‘I need to prove my family’s sacrifice was worth it’: how pop auteur Shygirl slogged her way to the top

Adored by Madonna and Charli xcx and buoyed by finding true love, the Londoner is branching out into rock and breaking the mainstream. She explains how her working class upbringing made her so fearless

L eaving 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. “I’m that kind of person,” she says, grinning. She woke her boyfriend, who was asleep in bed next to her. “I was like: babe, we’re sorted! 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.

I n 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. “I felt good about the reception, but there’s always that anticlimactic feeling when you get what you wanted. You’re like: OK, now I have it. Now what?” she says, tossing her tangerine corkscrew curls. “Then I met George.”

Go on, I say, tell me the story. “It was on Raya,” she says conspiratorially. 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. “Then we got Thai takeout and hooked up,” she says matter-of-factly.

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. Do you wanna come to Tokyo?” She flew him out, “in economy”, she says, laughing, and she and actor George Smale have been together ever since. “We had 10 days there and one other date in London when I got back before saying, ‘I love you.’” By the summer, they’d moved in together. Unlike previous relationships, she says, “I didn’t feel like I was all of a sudden so enamoured with someone that I didn’t know where my footing was.”

That contentment and calm was a source of inspiration. “When I made Lucky, I sat in the room with the mic. I didn’t write anything down, I just said how I felt,” she says of the album’s lead single. “It’s me saying: I am an active participant because of the choices that brought me here.” Like many of the tracks on Swallow!, Lucky[Hymn] is an indie song. “It had more of a classic tone to it because I felt like I was in a classic part of my life,” she says.

With its dreamy, moody guitars and anthemic, crashing drums, Swallow! is a different sound for an artist whose previous records have flirted with hyperpop, UK garage and electronica. As a millennial, Shygirl came of age when guitar-driven pop music was dominating the charts. “It was very prevalent in all the pop I grew up listening to: Keane, Madonna, random shit like the Rasmus,” she says. In the 2010s, when she was a teenager, musical discovery was serendipitous: “We had HMV, where you could just walk in and put the headphones on.” Her curiosity, she says, was encouraged by her parents. “I’m not from a family where they would just give you answers.”

Shygirl is the eldest of three children born to young parents in south-east London, and spent her early years bouncing between Downham, Catford and Lee Green. “My life has shown me that you are never entitled to anything,” she says. “You can be deserving but not receive.” When has she felt like that? “I grew up with that experience. My parents worked really hard. They didn’t have everything.”

Her dad, who is of Grenadian origin, worked for the UK government’s Welsh office and later as a club promoter in Notting Hill. He worked nights; she didn’t see him much. “My mum used to work as a cleaner, a toilet attendant, a receptionist, a dinner lady,” she says. “She’s always had a job.” So has Shygirl, who as a teenager worked at a restaurant her mum managed.

Her parents are no longer together, though she is quick to clarify that hers was a happy childhood. “I wanted for nothing,” she says. “But I’m of the mindset that if you want something, you have to go get it. I’m only the one to blame if I don’t.” That determination runs through new songs such as Live the Life You Like, a stomping, Prodigy-esque anthem. “And then I’m pushing / It’s not enough,” she purrs.

In Amsterdam, in 2018, she booked her first show before her debut EP, Cruel Practice, had even been released. “I was like: I don’t even have any music out and someone’s taken a chance on me,” she remembers. Soon afterwards she handed in her notice as a booker at a modelling agency. “I’m about to quit a day job that had holiday pay, sick pay, and I’m gonna go be a musician? But because I used to do contracts with the model agency, I knew how to push a rate up.” She negotiated requests from brands who wanted to use her music in their adverts, until one came in from Rihanna, for Fenty Beauty, and she got overexcited, “not as sharky as I usually am” with making the deal. She got a manager, the money came in and Shygirl paid off her credit card. She likens herself to a gambler: “My money was up from being, like, two grand in debt. I’d owed my housemate money for rent.”

She signed a record deal in 2020; this year, she bought a house. She hadn’t even entertained owning one, “because I was so busy thinking I need to pay my rent and bills. My dad still doesn’t own a house. My mum just got one.” Her drive to make music, she says, “has always been to make my life better than my origins, and to prove to my family that their sacrifice is worth something”. But “living an experience they have never lived” has been accompanied by a dose of “mad guilt”.

She played New York’s Madison Square Garden with Charli xcx and Troye Sivan as 2024’s Brat summer raged on into Brat autumn. Seeing how Charli, a peer and friend, was able to maintain her sense of self even as everything became “as big and stressful as it gets” made pop domination feel more achievable. Although, “we definitely have different intentions for our day to day”. Charli, she stresses, works incredibly hard. “I work hard, but I really prioritise chilling,” she laughs.

Spending an afternoon hanging out with Shygirl, as she radiates self-possession, grace and plenty of gossipy wisdom, one gets the sense that she is something of a girl’s girl. “All of us are trying to open doors for each other, all the female artists that I’ve worked with.” Being a woman, she says, is her biggest barrier as an artist. “In my experience, that is the most prevalent block at the moment.” She gives the example of Beyoncé’s Grammy win for best country album with Cowboy Carter, which prompted the Recording Academy to create two separate categories for best country album: traditional and contemporary. “The rules shift, and the doors’ locations change,” she says.

Realising there might be a ceiling for her ambition, one imposed on her by others, has meant she is now “only interested in working with people who want different-ness. Who are not comfortable with the status quo, because I can’t relate to that. It’s not an experience I’ve had in any avenue of my life.” And, she adds, “it’s usually men” upholding that status quo. “Not to be a man hater: I love my boyfriend!”

S hygirl and Smale have been collaborating creatively, too. He provided background vocals on album opener Alyse and they have worked together on the interconnected videos for the new album, which she co-directed and which form an elliptical thriller narrative based around a kidnapping. “You’re dropped into a situation the same as The Bourne Ultimatum or Tell No One. You may have been an ordinary person; you’re now in extraordinary circumstances: what do you do?” she says. Her character ends up tied to a chair. She seldom even thinks of not acting in any situation, she says, so it was a challenge to play someone barely able to move.

But her character screams, shouts, cries and thrashes as she’s held captive, giving Shygirl an outlet for emotions she didn’t realise she needed to express. “I never raise my voice,” she says. “To shout at someone who has made you angry? To show that you’re affected by them in that way? I would never do that.” An eldest daughter, she describes herself as a protector who feels responsible for everyone else in her life. “I feel like every child gets to a point where they see their parents as human beings, not just as their caregivers. That happened for me when I was very young.” How young? “Ten, 12.” It meant she never had idols. “I don’t really look up to anyone in that way,” she says. “I see everyone with faults.”

In the video’s final shot, Shygirl looks directly into the lens, “accepting that this is a contrived environment”. She wanted to break the fourth wall, even if that movie trope is a bit of a cliche: “Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason, you know?”

Of course, falling in love is the biggest cliche of all, I add. “Exactly!” Once you’ve said “I love you” a million times to your partner, she says, “you’re looking for other ways to express it”. Her smile is beatific thinking about it all. Playing the new album to her boyfriend made her cry; the delicate, intensely vulnerable ballad Real allowed her “to revisit the memory of when we were in Japan, and recognise that now as falling in love”. It has an incredulous, awestruck quality, as though she can’t believe her own good fortune. “We’re always choosing each other,” she says. “I’m always choosing what’s happening in my life.”