Creepy Crawly is the folky dream-pop project of Bristol-born, Manchester-based songwriter Rachel Cawley. Built around luminous vocals, layered harmonies, and textured guitars, her music blends dreamy indie pop with a subtle sense of melancholy.
Her upcoming sophomore album, “I Feel It On My Skin,” arriving in June 2026, explores memory, longing, and the strange feeling of watching time pass a little faster each year. The lead single, “Buttercup,” captures the headrush of first love during a hazy summer afternoon, where carefree moments with friends and teenage dreams feel endless even as you begin to sense they will not last forever.
We spoke with Rachel about the memories behind “Buttercup,” from a yellow summer dress and afternoons spent lying in the grass with friends to the childhood buttercup game that inspired the song’s central image.
"Buttercup" is described as capturing the runaway headrush of first love during a midsummer heatwave, layered with bittersweet nostalgia. What personal memory sparked the song, and how did that buttercup-strewn riverbank image become the emotional anchor?
I started writing the song just thinking about the colour yellow—I think the first phrase that turned up in amongst my mumbled nonsense was ‘put on the yellow dress’—that sparked a chain of memories. I remember a yellow summer dress I used to wear as a teenager and how it clashed with my hair that was dyed red at the time. I remembered bunking off school at lunchtime with friends and my first ‘real’ boyfriend, where we’d just sit around in the grass in the sunshine and talk about all the things we were thinking we’d do at some point in the future, all those dreams.
There’s also a silly thing we all used to do with buttercups, where you’d pick them and hold them up to someone’s chin—if it turned your skin yellow, it meant you liked butter. I’m not sure why we did it.
The track blends sherbet-sweet harmonies with fuzzy, J Mascis-inspired guitar work while still carrying a melancholic undertone. Can you talk about balancing those bright, dreamy elements with the underlying sense of longing in your production choices?
I think I have a tendency to write inherently sad melodies. When I play this track with a full band, it feels buzzy and fun, but with that hint of melancholy. When I played it as a duo with just myself and a guitarist (Tom), it really felt a lot more melancholic—so the pacing from the drums, the 16ths feel, the bounciness of the bassline, and the stacked harmonies all keep it feeling a little brighter and sunnier. The opening chord of the verse—CMaj7 is my favourite dreamy chord of all time—I started there and kept going!
"This won’t last forever," the closing lines of "Buttercup," really hit on the fleeting nature of those intense youthful feelings. How do you approach writing lyrics that hold onto the intensity of a memory even as the details fade over time?
It’s fair to say I’ve become unhealthily obsessed with the realization that I’m getting older. Of course, we’re all getting older all the time, every day. There’s a great lyric in the Yoshika Colwell song ‘It’s Getting Late’ that nails it—“and I’m older now than I’ve ever been, it’s getting late / and I’m younger than I’ll ever be, it’s getting late.” I wish I’d written that lyric.
And one of the things I love about music is how it can trigger a memory—when a song comes on, it can take you back to a moment in time with incredible intensity. It bothers me that so much of my/our lives are spent just passing through, not feeling much, and forgetting most of it. I’m trying to live with more intensity again—both good and bad.
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Your sound draws clear parallels to bands like Alvvays, The Sundays, Soccer Mommy, and Camera Obscura, all masters of jangly, heartfelt indie with a wistful edge. Which of those artists (or others) have been most influential on Creepy Crawly's evolution, especially for this new era?
That’s such a tricky question for a long-term obsessive listener. The music I was listening to most before making this album was Cassandra Jenkins and Charlotte Cornfield—and I think that influence plays out in instrumentation choices and storytelling lyrics. The jangly influences have been there for a long time—I bought a Rough Trade Shops Indie Pop 1 compilation when I was about 15, and I’ve been listening to a lot of the artists featured on that ever since—The Magnetic Fields, The Pastels, The Vaselines, and Lush. Funnily enough, The Sundays weren’t a big influence until this year—so many people have told me that my music reminded them of the Sundays that I started to listen to them more, and of course, they’re great. One of my favourite hobbies is to take songs apart and work out the mechanics of how they’re made—melodically and harmonically, and the song structure. I love the intersection between the emotion and the engineering in music.
The single was recorded in Manchester with producer Joel Harries and drummer Felix Harrap. What was the collaboration like in the studio, and how did their contributions help shape the shimmering, folky dream-pop sound of “Buttercup”?
Joel is amazing—he produced and mixed my first album, and I turned up a year later with a bigger pile of songs and a desire to make them weirder, and I am so happy with how it has turned out. I tend to make very fleshed-out demos with lots of different layers tracked, but Joel has a great knack for taking them apart and putting them back together in ways that are surprising and sound great.
Felix plays drums on two songs on the record, but he plays live with me when we have full band shows. He’s a fantastic drummer with a great sense of restraint, always doing enough but never overpowering the music. We’d been playing the song live, and I wanted his drum parts to make it onto the recording for this track.
As someone who was born in Bristol and is now based in Manchester, how has moving between those cities, or the UK indie scene more broadly, shaped your music and the themes of nostalgia and transition on the new album?
Bristol is an amazing city, but I grew up about ten miles away in the countryside, and it felt like this cool place that was always slightly out of reach. When I was 18, I had finished my exams and could leave; I was pulled to London like the giant magnet it is. I have a love/hate relationship with London. I moved there to work in the music industry, and I ended up growing up much too fast in that world. Working in the industry put me off the idea of making my own music, and it took more than a decade to get over that. Being in Manchester has maybe been the salve to that problem—everything here feels a bit more relaxed and welcoming. All the touring bands stop here, but the local scene is maybe a bit less of a pressure cooker than London.
With "Buttercup" now out and the full album arriving in June 2026, what are you most excited for fans to experience when they hear “I Feel It On My Skin” in its entirety, whether it's the sonic details, emotional arc, or something else?
I think it’s probably the range of sonic details and different instrumentation choices we made throughout (there are various wobbly synth sounds from my Arturia MicroFreak, and I even (badly) play the lap steel guitar). I’m also excited for people to hear all the hooks and stacked harmonies—I love harmony writing so much.
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