Wearing your heart on your sleeve might seem like a requirement for being a certified pop star but not everyone in the field really lets it all hang out.
Many stick to bright and light and pleasingly shallow and while that’s absolutely fine and still makes for music you very much want to listen to, there’s something about artists combining soul scoring lyrics with music that gets your emotions flowing that feels so innately satisfying.
These five artists not only pour their hearts into their songs but they do so in a way that suggests it’s the only way they know how to live and make art and listening to their tracks makes you realise how good it feels to hear someone sing about the good and the bad of the human condition in a way that really hits home.
So sit back and listen but do not expect to stay unmoved …
“The City is a Graveyard” by Baby Storme
(courtesy official Baby Storme Instagram account)
Riding high on very visible TikTok virality, Baby Storme is a self-taught pianist from Yonkers, New York who, in the words of FLAUNT, “here to shake up the music industry with her own unique sound, a blend of pop and alternative you can’t overlook.”
It’s clear she means to make even more of a name for herself via her music which now includes the affectingly ethereal track, “This City is a Graveyard”, which compares, to winning effect, urban decay and enmotional desolation.
The net effect is profoundly beautiful and moving, aided by a clip actually filmed with permission in a cemetery which sets the scene for the lyrical picture she creates quite perfectly.
But don’t expect Baby Storme to keep doing the same thing over and over with the fashion-loving popstar stressing her love of mixing things up.
In the future, you can expect a lot of variety because I don’t want to keep my music in a box. It’s going to be a lot of rock, a lot of alternative, pop, classical, you name it. It’s going to be a whole lot. (FLAUNT)
“Off the Wall” by Chenayder
(courtesy Soundcloud)
Everything old is new again, and while it many cases, that can feel quite derivative but not if you’re Chenayder, not yet out of her teens, an emerging artist who brings together lofi and indie pop in what Ones to Watch calls “music [which] is a lullaby for the tired soul” and which the artist herself rather poetically tags as “vintage and sorrowful”.
Her song “Off the Wall” is a thing of exquisite aural loveliness, infusing dreamy 80s-inspired synth melodies with emotionally raw lyrics that take a deep dive into what happens when two onetime staunch friends clash and dissolve into acrimony.
Far from militantly decrying her new enemy, Chenayder sounds mournful about the loss of her once strong bonds with this person, forgoing vitriol for understandable and relatable mourning.
The song is a gem lyrically and melodically, so affectingly strong that it’s exciting to think where this young woman will go next, especially as she seems so adept at giving her own musical stamp to decades-old influences while winningly wearing her heart on her clearly very talented sleeve.
“Piggie” by Jazmin Bean
(courtesy YouTube)
Jazmin Bean, known to the English tax department as Jasmine Adams, is an English singer-songwriter, internet celebrity and makeup artist who goes hard lyrically, holding nothing back.
It’s on gloriously emboldeningly display in “Piggie”, a song which they explain to DIY was “inspired by the predatory and toxic relationships they encountered in their teens” and which marries full-on lyrical observation with some catchy in-your-face music that matches every pointed word with a matching intense note.
When I got out of rehab, I looked back at pictures of myself and saw the events that were happening around me at the time. I was three months clean and had lots of realisations about my life. I didn’t want to combat it with a sad song. Instead, I’m poking fun at some of the men I met at the time.
’Piggie’ is the closest track to the ‘Worldwide Torture’ era, so I wanted to bridge the gap between the old and new sound. But honestly, what’s coming next… I’m not even ready for. (DIY)
“The Worst Person Alive” by G Flip
(courtesy official Facebook page)
When you’re in the depths of the glowing wonder of what you think at the time is true, undying love, it’s hard to conceive of a time when things may not be so rosy.
Actually forget “rosy”; downright nasty might be a better term, a sobering development that the immensely talented Aussie singer covers incisively in her “The Worst Person Alive” which she describes this way:
This song is about feeling like the worst person alive after being the one to instigate a breakup. One day you’re in a relationship and the other person is your number 1, they know everything about you, they know you better than anyone else, you’ve had some of your best memories with that person and then you break up and you sadly become strangers. I really hate that it’s all or nothing. It’s such a drastic change – ‘Last year I was the love of your life, now I’m the worst person alive’. (NME)
As with many of her songs, G Flip aka Georgia Claire Flipo, lays it all out, holding back nothing and going deep into what it’s like when something rich intimate and beautiful becomes anything but and you have to exist in the new toxic emotional landscape that results.
“Can I Shower at Yours” by Amy Shark
(courtesy official Facebook page)
Amy Louise Billings, known professionally as Amy Shark, who hails from the Gold Coast in Australia’s state of Queensland, is a singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer who came close to calling it quits before hitting it big with the song “Adore”.
Now a household name for many music-loving Aussies, Shark is following her standout track “Only Wanna Be With You” with “Can I Shower At Yours” which gloriously explores what it’s like to fall for someone quickly and completely.
It’s a blissfully supercharged moment that the artist captures near-perfectly, helped along by an accompanying clip that really has some fun with playful choreography and some wonderfully fun performers.
The song is very much heart on sleeve material from a singer-songwriter who isn’t afraid to say all things we think but fear uttering; I mean, who actually comes and says “If you only knew what I wanna do. How I wanna lose my mind with you. Waste every second of my life with you. When I go, will you miss me?”
We’re afraid how that will play and if we’ll scare them off but Shark isn’t and it makes for a liberating piece of compulsively listenable, truthful pop.
SONGS, SONGS AND MORE SONGS EXTRA!
Annie Lennox and Alicia Keys together performing an iconic Eurythmics track? Yes please and very much thank you!