Musician, model, producer: what the world needs now is Eartheater

With a stage name like Eartheater, it is no surprise that Alexandra Drewchin’s work feels voracious and all-consuming. She has the presence of an Amazon, has walked the runway for major fashion houses, and helped launch the musical career of Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes Leon.

Her own music defies categorisation, crossing genres and eschewing labels. On her latest album, Powders, Drewchin moves from billowing strings to soft beats and back again. When you think you have a handle on what is happening, a stripped-back cover of System of a Down’s Chop Suey pops up to shake you up again. Drewchin is utterly her own artist but if a comparison is needed, perhaps it is best to reach for Bjork.

It has been a busy few years for Drewchin, who is one of those multi-hyphenates for whom creating art is not limited to just one sphere. Drewchin is well known in the fashion world, working the runway for labels including Acne and Mugler at New York Fashion Week; Rolling Stone has labelled her one of this year’s 25 most stylish musicians.

For the music video for Pure Smile Snake Venom, the Powders single that also opened Chanel’s Spring Summer 2024 ready-to-wear show, Drewchin and her team collaborated with artist Anna Uddenberg. Drewchin’s stylist, Billy Lobos, told Rolling Stone he “wanted Eartheater to become the sculpture”.

Drewchin arrives to our meeting at a bookstore and cafe in Ridgewood, Queens, on a balmy summer afternoon dressed in mesh and chunky heels. Her copper hair is pulled high on her head and cascades down one side of her face. Her eyebrows are carefully pencilled on, and her eyes rake the room with the intensity of a predator looking for its next meal. There is not a trace of sweat on her face, a true feat in this weather.

“Fashion to me — I’m just curious,” she says in a flat tone, her voice low, each word considered. “I like to see what’s happening because it’s so rare when I really, really f--- with a piece of clothing. When it really does what it’s supposed to do, and it stays doing that, it feels like a friend.”

But with so many irons in the fire, Drewchin says that, going forward, she’s not focused on the fashion world.

“I feel like I’ve done it; unless there’s something incredible that pulls me back, I don’t really care right now,” she says, taking a sip of the orange wine she was delighted to find on the menu.

There is plenty for Drewchin to focus on. She is the founder of record label Chemical X, where Lourdes Leon, who releases her music under the name Lolahol, is signed.

“To be frank she came to me,” Drewchin says of their collaboration. “She was born in the limelight, and she needed the shade. She’s lily of the valley, comfortable by a little waterfall, and she’s escaped the blaring fireball of what fame is.”

As Eartheater, Drewchin is best known for her multi-layered tracks and intricate lyricism. Whispers and strings, soft synths and sparkling plucked melodies. Confident beats. Though complex, Eartheater manages to make music that sounds as if you are looking at a swimmer treading water in a placid lake, the surface smooth and glassy, but the eggbeater legs churning everything underneath.

“I feel deeply fulfilled at this point in my life and I haven’t felt that until now,” she says.

Drewchin has been making music as Eartheater since 2009. Her first two albums came out in 2015, and then a third, Irisiri, in 2018 on the label Pan. It was after she made Irisiri that she began work on a mix-tape collaboration with other New York-based artists that would become the first release off Chemical X.

“I had this piece of work which felt really wrong for Pan … That’s when I created the label. I didn’t want to give it to someone else; it felt so intimate, and… I didn’t feel like it needed anything besides the music.”

Trinity started out as a simple collaboration with her friends. An after-work jam session.

“We all worked at the same club together, and when we were winding down after work we’d go and just jam and make these songs … It was a lot of synergy and collaboration, it was super cute for me, just like deep friend summer sexy energy. That to me, that’s where Chemical X was born from.

“Chemistry, fun, intimacy, friends,” she says, the words punctuated with little taps on the table. “[It] became, and it still is, the most successful piece of work I’ve ever made, so it’s just a blaring reminder, every day, that all the sort of thrills and fluff and two-stepping that one does to release an album, or make something pop, isn’t actually necessary. When the world needs something, and you have it, and you can give it … it just happens, and it takes on a life of its own.”

Success is unpredictable and can hit when you least expect it. Drewchin, who enjoys a natural metaphor, likens the process to the discovery of a spring.

“You crack the rock open, and there’s a gush of water, and it’s very pure, and it’s nourishing, so you might as well plant a garden around it,” she says. Chemical X is the garden bed, and Drewchin is busy planting.

“I am courting people that I haven’t released yet, but I’m being very careful about who and what because I want it to maintain its integrity, because once you give an inch to something you don’t 100 per cent believe in, then it’ll become a mile, and all of a sudden you feel obliged to do this or that,” she says. “I need it to be a sacred place for really excellent work, or for something I see to be a really important unfolding of culture or an important encapsulation of a specific thing in culture right now.”

As an artist and label owner, is she worried about the rise of artificial intelligence in the music industry? Her answer surprises me.

“I’m not scared of it,” she says. “It’s important to remember that AI is learning from us, so we still can teach it. The depth of my imagination could only be tickled by what AI can do and I think it’s exciting. Anybody with a vision and drive and innovation will be able to persevere. I do think it will upset the individualistic society, and I think that’s kind of cool. I find it a little tiring the whole ‘look at me, look at me’ society. We all are a conglomerate of what we’ve consumed.”

Appropriately given her moniker, consumption is a topic we land on a number of times; having consumed the Earth, Drewchin is feeding it back to us, one lush, complicated, mesmerising track at a time.

When she released Powders, Drewchin announced a sister album, Aftershock, to be released sometime this year. The timing was vague, and when pressed, she won’t commit.

“I kind of regret even mentioning it,” she says. “I didn’t expect people immediately to go: OK great, Powders′ fantastic, now where’s Aftermath? You know what, hold. You chill on Powders, you absorb that. Because I’m really proud of that album.”

What Drewchin is focused on now is touring the album she has, and enjoying the moment she’s in.

“[This moment] definitely feels like a conclusion, which is a place where I can take a deep breath. I’ve reached the precipice of something, and I can turn around and see that view of what I’ve surmounted, and that view is going to give me a lot of perspective in how to move next.”

Drewchin is excited to bring her music back to Australia.

“I’ve been touring on or off pretty much the whole year,” she says. “I really love what I do … I never could have imagined that I’d be where I am now.”

Eartheater performs at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building for the Now or Never Festival on August 22, Brisbane’s The Triffid on Aug 25 and Sydney’s Manning Bar on Aug 26.