Weeks ago, we started asking people what music they were listening to. And over and over again, we heard, “not much.” A few had dipped toes into Addison Rae or the new Lorde album. Many had migrated to podcasts or audiobooks. One editor’s Spotify algorithm had been taken over by “Chill Lowfi Study Beats.”
The consensus was clear: we were in a music rut. Which felt strange considering the season. There’s always been a special relationship between music and summer: the festivals, the boomboxes, the stadium tours. In 2017, SZA’s Ctrl blasted from every beachfront and Bushwick rooftop. Last year, Charli XCX rewrote the script with brat.
This year, things feel more diffuse. At the same time, there’s never been a more exciting moment in music. So this week, we’re showcasing three artists you should be paying attention to. They come bearing fresh perspectives on the industry, niche sets of extremely online references, and work that reminds us what it’s like to feel something.
By the end of last year, SAILORR couldn’t escape her own face. In November, she dropped “POOKIE’S REQUIEM,” a breakup ballad equal parts scorned, self-lacerating, and mournful. A diss track of sorts, it eviscerated both her ex and his new girlfriend with terminally online precision.
“To whatever bitch you got in Bushwick … Pussy leakin’ mood board makin’ / Stole my memes and bump my music,” she sings in the opening verse before twisting the knife in the chorus: “I hope you’re happy / Got you a mini-me.”
It’s not the first pop song to level poser allegations — recall Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” or “Common People” by Pulp. But this one was aimed squarely at a generation preoccupied with the “authenticity” of one’s internet persona. The specificity worked; to date, the track has more than 27 million Spotify streams. Within two months, Grammy-nominated R&B artist Summer Walker had hopped on a remix, placing SAILORR alongside Walker collaborators like Kendrick Lamar and Usher, and boosting the track to No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot R&B Songs.
Soon, every algorithm on every app was pumping out SAILORR content, from her own music videos to 10-minute dissections of her sound, style, and identity. All of which multiplied across social media and flung her further into viral fame. “I hated that — seeing my face on the internet all the time, seeing what people would say about me,” SAILORR says. And yet, for the 26-year-old musician, it was almost impossible to look away — from herself, from the comments, from the discourse. “It was like a drug.”
To ride out the momentum, SAILORR packed up in her hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, and moved out to LA. At first, the move felt like a gamble. “I was spiraling — I was not doing OK,” she says, recalling those early months. She had temporarily moved in with her current boyfriend, living off savings from bartending while waiting for a contract from BuVision — a label acquired by Atlantic Records in February — to come through. “I was like, ‘I’m straight,’ but then a month goes by and you’re like, ‘Am I gonna be straight?’”
But of course, it all worked out. In May, SAILORR dropped her debut mixtape, From Florida’s Finest, and cemented her status as R&B’s next great hope. Now, she’s rattling through the to-do list of your typical ascendant superstar: international press, studio sessions on both sides of the Atlantic, fielding DMs from the likes of Doja Cat and booking summer festival slots.
That’s what brings her to London, where we’re meeting: a two-week trip bookended by two major gigs. First, a show at Camden’s Jazz Café, the final stop on a sold-out tour that took her to six US states and, for the first time, overseas. Then a slot on Wireless Festival’s 20th anniversary lineup, curated by Drake.
Right now, she’s smack-bang in the center of that whirlwind, picking her way through a mezze board in the lobby of the sterile Hilton she currently calls home. Here, amongst the professional laptop bros, SAILORR sticks out like a neon sign. Low-rise Heaven jeans, a custom office-siren-meets-coquette top designed by her longtime collaborator VALLY GIRL, thrifted $5 kitten heels, and a Louis Vuitton bag adorned with Monchhichi charms and a Tamagotchi she hasn’t yet activated for fear of killing it. Not a Labubu girl then? “Just not on this bag,” she grins. “But lowkey, Labubus are basic as fuck. Bitch has always been wearing bag charms! Y’all are late.”
For all the thrill of life on the road, SAILORR is ready to go home — to her real home in Jacksonville, where she was once your typical big-dreams theater kid. Born Kayla Le to Vietnamese immigrant parents — her father a fisherman and her mother a nail salon owner — her childhood was tumultuous. “There was so much going on that me and my sister were just trying to keep the peace,” she says. As an act of self-preservation, she learned to split personas: “annoying, loud, and outspoken” at school; a quiet “people pleaser” at home. By 10, she’d moved out of her parent’s place and in with her 18-year-old sister. “She was the one who raised me, and I grew up being super independent — just the two of us. Not to fault my parents, but they were going through a lot of shit.”
Her musical education came via MTV and family karaoke sessions. By fifth grade, she’d found a local performing arts school and had her sights set on Broadway. “I used music and theater as an escape. It was my way of being able to tell my story without telling my story,” she says. And she almost went all the way, trying her hand at playwriting and screenwriting. She auditioned for performing-arts colleges her senior year before realising she couldn’t afford tuition. “I was like, ‘I’m not going into debt for this.’ So that’s when I started making music on my own.”
To do that, she had to get comfortable talking about herself. Even more daunting, she had to get comfortable with herself. No small feat for a second-gen kid passed over for school plays because of her heritage, growing up with the sense that she never quite fit in. “I think most Asian Americans know this unspoken thing: you feel separated from your homeland, but you’re not quite like the white girls at school,” she says, thoughtfully. “I spent a majority of my childhood trying to assimilate. Then, I woke up one day and I was like, ‘I got the sauce. Fuck you, bitches!’” Was it really that simple? “Not overnight,” she shrugs. “But when you try to fit in, you’re not happy.”
These days, the real work still lies in getting others to understand who she is. When “POOKIE’S REQUIEM” blew up, it wasn’t just the attention that triggered her spiral. It was the assumptions. Her unpredictable melodic phrasing drew comparisons to SZA. Her signature black grillz — a homage to Vietnamese teeth-blackening traditions — were misinterpreted. Cultural appropriation accusations landed like a gut punch.
“I understand where people were coming from, and that’s why I couldn’t be mad,” she says. “But I also felt so misunderstood. This was a moment everybody dreams of. You make music that falls on deaf ears for so long. Finally, it catches and people are like, ‘Fuck you.’” For a while, even getting through the day was hard. “I had to keep reminding myself: wake up, go to the gym, do something. Because you’ve got to break out of it. At the time, I had my boyfriend, my producers, and my managers. Without them, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
Priorities shifted quickly. Yes, there was pressure to capitalize on the rising streams. But studio sessions started to take on a different form. “We would end up just talking because that’s what we needed to do,” says Zach Ezzy, the producer who, along with Adam Krevlin, has helped craft SAILORR’s signature sound. Over Zoom, the pair beam as they recall meeting her for the first time in April 2023, introduced by Ezzy’s manager. “From the first day, it was just like, wow — she really knows where she wants to go and who she wants to be,” Krevlin says. “And her writing? It’s so her. We couldn’t compare it to anyone else.”
Ezzy agrees: “That’s what shocked me — that, and how consistently she’s been growing as a writer. It’s definitely what people relate to the most. It’s just… different.”
It’s the vividness in SAILORR’s lyricism that really brings her music to life. Take her renunciation of pre-hookup hair removal in the aptly titled “DONE SHAVING 4 U.” Or the winking nod to Twitch streamer Plaqueboymax in “BITCHES BREW.” “Most songs are all saying the same thing so you have to find your unique perspective,” SAILORR says. “Screenwriting and playwriting really gave me the tools to be like, ‘Okay, how specific can I get?’”
The girls who get it get it. Last week, post-show in Camden, the SAILORR fans were instantly identifiable. Pink was the unofficial dress code: on babydoll dresses, tennis skirts, frilly bloomer shorts, crop tops, bandanas, and bow-embellished jeans. The bows, in fact, were essential, affixed to baseball caps, handbags, and, of course, neatly braided hair.
One girl tells me she burst into tears during the final song on SAILORR’s set, another loverlorn ballad, “BELLY” (“It’s just one of those songs you listen to at four in the morning and it’s like, ‘What the fuck is my life?’”). Another gushes over her stage presence: the dance routines, the theatrical skits where she breaks down mid-road trip, invisible steering wheel in hand, then mimes searching for phone signal while fighting the urge to call him for help. But what they really connect with is SAILORR’s ability to defy expectations and hold several identities at once: soft but hard, pretty in pink while ugly-crying streams of mascara. “Every girl can relate to her because it’s like, fuck everyone who’s hurting us. She knows her self-worth,” says one student, her bows hand-stitched onto a white tee over each nipple. This is SAILORR’s world: a place where modern girlhood is writ large with saccharine ribbons and spill-your-guts lyrics.
“People think music for women is supposed to be like, ‘I’m a bad bitch. I make money, Imma fuck your man and leave him in a ditch,’” SAILORR says. “Yes, it’s cool to have that feeling, but being a woman is so many things.” From Florida’s Finest, for example, was written in the throes of a failing relationship and exhaustion from juggling multiple jobs (bartender, nail tech, lash tech). “I was grappling with a lot. Just not feeling like enough. Am I a good sister? Am I a good friend? Am I a good partner? Am I a good person?”
But her emotional interior is only part of the story. Culturally fluent in both high and low references, she’s just as comfortable decoding literary fiction as she is reposting deep-fried memes. To her credit — and perhaps the key to enduring for more than one TikTok cycle — SAILORR is a true internet native. Her mixtape artwork, a crunchy photoshop job depicting her head on a multiplying cockroach, nods to her roots (“When I think about Florida, I think about roaches), and also The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella about a man who transforms into an insect. She’s inspired by other musicians (Tyler, The Creator is a big one), but more often she’ll watch films and read scripts to keep her pen sharp: Gaspar Noé, Damien Chazelle, and Bong Joon Ho.
“That’s why I have beef with Pinterest moodboards,” she says. “I don’t really give a fuck about looking at other people’s shit to inspire me. I want to know that it came from me, not a regurgitated thing that I found on the fucking internet.”
It’s a fitting stance, considering eight months ago she was the thing being digitally duplicated. In a cultural landscape that cycles through flimsy imitations of real art via 60-second videos and meme-able snippets, SAILORR is determined to carve out a lasting identity, even if it means cutting down on screentime. “I go on, I post, I get off,” she says. And just like that, nature starts to heal. “Now, the algorithm is what I want again. It’s like the most dumbass humor you could possibly find. That makes me happy.”
Credits
By: Olive Pometsey
Photographed by: Hazel Gaskin
Styled by: Feranmi Eso
Hair: Shamara Roper
Makeup: Saphia Ayesha
Photography Assistant: Maxwell Anderson
Styling Assistant: Wonder Lisungi
Production Assistant: Stanley Chapman