LÉON Takes Charge Billed as the best Swedish pop export since Robyn, the indie-pop siren starts her own imprint and makes music on her own terms By Yeow Kai Chai You can hear instantly why Katy Perry would be besotted with her disco-pop song ‘Tired of Talking’, tweeting “she’s one to watch.” When the then-22-year-old LÉON, otherwise known to her parents as Lotta Lindgren, posted the track from her debut EP Treasure to the music-sharing platform SoundCloud in July 2015,  the song exploded, amassing millions of plays and gaining celebrity fans like Perry. After all, the [...]

Vandetta, the Doyenne of Communication Vanessa Fernandez has a million things she wants to do, but at the core of it, she enjoys creating and communicating with her music. By Yeow Kai Chai Vanessa Fernandez is reclining on a pristine beach in Okinawa, the sub-tropical island paradise off the south-western tip of Japan. Well, at least that’s how you’d imagine her. After all, you could hear waves lapping gently, a ceaseless ebb and flow echoing her mellifluous flow of ideas. Under normal circumstances, one would be ridiculously jealous of her, but this is Vanessa we’re talking [...]

Beware Stella Donnelly, She May Be Watching You The Welsh-Aussie singer-songwriter loves people-watching – which explains why she has become one of the icons in the #MeToo conversation. By Yeow Kai Chai A brief listing promoting Stella Donnelly’s gig for her recent Australian tour sums up her contrarian appeal: “She belts out her songs and stories with the voice of an angel and the mouth of a sailor.” So, it is: the Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter revels in counterpoints, delivering disarming folk-pop melodies with a killer lyrical sting. Serendipitously, she’s also become part of the zeitgeist-defining #MeToo movement [...]

How SOAK didn’t let success get into her head Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson on the importance of ambition and staying grounded By Yeow Kai Chai Few teenagers in the world could say they have won a country’s highest musical honour, so it is certainly a feather in the cap for SOAK, otherwise known as Bridie Monds-Watson, who was awarded the Irish Choice Music Prize – two months before she turned 20 in 2016. Most impressively, it was for her ethereal, folky 2015 debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream. It also nabbed the Northern [...]

Goat Girl take No Prisoners The South London post-punks give as good it as it gets By Yeow Kai Chai Take it or leave it – that pretty much fuels the defiant post-punk shenanigans of Goat Girl, the British post-punk quartet who named themselves after Goat Boy, the priapic, porn-loving alter ego of the late American comedian and iconoclast Bill Hicks. It’s a particularly audacious name, appropriating what some may deem a misogynistic character from another era, and spawning a dialogue with it. So what was the motivation behind it? On the line from her home [...]

Charly Bliss doesn’t take life for granted How singer Eva Hendricks pours her heart out on her band’s new album Young Enough and discovers herself By Yeow Kai Chai For Eva Hendricks, the effervescent singer of the fast rising Brooklyn power-pop quartet Charly Bliss, being in a band is a dream come true – for her parents, who are music devotees. Growing up in Westport, Connecticut, Eva and older brother Sam grew up jamming together – he on drums, their eldest brother on guitar, and she would sing along – a sibling-bonding ritual which paid off. [...]