When people hear the word “throuple” they jump to all sorts of conclusions, according to Amber Bain. “It’s quite common to sexualise a throuple,” she says, “to imagine it as purely a sexual thing. Actually, it’s not. It has an insane amount of emotional integrity – as much feeling as a two-way relationship.”
Ireland recently reached peak throuple discourse – throuple being defined as a romantic relationship between three people – amid reports that the former Saturdays singer Una Healy was in one. (She wasn’t.) In the case of Bain, the thoughtful young English songwriter who produces pummellingly haunting pop under the stage name The Japanese House, a fraught three-way relationship was a life-changing event. An inspirational one, too, as can be heard on her extraordinary second collection of downbeat electro-indie, In the End It Always Does.
With unorthodox romantic arrangements there is a temptation to giggle nervously and avert your gaze. But the picture of heartache Bain paints on the album is devastatingly raw.
The relationship began towards the end of the pandemic when Bain relocated to Margate, a slightly forlorn seaside town in Kent, where she met and fell in love with a lesbian couple who had been together for six years. Later, one of the trio moved out, and everything unravelled. All involved were left at sea.
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Bain emerged buffeted and bruised. Those emotions are articulated on new songs such as the wistful electro-driven Boyhood (“Will you hold me like you always do?”) and the stripped-down Sad to Breathe. “If you’re going away,” Bain sings on the latter, her lulling, gender-ambivalent voice paired with brisk, mournful guitar, “Why’d you say something that made me believe/ that you just may stay?”
“It was intense. I feel really happy I had that experience. I’m equally happy I’m not longer in it,” says the songwriter, who named her project The Japanese House in tribute to a Cornish holiday home where she would stay with her family as a child.
“There are lots of special things that can happen to you in life and you look back and realise, ‘Oh, that was actually something special,’” she continues. “This was one of these things that I knew was special in the moment, as it was happening. I knew this was something that a lot of people weren’t going to experience.”
But there were challenges, too, and in the end the throuple ran into trouble. “It was hard. It’s difficult enough to juggle one other person’s emotions. Three people … It was insane.”
Bain is a labelmate of Matty Healy of The 1975, who has been in the spotlight recently amid frenzied speculation that he was dating Taylor Swift (followed by speculation, even more frenzied, that they’d broken up). Bain and Healy are friends and musical peers with a shared talent for blending pop and introspection, for making catchy music with a sharp edge of bitter-sweet hyperhonesty.
“I’ve known him since I was 17,” she says of the mercurial Healy. (They were introduced when Healy was dating a friend of Bain’s.) “I’ve known [The 1975] since they were playing to 150 people. I liked his music before he was a big celebrity. He was always a friend before that. It was cool, that happening in my life. I was still in school when I first started hanging out with them all. It was exciting.”
Bain has thoughts about the controversies that have embroiled Healy, who has been criticised for appearing on a podcast in which the interviewers mocked the mixed-race New Yorker rapper Ice Spice for “looking like an Eskimo”, prompting Healy to laugh along. But she’d prefer to communicate her feelings directly to him rather than air them in the media.
“It’s hard, because I have very specific opinions on all of this. It’s only fair that I just share them with him. I don’t want to speak publicly about all of that. He knows what I think – and that’s really important to me. It’s hard to be scrutinised on everything you do and say. It’s definitely something I think is more effective to be dealt with on a personal friendship level rather than through the media.”
The 27-year-old is still getting used to her public profile. When she first signed to Dirty Hit, she wasn’t keen on being photographed. So the label put out her music anonymously and had fun with the idea that she was an artist without a face. But the ruse backfired after The 1975 fans noted that the band’s drummer, George Daniel, was credited as producer of her debut EP, Swim Against the Tide. Rumours began to circulate that The Japanese House was a secret 1975 spin-off – rather than the work of a camera-shy queer woman from the fringes of London.
“Because [Healy] and George worked on that record, people thought it was their side project,” she says. “The truth behind it was I absolutely hate having my photo taken. Pretty much refuse to do so. My label decided to make it look purposeful. In reality it was just me being kind of a brat.” She pauses and corrects herself. “Not a brat, a scared teenager.”
My fan base has definitely become a lot more gay. It used to be just 1975 fans
In 2019, with her debut album, Good at Falling, she went further towards surrendering her anonymity. It chronicled in precise and heartbreaking detail the end of her relationship with the songwriter Marika Hackman. Nothing was left to the imagination: one song documented their love life’s descent into uneasy inertia. (“We don’t touch any more / But we talk all the time, so it’s fine”.)
“I would never want her to censor herself. I think it’s an amazing record and she’s a fantastic songwriter,” is how Hackman described Good at Falling in 2020. “There’s a part of me that thinks it’s quite sweet. It’s lovely that a relationship can come to an end and you can have a map of it. There’s stuff in there about things breaking down. And there are things in there about how much we loved each other.”
Their break-up hit Bain hard. But, having worked through it on Easy to Fall, she’s in a healthier place. Today she and Hackman are platonically close.
“Marika and I are good friends and have been for years,” she says. “It’s nice to be in a close relationship with someone who at one point you’re writing [very intimate songs] about. A year later you’re walking down the street holding hands and smiling about it. It’s funny the way things happen. Marika and I are lucky to have always understood that aspect of our relationship. I guess Marika is the only person I’ve been with where it’s been the other way around, and they’ve written songs about me.”
She didn’t think of herself as a “queer” songwriter at the beginning of her career. She was a teenager, just out of school, with emotions she needed to express. The idea that she would be one thing or another didn’t occur to her. But now, a little older, she is thrilled to have an increasingly diverse fan base. Having often felt alone in her personal life, she finds that to go on stage and be surrounded by people on the same wavelength makes each concert a ritual of renewal.
“My fan base has definitely become a lot more gay. It used to be just 1975 fans. I was talking to my girlfriend about this the other day. I was in this club in Chicago. It was a gay night. We were with our two friends who are straight. They were feeling they were the only straight people there. I remember thinking, ‘It’s so funny: that’s how I feel when I’m in straight places.’ When I’m in a place where it’s mostly queer people I always feel emotional. It’s such a relief to feel a sense of belonging. What’s really nice about that fan base is that it is my environment every night on tour. I get to have the sense of community on a daily basis.”
In the End It Always Does is released via Dirty Hit on June 30th
