Tee Tolmar
Budapest born, Edinburgh based. Cultural journalist & photographer, with a passion for music and fashion.
On her debut album, Sarah Meth reflects on growing up, finding independence in New York, and the strange ways music makes us feel less alone
Shame is a strange thing to build an album around. It can be useful, even necessary, Sarah Meth suggests, a sign that we care about how we treat other people and that we have a conscience. But it can also creep in from elsewhere, settling into us until we can no longer tell why we ever felt it in the first place.
“Shame can be an important tool for us because it shows that we care and we have empathy and conscience,” she says. “But shame can often be really internalised, especially when you’re a woman or when you’re a minority of any kind. It’s not ours, it’s other people’s.”
On ‘Something Shameful,‘ her debut album, Meth is trying to untangle some of that feeling. Written between 2024 and 2025, the record draws on a period of transition, as she found herself moving out of her early twenties and looking back at the person she had been. Her previous releases felt like distinct chapters; this one, she says, is the first that brings those different versions of herself together into a fuller story. Its first half is more impulsive, more reactive, while the second begins to make room for acceptance.
The album’s perspective was shaped in part by a trip to New York after her first major support tour. Meth had originally planned to go with someone else, but when those plans fell through, she decided to travel anyway. What might have been a reason to abandon the trip became an opportunity to do something entirely on her own terms.
“Going along with someone else for their experience in New York, and them saying, ‘Come with me whilst I’m doing this’, that’s not my story,” she says. “That’s their story. And so I guess it worked out for the best, because it resulted in me finding my own agency.”
She has returned to the city many times since, building friendships and musical connections along the way. London is home, but New York seems to loosen something in her. She describes London as more internal, its people sometimes difficult to get close to, while New York encourages a kind of curiosity that draws you out of yourself. There is, too, the city’s particular sense of possibility, the feeling that something interesting might happen just around the corner.
On one visit, after a particularly bad night, she made her way towards the subway and stumbled across a man playing saxophone, a couple dancing and children nearby. The scene was small, almost incidental, but it changed the feeling of the evening. It was a reminder that the city could still surprise her when she least expected it.
“There’s so much mystique there,” she says. “When you invest intrigue into the city, it reflects it back to you in a way that you don’t get in London.”
Meth is fascinated by the way places shape the people who make music in them. Touring has brought her into contact with musicians whose lives look very different from hers, but with whom she can still find an immediate point of connection. She recalls meeting a drummer from Tennessee, from the same town as Dolly Parton, while touring with a band from Atlanta. These encounters seem to affirm something she already loves about music: how it can make a shared language out of experiences that might otherwise feel worlds apart.
Her own musical touchstones stretch across time and background. Nina Simone is her favourite artist, someone whose songs make her feel understood despite the differences between their lives. Her first encounter with Simone was not especially solemn: as a small child, Meth became obsessed with an Aardman animation set to ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me,’ featuring a particularly glamorous cat. She watched it repeatedly, before discovering Simone properly as a teenager. What began as a childhood fixation became a lasting connection.
Meth’s musical education was similarly rooted in experience rather than formal training. She sang in a choir from the age of four until sixteen, learning how to listen, blend her voice with others and become part of something collective. She has never had formal instrumental lessons and cannot read music, but those years left their mark on how she hears a song, particularly in the layered harmonies that run through her own work.
Writing, on the other hand, rarely happens when she deliberately sets aside time for it. A melody or phrase might arrive while she is walking, sitting on a train or watching someone else perform. She tries to catch the idea before it disappears, then returns to it later to see what it might become.
“I struggle writing anything I think is good when I go, ‘Today I’m going to sit down and write,’” she says.
That instinct to follow an idea rather than force one has also left room for humour. ‘Don’t Touch Me’, which addresses women’s experiences in the music industry, grew out of difficult encounters and observations, but Meth wanted to approach the subject with a sense of playfulness. Writing has long been a coping mechanism for her, and making the song allowed her to turn frustration into something she could enjoy creating.
The video brought that spirit into the process, too. Made with the help of friends, it became one of the most joyful experiences she could remember having in a long time. Their presence meant something beyond simply getting the project made: it gave the song a sense of solidarity, and a way of bringing other people into a conversation that can often feel exhausting to have.
“We need men in music to do more and to do better,” she says. She wanted the song to open up that conversation rather than make it feel impossible to enter. Events in London’s music community since its release have only reinforced why she felt it was worth making.
There is a particular vulnerability in releasing songs written at an earlier point in your life and then having to live alongside them. Meth finds that their meanings change as she does. Sometimes an old lyric offers comfort; sometimes it catches her repeating a mistake she thought she had already worked through. Songs can feel as though they are about other people or circumstances when you first write them, only to reveal something much closer to home later on.
“You think so much that songs are about these other people or exterior things, and they’re always, always about yourself,” she says.
For now, Meth is enjoying the busy stretch around the album’s release, preparing for rehearsals, a band show and a release party. She knows she thrives when there is something to work towards, even if the quiet that follows can be harder to settle into. Beyond this record, she is interested in collaborating with artists she admires, not simply to see what sounds good together, but to find out what might happen when someone else changes the way she thinks.
For an artist who has spent years collecting experiences, melodies and fragments of conversations, there is still plenty she wants to discover. ‘Something Shameful‘ gathers some of those fragments into a portrait of where she has been. What comes next will depend, as it often does with Meth, on what catches her attention along the way.
Listen to ‘Something Shameful’ here: