The vocals you hear on Rosie H Sullivan’s Serpent’s Tooth were recorded the day she wrote it. They were captured as a demo, but she kept them for the finished release. Sometimes the hardest decision in a recording studio is knowing when not to record another take.
For Scottish singer-songwriter Rosie H Sullivan, that instinct sits at the heart of Serpent’s Tooth, a striking new release accompanied by Mollie. Both songs lean into a darker, more mysterious side of her songwriting, yet the story behind them is surprisingly spontaneous: a new guitar tuning, an exchange of voice notes and a lyric that began as something else entirely.
In an original interview with Imminent Infinity, Rosie takes us back to the voice notes she exchanged with collaborator Jack Hardman, the unusual guitar tuning that sparked the song and the performance she decided not to redo. It is a conversation about trusting an idea while it still feels new.
A title found by accident
The origins of Serpent’s Tooth lie in an experiment with the unusual CGCFCE guitar tuning, which Rosie discovered through Trevor Dann’s book The Search for Nick Drake. She sent some ideas to collaborator and co-producer Jack Hardman, who returned a spooky fingerpicking pattern with an improvised vocal melody.
“At one point it sounded like he mumbled ‘serpent tooth’ and I immediately knew that would be the title,” Rosie told us.
That accidental phrase sent her researching serpents and their Celtic and mythological meanings on a train from Edinburgh to London. The song draws on imagery of rebirth, shedding skin and the darker sides of human experience, including betrayal. The meaning was not mapped out before the first note was played; it developed through collaboration.
“It was definitely one of those songs that came out in a flow state, and the meaning emerged along the way.”
It is a reminder of how songwriting often works at its best. You can sit down with an idea of what you want to say, but sometimes the song has other plans.
The demo vocals that stayed
Asked whether she’d ever kept an imperfect recording because its emotion couldn’t be recreated, Rosie pointed straight back to Serpent’s Tooth.
“I think it captures the feeling of writing the song and the newness of that. I think sometimes when you give yourself too many takes, it can lose the magic. There is definitely an emotion present in the way I use my voice in the recording, and I never wanted to lose that.”
As someone who records and produces music myself, that decision is the part of this story I keep coming back to. You can comp another vocal, correct its timing or spend hours refining its tone. What you cannot simply manufacture is the feeling of discovering a song for the first time. Rosie’s choice is not a rejection of production — the arrangement continued to develop — but a reminder that the job is to serve the performance, not polish the life out of it.
That does not mean the arrangement remained untouched. After playing the song with her band, Rosie realised it needed a bigger ending. Drummer Ryan Bradley recorded the outro drums, which she now considers one of her favourite parts of the track.
It is a lovely balance: the immediacy of an original vocal performance alongside an arrangement allowed to grow around it.
Two songs from the same weekend
Mollie is not simply an unrelated extra track. Rosie and Jack wrote it during the very same weekend as Serpent’s Tooth, making the pairing feel natural. The two songs are also being paired on a special double-A-side 7-inch vinyl release, offered exclusively through Edinburgh’s Thorne Records, according to the official press kit.
“They both explore a bit of a darker tone than previous songs I have done,” Rosie said. Written so close together, she feels the songs complement one another.
That shift also allows a little more ambiguity into her writing. Rosie spoke about the vulnerability of sharing personal music and how important it is to trust the people she writes with. The newer songs, she said, explore a more mysterious side of expression: saying something meaningful without necessarily explaining everything.
Keeping the human element
There is a clear thread running from Rosie’s earliest recordings to the new release. Her song So It Is was recorded in one take in her parents’ garden, and that appetite for capturing a moment is still there.
“I think it’s so important to be playful and not take it too seriously in the studio.”
What comes through is not simply a willingness to leave mistakes in, but the importance of feeling free enough to experiment in the first place.
From the Isle of Lewis to the songs still waiting
Growing up on the Isle of Lewis gave Rosie a close connection to nature and a vibrant music scene. Her time on the island, and eventually leaving it, appeared frequently in her earlier work. She says she feels less drawn to writing about those experiences now, although she still has a fondness for traditional music alongside her indie-folk sound.
“I still feel like my previous songs are like jigsaw pieces that make up ‘me’; they are all a huge part of who I am and my musical journey,” she says. Interestingly, some tracks on Phases were written after Serpent’s Tooth and Mollie.
Release order, it turns out, is not always writing order. Some songs wait years until their moment arrives.
What would success look like?
We ended by asking Rosie to imagine looking back at this stage of her career in five years. What would she want to change, and what would she hope remained the same?
“I would love to call this my full-time job. In this day and age, it seems harder for that to be a possibility, but if I can fill my days with being creative and doing music, I’ll be happy,” she says. There are other hopes too: more shows outside the UK, a tour with her band and a debut album. But her answer is not only about milestones.
“I never want to lose the reason why I do all this.”
Rosie wrote her response the night after a launch party for Serpent’s Tooth and Mollie at Thorne Records. It reminded her why sharing music matters: the collective experience between artist and audience, and the people behind the scenes who help make it possible.
That sense of connection runs through the entire conversation. A collaborator’s half-formed vocal idea becomes a song title. A drummer gives its ending new weight. An imperfect vocal from the very first session becomes the one everyone hears.
For Rosie H Sullivan, perhaps the challenge is not to make every moment flawless. It is to recognise which moments are worth keeping.
The paired release Serpents Tooth // Mollie arrived on 30 October 2026. Mollie had also been released separately on 30 September 2026.
Interview by Scott for Imminent Infinity. With thanks to Rosie H Sullivan and Calum Morrison at 7A MGMT.
More artist interviews from Imminent Infinity
For more conversations about songwriting and finding your voice, read our interview with Fright Years — another act represented by 7A MGMT — and our Mini Disc interview about the writing of Whale Song.
