Music
There’s a quiet ease to GERD. Even through a screen, it comes across clearly. Speaking from home at the tail end of a week spent mostly indoors, she laughs about the stir- craziness of it all, immediately turning her attention to the promise of Friday and the simple joys of going out again. It’s a stark contrast to the version of herself she describes elsewhere: someone who retreats to wooden cabins, forages for mushrooms, and finds clarity in stillness.
This balance between solitude and release weaves itself through her music too, where intimacy and introspectiveness moments allow space for something more expansive. As she prepares to share new material, that duality feels more present than ever.
That contrast flows through GERD’s sound too, where her emotionally direct songwriting sits against electronic production. Her tracks often feel like they begin in something personal and small before opening out into something much larger. On her latest single, ‘Truth Be Told’, that shift feels especially pronounced.
That contrast finds its way into her music. GERD’s songs move between the intimate and the expansive, her voice anchoring something that gradually unfolds around it. Truth To Be Told captures that feeling in its clearest form so far.
The track began, as many of her songs do, with something internal. “I was in a period of my life where I felt like I was shaping myself into something that didn’t feel true anymore,” she explains. “Like I was pushing myself in the wrong direction, just because I thought I was supposed to.” It’s a tension that sits at the heart of the song, one that gradually unravels as it progresses.
In the studio, that emotional shift became something more tangible. What starts as a sense of constraint slowly gives way to release, the production opening in stages – key changes, building rhythm, and eventually something far more expansive. By the final stretch, the track leans into a kind of cinematic freedom, which she laughingly describes as a “Titanic moment… standing with your arms out, feeling completely free.”
For GERD, the process wasn’t just about shaping a song but moving through something personally. What began as a feeling ultimately became a turning point – “a journey,” she says, “both within the music and inside yourself.”.
Moments like that reveal core messages about how GERD works as an artist. Her music often becomes a space that lacks restraint, where emotions can be explored fully without overthinking. She laughs as she reflects on stepping away from perfection, explaining that she’s more interested in what feels raw and human, fuelling her songs with a kind of “ugliness” that is a rarity in the polished industry outside the studio. Working in cabins hidden away from everyday pressures, walking barefoot by the lake with a glass of red wine makes her feel “just human, just the person,” and that freedom seeps directly into her music.
GERD also serves as an outlet to push into extremes she can’t explore as her offstage self, Elin. Onstage, she becomes a “big drama queen,” able to pour every emotion into her performance. GERD has become more than a persona. GERD has become more than a persona; it’s a lens through which she experiences the world differently. She reflects that she’s “more GERD than Elin now,” turning simple pleasures like mushroom- picking or boat rides into something magical, something otherworldly, a space not just for herself, but for anyone who wants to join her in that world.
As she moves into this next phase, that same instinct – to follow feeling over expectation – continues to guide her. She’s less interested in perfection now, instead drawn to what happens when things are left raw, even “ugly,” allowing space for something more human to come through. It’s an approach she’s exploring across everything, from live performance to production – keeping in the “wrong” notes, the strange textures, the moments that feel unpolished but alive.
There’s also a sense of experimentation in how she’s shaping what comes next, pushing further into the balance between organic instrumentation and more fragmented, electronic elements, while using her voice in new, less conventional ways. The material she’s working on now, she hints, feels even more exposed stripped back, but somehow bigger in its emotional reach.
For now, GERD seems content in that in-between space – somewhere between the forest and the stage, solitude and expression – continuing to build a world that feels entirely her own and inviting others to step into it.
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Words: Keira Oldfield
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