, ‘June Baby’, tracks a dazzling summer romance with adequate musical shine, before the album’s most striking song, ‘Cake’, sees her drop all inhibitions and “go straight to the vodka” over deliciously dark synths. The back half then documents the fallout of this hedonism. “Slowly it dawns, I’m a pain in the ass,” she sings on ‘15%’, flipping the album’s title — a promise of new beginnings — into a self-own through the prism of her troubles.

She sees the album as a journey reflective of your twenties, being willingly “ignorant to the ways of the world” before dealing with the sting of the comedown. It’s tracked most clearly through the album’s four singles, which record these ups and downs with frank honesty. She explains: “‘June Baby’ is mid-summer, 2pm, very naïve and young and flirty. ‘California Sober’ is feeling confident after your first love and wanting to explore your sexuality and hook up with loads of people. That’s the cheeky, 10pm, night-out vibe, and ‘Cake’ is many hours after that when you’re way, way too intoxicated. ‘I don’t wanna face real life right now, so I’m going to push myself even further into this abyss.’” 

From there, the delicate and sombre ‘15%’ represents the ‘what the hell did I do and say?’ period, before penultimate song ‘Vauxhall’ posits: ‘What do I do from here? Do I keep pursuing my dream or do I move to the suburbs and have kids and live a normal life? Which would make me happy?’ 

As well as a chronological record of her formative years, Slowly, It Dawns also represents Canal pushing herself in bold new directions musically. ‘Cake’ is her poppiest track to date, while the fantastic ‘Totally Fucking Fine’ was written while Canal was unable to sing due to strep throat. “I had this project in my head of, ‘Can I write a song [from] start to finish with the melody and lyrics written in my head, and not know what it was going to sound like?’” she explains. Cut to 3am at the studio and the song — a bracing piano ballad — fell out of her in one take. “The song is about the tension of wanting to take up space because you think that’s what you’re meant to do, and the liberation that comes when you surrender to the beauty of what the world has to offer you.” 

“Putting out an album does feel like jumping out of the nest for the first time, and my teeny tiny wings are still gaining muscles”

Slowly, It Dawns ends with Canal trying to decide whether to put her head down and keep following her dreams, or to accept a small and quiet life. As we finish the interview and head out into the autumn sun, she — perhaps unknowingly — proves that both are possible. One of her favourite spots, she tells me, is a nature reserve tucked away in a bustling corner of central London, one you’d easily miss if not paying attention. If I have a spare few minutes, she’d like to show me. 

Walking around this calm oasis amid the chaos, she suddenly says, “This is my bench!”, inviting me to sit next to a pond covered with a canopy of trees. It’s a place Canal comes to often, she says, with the low-level hum of King’s Cross station almost entirely obscured despite being just a few hundred yards away. She has a UK headline tour and an imminent move to Los Angeles to prepare for, but she says it’s these moments of reflection that allow her to keep pushing forwards and become the pop star she dreams of being while managing to still hold onto herself, a push-and-pull laid out on her debut album and still firmly applicable to her real life. 

“Putting out an album does feel like jumping out of the nest for the first time, and my teeny tiny wings are still gaining muscles,” she says. “That’s naïve, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to try anyway. That’s the nature of being in your twenties — there’s a lot of naïve choices and then maybe a bit of regret afterwards, but the regret teaches you something.” 

There are studies that say looking at green things improves both eyesight and general anxiety levels, she recalls as we leave her adopted bench. One seat in the reserve is still catching a slither of sunlight though, and as I depart, she decides to stay in it alone for a few more minutes, relishing the calm before she steps back into the chaos.  

Taken from the December/January issue of Rolling Stone UK. You can buy it here.