FUSE TV - Little Boots Returns, Without "Big Bad Major Labels"

"Fans have asked me, 'Where’s the album? What are you doing?' I think everyone just thought I was having a pina colada in Ibiza for three years."

Victoria Christina Hesketh, aka UK dance-pop musician Little Boots, is sitting in the lobby of New York's Ace Hotel discussing her unintended absence from music. While the singer has stayed busy touring, ghostwriting, DJing and releasing brilliant mixtapes, it's been four years since her debut album Hands dropped and fans have increasingly wondered about her perceived hiatus.

Hesketh's story is becoming more familiar each year, as the 29-year-old musician split from her label 679/Atlantic Records to release her new album Nocturnes on her own label On Repeat Records. A mix of dark electro-pop, buoyant '70s disco, '80s New Wave and '90s house, Nocturnes eschews the various producers of Hands and features Mo' Wax and DFA Records co-founder Tim Goldsworthy producing nearly every track.

Hesketh spoke candidly about past regrets, misguided record label suggestions and "growing some balls."

The cliché is that you have your whole life to record your debut album and six months to record your sophomore. Yours took four years.

[Laughs] Yeah, mine was the opposite. I had six months to write the first album and three years to write the second album. After the first album, it was a very overwhelming experience and crazy time. The last thing we did was Coachella in 2010, which was ending on this huge high. It was this insane show and I got home, unpacked and was like, "Okay, now go away and write some more songs." I opened my computer at my studio at home and was like, "Oh my God. How the hell do I even get back into this?" I spent the first summer after that writing some terrible songs.