On Queen of Ashes, memory as illusion, Bowie’s influence, emotional danger, and learning to live alongside your ghosts
Christian Cohle does not seem particularly interested in making love songs that behave like love songs.
On “Venus,” the latest single from his forthcoming album Queen of Ashes, the Dublin artist takes romance out of the familiar terrain of intimacy and confession and pushes it somewhere stranger. Love becomes mythological, dangerous, devotional, predatory, and impossible to fully escape.
The title invokes the Roman goddess of love, but Cohle’s Venus is not an idealized symbol of beauty. She is closer to a force of nature: magnetic enough to inspire worship, but powerful enough to destroy the person caught inside her orbit.
That duality lies at the heart of the song.
“I wasn’t interested in portraying her as a perfect goddess,” Cohle explains, “but rather a force of nature, both divine and predatory.”
As “Venus” develops, that mythology becomes increasingly unsettling. The goddess begins to take on spider-like qualities, drawing rather than chasing, holding rather than pursuing. Desire turns into entrapment. Memory becomes preservation. Love remains beautiful, but beauty itself no longer guarantees safety.
It is a fitting entry point into Queen of Ashes, due in October, an album where autobiography frequently disguises itself as mythology, folklore, historical reference, and archetype.
That method allows Cohle to take deeply personal material and expand it beyond autobiography. Elsewhere on the record, the old Welsh tradition of the Sin Eater becomes a way of examining spiritual contamination and sacrifice, while the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice becomes a metaphor for doubt, hindsight, and the destructive instinct to look backward.
Even the more immediate songs carry traces of that instinct. Irish folklore enters “Living With Lucy” through the symbolism of the whitethorn. Personal memories become cultural echoes. Individual experience becomes part of something older.
Sonically, “Venus” mirrors that sense of entanglement.
Built around a dark, hypnotic rhythmic foundation, the track features Alex Reeves of Elbow on drums and returning collaborator Renaud Gabriel Pion on alto and tenor saxophone. Cohle cites David Bowie’s Blackstar as an important reference point, particularly in the construction of the beat, while Pion’s saxophone introduces an almost conversational presence—another voice moving around the song rather than simply decorating it.
It continues a progression established by earlier Queen of Ashes singles “Levitate” and “Living With Lucy.” Across the releases, Cohle moves between dancefloor momentum and emotional collapse, using rhythm almost as a Trojan horse for heavier subject matter.
Or, as he puts it himself: “Maybe I’m trying to dance myself out of the heaviness.”
We spoke with Christian Cohle about transforming autobiography into mythology, preserving memories we should perhaps release, collaborating with Renaud Gabriel Pion, borrowing maps from Bowie and Talking Heads, and why moving on might have less to do with forgetting someone than becoming someone different from who you were when they mattered most.
Queen of Ashes seems to blur the line between autobiography and mythology. What draws you to telling deeply personal stories through mythological symbolism rather than direct confession?
I just enjoy that postmodernist approach. Referencing mythology, cultural/historical references and preexisting works gives everything more meaning and depth. It also helps me get out of my way so to speak and tell the story in a more interesting manner.
Like in a song on the album “Sin Eaters,” which in the title itself there is a reference to an old Welsh tradition from hundreds of years ago. A Sin Eater was a person who was said to be able to take the sins away from a dead person by eating food associated with that deceased individual. They performed an act that was considered necessary or useful, but was simultaneously regarded as spiritually contaminating and were consequently looked down upon by the wider community.
I loved the symbolism of that, and how it mirrored myself and my life at the time Queen of Ashes was being made.
The song’s main crescendo was inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus had to descend into the Underworld to retrieve his wife, who had died, with one caveat: if he looked back at her as they made their exit, she would be lost to him forever. He did, and consequently, she was.
I thought there was something so powerful and timeless in this idea, the tragedy of looking back, of doubt, and how that can destroy a relationship.
Anyway, yeah, there’s a lot of referencing and mythology woven throughout the album! Even in “Living With Lucy,” one of the more upbeat, pop-adjacent tracks, there’s a reference to the whitethorn, a significant symbol in Irish folklore.
“Venus” transforms the Roman goddess of love into something both magnetic and quietly dangerous. Why was it important to explore love as a force of nature rather than something purely romantic?
Because it is a force of nature!
Some of the greatest tragedies in history have been born from love, desire and the things we’re willing to do in its name and some of our greatest miracles have too.
Love can be a catalyst for both creation and destruction, it all depends how it is wielded.
I was looking at my own life in “Venus,” and how my experience with love was never a simple thing.
One of the most striking lyrics is, “I kept your voice in a vial.” How do memories evolve over time, and at what point do they become something we preserve instead of something we actually experience?
Are memories ever truly experienced though? They are in that abstract space, so it’s tricky. How do you measure them? I don’t really know.
I think as we ourselves evolve, so do our memories. We preserve them to maintain some illusory sense of control over the experience, I suppose, and to hold onto the sense of identity that comes with it, but all of that is in flux too!
I know personally, I’ve preserved certain memories in an effort to cling to something I didn’t want to lose. The past can be controlled so it’s far easier to stay there than in the present.
Sonically, “Venus” feels hypnotic, almost trance-like, with rhythm carrying as much emotional weight as the lyrics. How did you approach building that atmosphere in the studio?
I think even from its earliest demo versions, if my memory serves me correctly, it always had this dark, hypnotic vibe to it.
I built it around this phrase I was jamming on my VoiceLive vocal processor: “My Venus, you are my everything.” It became a kind of mantra that created the song, even though in the final studio version I think you only hear that phrase once, somewhere in the distance as a backing vocal.
I played this real ’90s breakbeat sort of vibe on my drum kit at home that just looped throughout the track. It had this hypnotic effect rhythmically, and the way it was processed with EQ and everything made it feel really dark and heavy.
As the song developed in the studio, I really wanted to reference David Bowie’s Blackstar, as it’s one of my favourite albums of all time and Bowie influenced this LP a lot.
So I got the great Alex Reeves from Elbow into the studio to lay down a beat that, if you listen to the main drum pattern in Blackstar, it’s very similar. Then Alex develops it into something really special as the track progresses!
I hope you don’t mind, Bowie. Love you!
Renaud Gabriel Pion’s saxophone has become a recurring part of your musical universe since WETLANDS. What is it about that collaboration that continues to unlock new dimensions in your songwriting?
I think a lot of it goes down to trust and respect.
I trust him, and I have so much respect for his playing, and also in his sensibilities; musically but also in a broader holistic sense.
He’s just a wonderful guy and a true artist. The care and consideration he puts into everything he does is unmatched, and that really speaks volumes to me.
I know if I send him something, after he has agreed to collaborate on it, that I’m in really good hands. He lives in the music that he works on and always brings his authentic self to it. That’s all I could ever want from a collaborator, really.
What comes with that is just new flavours, new avenues, and entire new aspects of the songs coming to life.
Across the singles released so far—“Levitate,” “Living With Lucy,” and now “Venus”—there’s a clear emotional progression. Were you consciously introducing listeners to different chapters of Queen of Ashes, or did that narrative reveal itself over time?
I honestly never really thought of it that way, perhaps it was a happy accident?
All the songs are important chapters to me, and I suppose the narrative naturally reveals itself more and more as more songs become available.
Your work often balances danceable grooves with themes of longing, loss, and vulnerability. What fascinates you about placing emotionally heavy stories inside music that still invites movement?
Maybe I’m trying to dance myself out of the heaviness, haha! I don’t really know.
I think there’s nuance and mystery in everything in life. With Queen of Ashes, I was dealing with themes and parts of my life I had never shared before, parts that were really vulnerable and didn’t always put me in a very good light.
I felt that if the music didn’t have some aspect of a danceable groove to it, it would be very hard to digest, or hard to receive.
I’m tricking the listeners, I suppose, getting in the door, so to speak, with the danceable elements. Then you arrive in the house and you’re like, “Oh shit…” but it’s too late by then!
Artists like David Bowie, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and Roxy Music have all embraced transformation and reinvention. How have those influences shaped your own identity as both a songwriter and performer without overshadowing your own voice?
I think they just gave me the confidence not to be afraid of reinventing myself. They gave me the maps.
Ultimately, it’s me moving through the world, so regardless of where the map came from, the direction I take and the output will always be unique to me.
I’m the one using the map, so I think that helps maintain my own artistic voice to some degree.
I’m starting to realise more than ever that uncertainty, and moving into unknown territory, is where the magic lies. It’s in the mystery of things.
Creatively, whenever I get overly familiar, I try to throw myself somewhere I haven’t been before and see what happens.
Throughout Queen of Ashes, love seems less like a relationship and more like an enduring force that continues shaping us long after someone has gone. Do you believe we ever truly move on from the people who define us, or do we simply learn to live alongside those memories?
I far prefer the idea of time being a circle rather than a linear line.
I think we live alongside all of our memories and ghosts. They’re all happening at once, as we move through life, and they continue to collaborate with us.
“Moving on,” though, is a different conversation. If we’re speaking in purely romantic or relationship terms, yes, I believe moving on can occur.
But perhaps it’s more that we have to move on from the person we were when those events happened, rather than moving on from the person in question.
Looking beyond “Venus,” what do you hope listeners discover about themselves after spending time inside the world of Queen of Ashes?
I just want people to listen to it, that’s all I hope for. Everything else is personal to the listener!
What I discovered myself through making this album was how my own sense of identity was slowly being dismantled.
I was both the protagonist and the antagonist of my own story.
Christian Cohle’s “Venus” is out now. His forthcoming album, Queen of Ashes, arrives in October 2026.
