It is a disconcerting experience to look at your tweenage daughter’s Spotify playlists and realise that you have never heard of any of the artists. You may be aware of young stars who are hitting the charts, such as Billie Eilish, Khalid and Lauv, but what about Clairo, Khai Dreams, Beabadoobee, Girl in Red, Oohyo, Mxmtoon, Eli, Sundial and Conan Gray?
I would love to tell you that my daughter discovered them because she is a restless musical adventurer, dedicated to digging out obscurities from the cutting edge of rock and pop, but she isn’t. She is just doing what millions of other teens and tweens seem to be doing.
You can tell from the streaming figures. Girl in Red’s biggest tracks have been streamed 9m times, Khai Dreams’ 13m times. A video for Clairo’s Pretty Girl has racked up more than 30m YouTube views in the past 18 months: it consists of Clairo sitting on her bed wearing earbuds, miming into the webcam on her laptop while trying on a succession of sunglasses.
These figures obviously would not give Ariana Grande sleepless nights, but they seem remarkable given that these artists have virtually no media profile, no radio play, most don’t seem to have a record deal and they barely give interviews. A Google search reveals that Girl in Red is a gay 20-year-old from Norway who sometimes posts one-line explanations of what her songs are about (“Don’t fall in love with a straight girl”; “Be urself”; “Sad lol”) and that Clairo – real name Claire Cottrill – has juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and caused a degree of online controversy when it was discovered that her father was a marketing executive with connections to the music business, leading to false accusations that she wasn’t a DIY artist at all but an “industry plant”. But that’s about it.
“I think a lot of the artists making this music are really young,” says Josh Edwards, an A&R who has been keeping a close watch: he manages Dodie, an artist who went from posting videos online to the Top 10. “The music they’re making is very much online, and there’s a feeling that if you put too much of yourself out there on the internet it can be quite dangerous.”
For want of a better name, you might call it underground bedroom pop, an alternate musical universe that feels like a manifestation of a generation gap: big with teenagers – particularly girls – and invisible to anyone over the age of 20, because it exists largely in an online world that tweens and teens find easy to navigate, but anyone older finds baffling or risible. It doesn’t need Radio 1 or what is left of the music press to become popular because it exists in a self-contained community of YouTube videos and influencers; some bedroom pop artists found their music spread thanks to its use in the background of makeup tutorials or “aesthetic” videos, the latter a phenomenon whereby vloggers post atmospheric videos of, well, aesthetically pleasing things.
“There’s a culture that exists with people on the internet to help others exist on the internet,” says Edwards. “It’s not: ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’, more: ‘I like this thing, I’ll share it.’ You get people such as Emma Chamberlain [an American YouTuber with 7m followers], who recommends songs in videos and has a playlist on Spotify. People like that seem to able to deep dive better than anybody I’ve ever known. Or this music comes up as a recommended video if you’re watching similar things on YouTube. It’s very accessible, and a lot of the songs are really short so you can consume loads of them in a short space of time.”
You would struggle to call it a scene exactly, but it is definitely bound by a loose aesthetic. It is richly melodic, but lo-fi and home-recorded. As with Eilish’s early releases, you can hear the influence of Lana Del Rey and hip-hop; more bizarrely, it occasionally sounds not unlike the kind of indie music that Sarah Records might have released in the late 80s.
Its lyrics tend to be intimate and relevant to its audience – heartbreak, sexuality, depression, confusion – and it feels raw and unmediated, untainted by the machinations of the music industry. In fact, it is hard not to see its rise in popularity as a reaction to what Jamie Oborne, the founder of Dirty Hit – the label that brought us the 1975 and Wolf Alice, and which recently signed Bea Kristi (Beabadoobee) – calls “music that’s been A&Red and styled to death”: an audience that are regularly, snottily derided as mindless sheep who will listen to anything marketed at them, ignoring whatever the music industry has decided is relatable to them and taking matters into their own hands.
“I’m not surprised at all,” says Oborne. “It’s the same as Billie Eilish: she’s a positive role model, she’s not sexualised, she’s not talking bullshit 24/7, she’s not just putting out … pollution. With Bea, at our first meeting, I said: ‘We’re not doing anything except what she wants to do.’ She’s teaching us all how to market her music.”
A video shot at Beabadoobee’s first live show and subsequently posted to her Instagram seems to speak volumes. Kristi is being mobbed by fans who look exactly like her: if you hadn’t seen a photo of her in advance, you’d find it impossible to pick out the artist from her audience. Somewhere at the side of the crowd lurks a male figure. It is her labelmate Matty Healy, passing virtually unnoticed: a pop star with three platinum albums and a fistful of Brits being ignored in favour of a girl still at school, who last year posted a muffled recording a friend had made of Coffee – the first song she ever wrote – on Spotify and Bandcamp, and watched as the streaming figures went nuts after “someone put it on a YouTube video”.
“I actually don’t know why it was successful,” says Kristi, who wrote Coffee under the influence of Daniel Johnston and Mazzy Star. “I like to think it’s because it’s something raw. I had no experience, no clue – it’s just me and my guitar and my friend Haresh whistling, recorded on a shitty mic. I feel like something raw touches people more.” She was “kind of off” when record labels started approaching her, but eventually signed with Dirty Hit – which recently released her EP Patched Up – because “they allowed me to do whatever I want”.
Edwards isn’t sure how many artists will follow that path, saying they are, instead, “self-funding, making their own way”. Still, he says, it probably won’t be too long before a record label tries to manufacture a new pop artist with a lo-fi aesthetic; when a real, rather than imagined, “industry plant” appears. “There are parts of what this bedroom pop world is doing that mainstream pop currently can’t, because it’s about limited resources, about being organic, not too overproduced or prim and proper. Of course,” he laughs, “that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a time when mainstream pop won’t give it a go.”
