Leaving the important stuff to chance isn’t Shygirl’s style. First aid kit, wind-up radio, batteries: earlier this morning, the singer filled her online shopping basket in preparation for impending disaster. She had read a news article advising households to put together an emergency kit.
She woke her boyfriend, who was asleep in bed next to her. I’ve got the water purifying tablets, everything!” It’s a sticky September afternoon in east London, and the singer, whose real name is Blane Muise, introduces herself as “Shy” and slides into the booth opposite me at an Italian trattoria. She first burst on to the club scene with the naughty, pulsating Want More in 2016, and in the decade since, the singer, rapper and DJ has applied the same rigour to her career as she has to her emergency prepping, going from cult underground artist to rising pop star, opening arenas for Beyoncé and Charli xcx, winning a Mobo award in 2024, and appearing in Madonna’s recent Confessions II – The Film, in which she shared a toilet stall with Arca and Richard E Grant.
She has also grafted hard at falling in love and entering a long-term relationship, which is the subject of her forthcoming second album, Swallow!. An epic, soaring rock record, with more than a touch of William Orbit-era Madonna, it is an ode to intimacy, vulnerability and mutual devotion. Love, she says, is “scary, exciting and big”.
The 33-year-old’s particular mix of hard and soft, of brash swagger, blunt humour and slippery feminine desire has found an exhilarating new form of expression. In December 2022, Shygirl was preparing to go on tour. Her debut album Nymph had received rave reviews and she was finally earning enough money from music to rent her own place.
You’re like: OK, now I have it. Now what?” she says, tossing her tangerine corkscrew curls. She was hungover from a night out while browsing the members-only dating app.
When they matched, she asked him to send a voice note: “I don’t like meeting up with people unless I can hear what they sound like and their cadence.” Satisfied, she invited him over to watch one of her favourite films, Alien. She was leaving for Australia later that week, but they kept talking for almost two months. When she decided to extend her trip and add a visit to Japan, “I was like: fuck it.
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