- With a clever blend of rap and pop, ambitious production and bitingly funny lyrics, Shygirl impresses with her long-awaited debut album.
- On TikTok, culture is born, and starry-eyed youth stan the pop stars who can best personify the zeitgeist of their increasingly visual society. Here, UK artist Blane Muise, AKA Shygirl, is one of the app's it-girls. Droves of fans know her as a constantly shape-shifting idol—new multi-coloured hair, long alien nails and larger-than-life costumes are always in the mix. In a recent clip on the platform, one of her new album's hits, "Firefly," overlays the scene as she pouts during a shoot, her upper body swaddled in brown winter wear and raindrop-shaped jewels dangling from her bangs. Her caption? #newcharacterunlocked.
As a pop artist living through an age of hyper-digital socialization, there are few things more appealing than carving a strict divide between one's artist persona and one's true, authentic self. On her 2020 EP, Alias, Shygirl flirted with this idea. She opened up her sonic world via four alter egos—Baddie, Bae, Bovine and Bonk—who spit rapidfire about racks, sex and fast cars across seven songs. But offline, Shygirl, whose music and online presence invokes steely confidence and sexual dominance, has started to feel the pressure of increased visibility.
"So many people have come up to me—and they’ve been really nice, but I’m not always ready," she said in conversation with Doechii for Interview Magazine. "I'm like, 'Oh my god, I can’t believe someone's been looking at me when I've been staring off.' People are so used to having access to every aspect of the people they are into. I enjoy social media, but I don't feel like I'm always entirely myself on Instagram. I don't feel like I can say the jokes I would say in real life on Twitter."
This heightened attention makes Muise's attempt to infuse tenderness into her first album, Nymph, particularly honourable. With its title, the record is partially an effort to write herself—a Black woman who split her time between Wales and Southeast London growing up—into the whimsical tales of the mythical forest creature. The motif is mostly made relevant through the album's music videos and the dreamy, pastoral pop that adorns all her verses in fairy dust. The title is also, obviously, a play on the term nymphomaniac, and quick-lipped sex anthems, already staples in Muise's sonic tool kit, are aplenty on the album.
Over the sleek, minimalistic production of "Nike", she raps about her latest sexcapade through sugar-coated chirps: "He told me Nike / Just do it / Hands on my breasts / And my batty like he knew it." On "Coochie," a charming lullaby about the nether region, her vocals recall the pristine bubblegum coos of fellow alternative pop princess PinkPantheress. Never has the word "coochie" been uttered to sound this innocent and approachable. Near the song's close, a string instrument flutters away and her voice turns breathy, floating with wonder—she asks, "So does that mean, somewhere out there, there's a coochie waiting for me?"
As brash, as bold and as audacious as Muise's songs are, she does not embody all these characteristics all the time in her day-to-day life, and on some of the best moments in the album, Muise beckons to vulnerability. In the first—and my personal favourite—track, "Woe," she exhales over dreamy electronica about the simultaneous privilege and dread of being perceived by her fast-growing audience: "Bitches pree me all time / Do they even know / What's it like this high?" Switching over to a delightfully venomous 8-bar grime loop, her vocals are pitched down and she ponders over her success via an icy hiss. "Little did I know that the movies got it right, yo."
According to a recent GQ profile, Muise has had one serious partnership, and many of her songs are about that one person. Nymph is where she discusses relationship hardships with a seriousness that is unprecedented in her work. Underneath the drowsy video game chimes on "Heaven," for example, are lyrics depicting her frustrations during an off-period with an ex-boyfriend. Speaking to Apple Music about the song, she shared, "There were moments where I was like 'Can we just forget everything and get back together?'" With lines like, "Please ignore all the things I did / I'm here for more than the ride," that open-hearted sincerity is felt. On "Firefly"'s windswept folktronica, Muise's distorted vocals emerge weightless as she nudges a prospective lover to make up their mind. "I guess I need to hear the truth this time / You kept me waiting on a lie / Waiting on a lie / Wasting all my time."
Muise's strength is her satisfyingly languid voice that can veer honey-sweet or cruelly biting in a snap. She's often described in the media as a rapper, but slick bars and an idiosyncratic flow aren't exactly what she's known for. Really, she's a musician adept at using her voice as an instrument, and with it she can convey appealing, addicting hooks. And these strengths are complemented by her crew of reliable producers.
It's been six years since Shygirl released "Want More," her first-ever single created with her friend Sega Bodega, a producer with an affinity for plucky, lurid pop who is now one of her many trusted collaborators, along with Mura Masa, who she worked with on a few singles and a Lady Gaga remix. Bodega and Masa both make an appearance on production credits, as do other A-list artists working within Muise's realm of leftfield electronic music—Arca, Caroline Polachek and Danny L Harle.
Even with a roster of collaborators like this, the record occasionally hits a bump when the ambitious, sometimes challenging production doesn't fit her idiosyncratic flow, like on the Sega Bodega-produced "Little Bit." But on the best moments, her vocals mesh seamlessly with off-kilter backing tracks. "Come For Me," produced by Arca, is a world of ghostly gasps, lurching percussion and eruptions of spritely synths. It's one of Nymph's best tracks because Muise makes use of her hook-writing gifts, and her involvement mostly centres catchy repeated one-liners: "Come when you're called, be easy if I take the lead."
In a 2017 profile of Missy Elliott (an artist Muise discovered thanks to her father's collection), Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah reflects on the purpose of the legendary trash-bag suit in the music video for Elliott's single "The Rain." It "was about taking it all with you—the rarely spoken-about Black woman's pleasure principle," she writes. "The knowledge that you are beautiful. It is having been denied, and returning tender, exuberant, monumental and hyperdimensional." On the latest Shygirl album, Muise's role as the nymph might be her own trash-bag suit. With it, she allows herself to be provocative, otherworldly and beautifully complex all at once.
Tracklist01. Woe
02. Come For Me
03. Shlut
04. Little Bit
05. Firefly
06. Coochie (A Bedtime Story)
07. Heaven
08. Nike
09. Poison
10. Honey
11. Missin U
12. Wildfire