The 24-year-old French-Algerian singer-songwriter Lolo Zouaï is one of pop’s most beguiling new voices. Entering a cultural landscape that newly celebrates being bilingual (see: BTS; Rosalía), the New York-based artist combines French and English in her delicate songs.
Zouaï started making waves via her SoundCloud page, but found herself frustrated with the industry when, aged 19, she was flown out to Los Angeles by a label that then ignored her. Later, though, she gained some songwriting credits on enigmatic singer HER’s self-titled Grammy-winning LP, and earlier this year she collaborated with Blood Orange on the glimmering track Jade.
That Zouaï’s debut, released earlier this month, is called High Highs to Low Lows feels telling: this is an artist embracing the peaks and troughs of life with what she describes as her “bittersweet bangers”. Indeed, her lyrics are full of soft, sad youthful anxieties. On Blue, she sings: “Staring at my white wall, the Aaliyah poster/ Swear this is the last time I wanna be hungover”, before stating she can’t even look at her phone.
Full of luminescent songs that meld synths, R&B and pared-down pop, it’s a zeitgeisty sound, but every so often Zouaï channels old-time French crooners and the lithe Arabic tunes her dad played when she was growing up. “I see the world as my home,” she told US magazine Complex last year. “I don’t want to limit myself to one place.”
