Ella Eyre – one of the UK's best vocalists, bar none – originally had a different title for her forthcoming second album. With cover art being mocked up and marketing plans put into place, the 31-year-old purveyor of top tier R&B and soul realised something wasn't right. After years of struggling in creative straightjackets over her fourteen year career – she signed her first major label deal when she was 17 and released her debut album back in 2015 – but now fully in charge, the Londoner finally trusted her gut. The tellingly-titled ‘everything, in time’, released via Play It Again Sam, features fifteen songs that finally showcase who Ella Eyre is both as a person and as an artist.

It's there in the plush soul-pop of recent single ‘domino szn’, or the way her idol Lauryn Hill is referenced in the harmony-laden doo-wop of the excellent ‘red flags & love hearts’, and also in her ability to perfectly articulate our current social malaise in soulful, Jay Prince-assisted recent single, ‘high on the internet’. “That song came from my absolute distaste for social media,” Eyre says in her typically unfiltered manner. “I've always tried to keep it real on my social media, but the problem with keeping it real is sometimes I don't fucking want to be there.”

After being relegated to a voice-for-hire for way too long, ‘everything, in time’ represents freedom. “There's been a lot of stop-start with my career,” Eyre says. “I'm very aware of that. It keeps me up at night. But this album feels like something I'm really proud of. And the biggest cliches are sometimes the deepest truths: Good things come to those who wait. And even though it's taken a long time to get to this place, and a lot of procrastination from me, I'm really proud of where I'm at.”

Ella Eyre's been singing since she was a kid, stood up on the pews giving it her all at the local church. “What I realised was that the more I sang, the more people would compliment me,” she smiles. “And so then I would sing louder.” The voice – husky, soulful, versatile – would also stand out years later when she got into studio sessions with producers after signing to Virgin in 2012.

Another key element is that she's always written her songs. Even when the songs were collaborations with more established dance producers like Rudimental, Sigala or Banx & Ranx, Eyre was at the heart of what was being made. “All I knew was that I had words, I had melodies, and I wanted to sing,” she says. Being so young when she first signed, and with her dance features suddenly taking off, her own artist album was slowly being re-shaped, with a lot of the songs she wrote for what would become her debut album, Feline, becoming dancier, or more drum'n'bass orientated. “I was constantly trying to people please,” she continues. “I remember my A&R at the time said that I couldn't write songs, and that I should leave it to them to find me hits. I remember being like, 'that hurts so much, but okay cool if you think you know what you're doing go for it, find me a song'. And it was the most fucking irrelevant song choice for me that I could have ever imagined. They didn’t know me as an artist at all’

By 2019, Eyre had signed to Island and was starting to make plans for her second album. A writing camp was booked in Jamaica, a special place for Eyre whose late father was Jamaican, but after returning with a batch of songs she was excited about, the process slowed again. Then lockdown hit. Eyre wisely picked that time where things were on pause to have much-needed vocal surgery, a scary process that involved six months' worth of rehab and her basically re-learning how to speak and sing. As her rehab continued, she sat in on a meeting with her label while they listened to some of the dance songs she'd written assuming they would be pitched to other artists. But, once again, things had changed and these songs were now in contention to be Eyre's latest single. “We were listening through all these songs and 25 minutes in, with everyone going back and forth about what they think these songs should be, I unmuted myself. I was like 'hey, the fact that it's taken so long for us to land on what the first single should be is because none of this feels right.”

It was a bold move but one Eyre knew needed to be made. “Commercial dance music has paid my bills and allowed me to have a career, but there were so many people doing it, and I don't want to be doing what everyone else is doing,” she continues. “I want to be trying to find something that feels authentic to myself and in my own lane. I said, 'I'm going to finish my recovery and then when I get back to writing, I'm going to start an album'.” When it came time to play the label the songs for the album, however, the response was muted. “They said it's just not what they envisaged for me. So I said, 'cool, then we don't agree'.” And just like that, Eyre knew she had to make a break for it and she amicably parted ways with Island, taking the new songs with her.

Immensely proud of songs like the head-knocking anthem of independence Loverman, and the lyrically conflicted, retro-soul of ‘hell yeah’ that she'd already started with her now old label, she continued with the album. Inspired by the break-up of her long-term relationship – which was later rekindled during the making of the album, before coming to an end again – these were songs, alongside the bolshy ‘space’ (“About really wanting somebody to fuck off,” she laughs), that showcased a side of Eyre she'd previously been urged to suppress. “One thing I got called quite a lot by my first label was 'angry'. Because I was constantly being compared to other artists where everything was positive and upbeat. And I was just this, fuck you, mother fucker, burn. So for me ‘space’ is a more mature version of Ella Eyre in 2014.”

With the album 60% finished, she was then able to go to her new label with a clear vision of what she wanted. Any tweaks or re-workings would be made with her at the forefront of that process. “The beautiful thing about making this album is I've learnt a huge amount about myself and my productivity levels, but also just a lot about what matters to me and what I want,” she says. “I turned 30, which was a big milestone in my life, and a lot of things had changed, but everything's also felt so positive and exciting.”

The elegant mid-tempo ‘kintsugi’ displays some of that maturity, wrapping relationship woes in a beautiful metaphor. Named after the Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery by using golden lacquer, ‘kintsugi’ is about the idea “that even though something is cracked, even though it's broken, you put it back together with gold, which is so much more valuable, which in theory means it's built on stronger foundations”. Future single ‘red flags & love hearts’ was inspired by something a little closer to home; Eyre's therapist. “I remember when I was talking about this boy to my therapist and he said, 'you know, it's like that saying: why do red flags look like love hearts?' I'd never heard of it, but it's so true and it was so visual as well. We see them so clearly. We know there's something so wrong with this relationship and this environment that we're allowing ourselves to be in and yet somehow we managed to romanticise it.”

That song was one of the final ones to be added to the album, alongside the title track, ‘everything, in time’. Both were written in a flurry of creativity after she'd finally said goodbye to her on-off relationship. “I really wanted to keep writing for the album because I was feeling really energised and excited and motivated by this new lease of life that I had in my singleness,” she says. As with the album as a whole, sonically Eyre wanted her rich voice to be front and centre: “I knew that I wanted lots of vocals, be that choirs or ad libs. I wanted it to feel like a vocal obstacle course and explore the boundaries of my voice.” It was also a playground for her to draw on her inspirations, from the aforementioned Lauryn Hill to Outkast to Amy Winehouse. “It was just really fun to put my references and my love for different genres together and package it.”

Making album number two has been a long process but one anchored by Eyre's instincts and having the freedom to trust them this time. It's also made her rethink her goals, her work ethic and what success really means in a splintered music industry in 2025. Her goals for ‘everything, in time’ are manifold, from the more immediate – “my hope is that people stop asking me if I still do music!” she laughs – and more longterm. “I would really love for it to cement my credibility as a musician and as an artist. And I don't use the word artist lightly because I feel like I curated this album. I curated the creative and it's a body of work for people to really understand who I am, and where I want to be going. I would certainly like this album to remind people that I still exist and absolutely deserve to exist, and to be a gateway into this next exciting chapter in my life where I am a lot freer creatively. And I'm a lot freer in my mind and self.”

Also, fans won't have to wait as long anymore, don't panic. “I'm excited to see what my next album is going to sound like,” she beams.