John Glacier:
Breaking the Ice

John Glacier is anything but cold. Arriving at a cavernous East London café that doubles as a record store, florist, and unofficial workspace, she is all arms outstretched, huge grin, an overspilling Burberry Messenger hanging from the crook of an arm as she goes in for a side hug. Glacier may be a little shy, eyes initially darting left and right uncertainly, fiddling with her Princess Flower ring. But cold? Not at all.

She shrugs off her huge Moncler, flops onto the sofa, and orders a Dry January-defying passionfruit daiquiri — it is 12:30pm after all. It’s less than a year since the release of her debut album, February 2025’s mercurial, magnetic, rather magnificent Like A Ribbon, but Glacier is ready to celebrate her next, which she announces today. It’s called Lack of Joy Is Death. Though some tracks are still in demo form, it’s an immediate, life-affirming, downright ebullient offering that flits between rave, jazz, jungle, atypical electronica, and sometimes just weird, eerie synths. Collaborators include producers Benny Cassette, Kwes Darko, Take A Daytrip, and The Avalanches, as well as Clapton rapper Rimzee. “I made it last year — I’m addicted to writing,” she says of the swift follow-up. “I wanted to call it Lack of Joy Is Death because of the state of the world. It’s been a sham for a second now, and as humans we’ve gone too far. We’ve got a skewed value system.”

John has a lot to say about the dissolution of society, but we cover some background first. She was born sometime in the mid-nineties (she’s vague about her age, deftly sidestepping with a giggling “it keeps changing”) and brought up on nearby Southwold Road in Hackney. Her childhood sounds lively, busy, loving. She’s the second eldest of seven children born to Jamaican parents; her dad ran a Caribbean food store (known over the years as Utopia, Back Yard, and, more recently, Good To Go), and her granddad had a huge vinyl collection. “Predominantly it was reggae, dancehall, and soca, but a lot of country, too — ‘cos Jamaicans love a bit of country,” she laughs, adding she was also obsessed with Britney, Shania, UK garage, and grime. She spent summer holidays “in a hoodie, riding on my bike with my friends, a proper tomboy,” writing poetry and teaching herself harmonica, the kazoo, and the ukulele — “anything silly really.” It wasn’t all idyllic, of course. The streets she played on have long been gentrified; the neighborhood’s notorious Murder Mile is now littered with Lime bikes and natural wine bars. “Yeah, Hackney is different these days. It was an interesting place to grow up. The community was lovely, but there were challenges. In my era, almost every teenager knew someone that had been stabbed, which is disturbing — that that was defined as normal for kids.”

Glacier was in her late teens when she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a chronic genetic condition that affects many parts of the body, including the joints, vital organs, and even the skin; Glacier also deals with conditions like Raynaud’s and asthma as a result. “It’s annoying and a burden. There’s no logic to it. It’s an umbrella condition so you have a baseline condition that attaches itself to other random bullshit that you’re supposed to just experience and deal with. It affects everything.” It’s also massively under-researched. “There’s not a lot of funding for it so if you go to the doctors for help, a lot of times you’re not met with that. So yeah, more funding for EDS, please!”

It’s a cruel catch-22: the demands of being a touring musician exacerbate her symptoms, while the unpredictability of flare-ups makes maintaining a consistent career nearly impossible. “Throughout the whole of last year, because life has been so busy, which I’m grateful for, it meant that my health has flared up,” she explains. “That’s what EDS is going to do if you’re doing too much, if you’re too active, if it doesn’t like something — and it chooses randomly what it does and doesn’t want to ignore.”

John escaped incumbent negativity through poetry and later music, teaching herself to make beats on Logic and GarageBand. “I needed somewhere to express myself and I didn’t have that world around me. So, I created it myself.”

In-between jobs — behind the till at Utopia and as a facilitator for Mouth That Roars, a film workshop for teenagers with physical and learning disabilities — Glacier built a following on SoundCloud with since-deleted tracks like “A Child was Sad so I made this in front of her to make her laugh.” After meeting Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn at various parties, she released her first project SHILOH: Lost For Words in 2021. It was a gorgeously glitchy 25 minutes that drew comparison to Dean Blunt and Shygirl, but Glacier is incomparable really, sitting inside, behind, and in front of so many of her contemporaries. Where does John see herself on the British rap map? She grins. “I think if there was a town for UK rappers they’d put me on the outskirts! It’s not that I don’t really fit in, I just don’t really care if I fit in or not. I have my own name; I have my own bubble. It’s a great place to be.”

She further proved her singularity with the Sampha, Flume, and Eartheater-featuring Like A Ribbon, which she released on storied British indie label, Young, home to FKA Twigs and Robyn. Glacier’s ice-cold raps reflect on alienation, digital overwhelm, disappointment, but also faith, self-reliance, and the environment, too — her surname refers to the ongoing destruction of the planet. She released a deluxe version last August with additional production by Clams Casino and Sonny Moore, better known as Skrillex. Glacier and Moore made “Couldn’t Get Back” in an undisclosed location which she jokingly calls “Batman’s cave,” and partied together afterwards at the excruciatingly cool club M.O.T. in South London. “He’s lovely, so warm, legit one of the nicest people in music. It was a wonderful experience.”

Skrillex isn’t her only high-profile fan; Caroline Polachek, Rosalía, and Skepta are also admirers and the fashion industry unequivocally loves John. Glacier, who appears taller than 5’7”, has walked for Hood By Air and Marine Serre, modeled for Stone Island, and her songs have soundtracked runways and campaigns for Lacoste, Burberry, Chanel, and Alexander McQueen. She features alongside Hunter Schafer, Carey Mulligan, and Liu Wen in “Image of an Image,” Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 campaign conceived by the American visual artist Anne Collier. “I was like, all these big names and then me? What the fuck,” she exclaims. Of course, she works with Prada because, well, Prada, but John has strict stipulations for collaborations. “It might sound dumb, but it’s so important to me to work with nice people. I love Prada because it’s the people at Prada that make Prada Prada. The team has been very supportive of me and my music.”

It’s a lot for a girl from Southwold. It’s a lot for anyone, really. And she often struggles to make sense of her success. “Clearly, I’m still adapting to it all. It’s all so… hard to put into words.”

But it’s not simply success she’s coping with; she’s had health issues, too. In addition to EDS, she was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2025. She doesn’t say which sort, and I don’t ask. But she does say that she had long suspected its presence. “I’ve been severely unwell before all my shows. I love performing so I still did them, but it took a massive strain. When I finally got my diagnosis, it was like, OK. I knew I had cancer the whole time, from years ago.” The tumor has since been removed, though she is still waiting to hear the results of her surgery before she makes too many decisions about promoting the new album. Still, she will be playing at LA’s Natural History Museum in May, and plans for future performances to be in equally intimate spaces. “That’ll be lovely because the set will be among the exhibits.”

Last November, she posted a snippet about her illness on Instagram: “Cancer couldn’t beat my arse, glasto on the stage I park/ Sticks n stones can’t break my bones.” Did she feel as though she had to tell people? “I’d pulled out of an American tour, and it got to a point where I knew I’d have to cancel other events. When you do what I call public work, people have a lot of opinions. I didn’t have the capacity to listen anymore, so I had to say, ‘This is going on, hear me out or don’t, but now you know.’ It’s helped me feel more comfortable about when I need to pull out of something. I feel less restless about it.”

Although I was wary of bringing up Glacier’s illness, the subject of cancer is inevitably threaded through our conversation. When we first meet, we talk about a recent solo trip to Ibiza which she booked to find “a bit of normalcy.” It took time to adjust to being alone but after the first day, she ventured out to restaurants and walked around the Castle of Ibiza “in Burberry heels for some reason.” She read bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions and Fuck You Cancer by Deborah James. Did she find the latter helpful? “Yeah, I did because it’s just a warped experience that you can’t really put into words. Though she has, and it’s funny.” Does humor help bring levity? “It’s important to find those pockets and try to give life to that side of any experience, because it’s kind of what you eat: don’t feed the beast, you know? If I’ve got positive here,” she gestures to one side, “let me try and keep adding onto that.”

This attitude prevails on Lack of Joy Is Death, which is cheeky, droll, ravey, swaggy, and braggy. It’s just not quite like anything else you’ve ever heard. It sounds like she had a great time recording it. For example, the brilliantly boisterous “Bond Girl” was spontaneously created with Take A Daytrip in LA. “I was meant to go for a break, but the writing addict in me said, ‘Actually, let’s go studio.’” Cassette is, like all collaborators she mentions, “lovely” — same goes for Robbie Chater, who slid in the DMs last year. “I’ve been a fan for so long. And it sounds cool; The Avalanches and John Glacier!”

She has a lot to say, particularly on The Avalanches-assisted “Something Alive”; she takes aim at ineffective British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the state arming of genocide, the devaluing of disabled people, and the rise of the far right. But this is far from a heavy record deluged in political rhetoric. “It is about the state of the world because even with freedom, or what we think is freedom, there’s oppression. But I wanted a more uplifting album. Being Caribbean, in times of oppression we always turn to dance, we always turn to joy. Jamaica has undergone slavery, genocide, colonization: but look at Carnival. You can’t kill the stories, you can’t kill the dancing; you can’t kill the joy, you can’t kill the culture. Once you let a culture die, that’s when you have true death.”

Inevitably, this leads us to consider that same attitude towards illness. “I was severely unwell before they [diagnosed me], but one thing that kept me going was my pockets of joy; they kept me alive. Kept me going.” And friends? She breaks into a rare frown. “Everyone knows what cancer is and if certain people can’t be there then… I just think they’re a bit of a cunt. And that’s OK. I think I needed that anyway. Sometimes you need to keep your light open for yourself. You get a crazy zoom out with a health issue like this. You see too much. I’ve seen too much too early.”

We’ve been together nearly two hours and I’m conscious the conversation has gotten heavy. We catch up on the phone a few days later to clarify a few points and I emphasize how uplifting Lack Of Joy Is Death is. “That makes me so happy to hear. We need fun, and via fun, we have community often, as well. With Like A Ribbon, you could share it with others, but often I find that people would rather sit with it by themselves. With Lack Of Joy Is Death, we’re gonna get together and be loud and abrasive, and we’re gonna be ourselves and we’re gonna have fun.”

Is she happy? “I’m very happy with the work and the world I’ve created. I’m very happy with the collaborations that I’ve been able to be a part of.”

She may not be a household name quite yet, but given what she’s already achieved, I wonder what success looks like to Glacier? “I hope people get the message I’m trying to put across with the album. But also, if they don’t, I just hope they enjoy it.” How about the bigger picture? Her response melts me. “I’d like to have a family and be financially stable. I’m proud of my parents and I’d like to have kids that are proud of me. But if I don’t have kids, then I hope I can be proud of myself for the choices I’ve made and sticking to being me and doing things how I want to do them. That’s it really.”

John Glacier. Cold? Never.