"On stage, it's like my true self," says Chloé Pelletier-Gagnon, the 34-year-old Québecoise artist who records as Klô Pelgag.

"I feel like it's a safe space, [where] you can do anything you want. More than in real life, when I'm walking the street, and my neighbours are like 'look at the sky today... maybe tomorrow it will rain!' And I'm like 'yeah, maybe'.

"In that kind of situation I feel like I'm acting. It's supposed to be real life, but I think real life is more difficult, sometimes, for me than the stage."

In conversation with Anthony Carew on The International Pop Underground, Pelletier-Gagnon talks about her beginnings in music, her love of the theatrical but revulsion at that word, and her new Klô Pelgag LP, Abracadabra.

Producing the album herself for the first time, she overcame her fears of having "the double role" of artist/producer, discovering something "more personal, more free... [that] only I could find."

"The best thing for me, in music," she says, "is when you forget what you're doing... You forget to eat, and to drink water. And then you turn back and you're like 'oooh, it's 4AM! I have to go to bed'. And the next day you're listening to what you did and it's like: 'what happened?'"

Feature image: Benoît Paillé