Tastemakers: What's NME's Rhian Daly listening to this week?

Rhian Daly

Everything about Sir Babygirl (real name Kelsie Hogue) is intriguing. She first started making music because of Lisa Simpson. She manipulates her voice from smooth purrs to strangled half-wails, which are somehow more addictive than her normally pretty vocals.

Debut track Heels, written to free herself from a cycle of “disappointing half relationships”, features lines such as, “The mind’s a funny fruit to sell at the market” that practically beg you to analyse them. Her debut album was, apparently, recorded in her native New Hampshire woodland over the course of a year, yet it sounds like it was born on the dancefloor.

The bubblegum pop artist lands between Charli XCX and St Vincent, and Heels shares a similar retro-futuristic sensibility with the former. Hogue said her aim was to recall the sounds of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson, but “make it sound gay as hell.” It isn’t hard to imagine Heels as a reworked version of something off of Annie Clark’s Masseduction either, while there’s an air of PC Music about its playful glitch and gloss. Heels is a fascinating, fun step into Sir Babygirl’s vibrant world.



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