Shygirl: Learning to let love win

“It’s really crazy, my schedule,” Shygirl tells me, having just returned from Los Angeles and still feeling the effects of jet lag. London has finally turned cold, which suits her just fine – the only thing she misses about the warmer weather is her tan. This small talk is ordinary, but the life she’s describing is anything but. The south London artist has gone from shaping the capital’s underground club scene to opening for Beyoncé on the London leg of the Renaissance tour in 2023, playing arenas with Charli xcx and Troye Sivan on the 2024 Sweat tour, and appearing in Charli xcx’s recent mockumentary The Moment and Madonna’s Confessions II – The Film. She’s even turned up at Paris Fashion Week, with Law Roach among the familiar faces in her orbit. Her club-built, high-voltage music has travelled a long way from the rooms where she first made her name, and she’s still finding new places to take it. 

Opening for Beyoncé didn’t leave Shygirl much time to marvel at her ascent. She found out about the show while on a plane to another gig in Toronto. She landed, performed, got back on a plane to London, and went straight to the Beyoncé concert at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium the following day. “There was really no time to think,” she says. And when you’re opening for Queen Bey, not everyone in the crowd is necessarily waiting for you. “You can be having the biggest experiences of your life, and someone can humble you by asking, ‘Why are you here?’” she laughs. “And I think that’s great because, yeah, it makes me interrogate why I want to be there.” The answer isn’t clout for clout’s sake. Talking about social collateral, she says Londoners “naturally don’t really care about clout or being a beg. We would much rather be noticed for something worthwhile or being around people who we genuinely fuck with or who fuck with us on a real level.” Those arena shows did leave her with a question, though: after touring with Charli and Troye, what music could she make to fill spaces like those? Shygirl’s response is: “That’s how SWALLOW! was made.”

With a release date of 6 November, Shygirl’s second album began taking shape at the end of 2023, as she approached her thirtieth birthday and fell in love. She spent the following three years finding its shape, reaching for the indie songwriting and natural instrumentation she’d grown up with while retaining the electronica that carried her out of the underground. The sound is more expansive, but its central change is one of feeling. Rather than looking back on a relationship after it has ended, Shygirl was writing while she was still inside it, trying to capture the emotions as they arrived instead of revising them with hindsight. “There’s been a calmness, a serenity to it,” she says, describing the clarity of loving someone without feeling defined by them. SWALLOW! is a reintroduction rather than a repudiation of the artist who came before it, as Shygirl finds out what else her music can hold.   

So far, Shygirl has shared three singles from SWALLOW!: the distorted, raw-edged ‘Alyse’, the jangling acoustic guitar and trip-hop haze of ‘Lucky [Hymn]’, and the dance-floor propulsion of ‘Mantra’. Together, they hint at a record that pings between racing synths and Shygirl’s chant-like vocals, with frantic breakbeats surging beneath haunting harmonies. When I suggest SWALLOW! has a softer touch, Shygirl counters: “To be able to say, ‘I am lucky,’ or, ‘I am, and I can, and I will,’ and, ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ If they’re not confrontational statements, I don’t know what is.” 

The influences of the music she grew up listening to run through SWALLOW! As a teenager, Shygirl was dreaming about love and finding people who understood her to the sound of indie music on the radio, with The Cardigans among her regular listens. She also names Santigold, Bloc Party and Hot Chip when talking about how broad the genre felt to her, alongside the pop she still loves from Madonna, Björk, Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls. “I don’t necessarily think about it in the room or when I’m in the studio,” she says of their influence, “but afterwards, I’m like, ‘Oh, God!’ I’ve listened to so much Madonna and so much pop music – you can hear it in the music.”  

While working with producer Karma Kid and composer Casey MQ, she began asking for guitars and piano, instruments she’d previously felt less confident asking musicians to realise from her imagination. Now, she trusts herself enough to bring an idea into the studio and explain what she wants, giving herself more room to express herself with the electronic instincts that shaped her earlier work still firmly in place. 

Although SWALLOW! took three years to complete, Shygirl estimates that the time actually spent working on it was closer to two months. She didn’t want to rush a song to completion just because a demo was exciting. She wanted the record to reflect the breadth of what she was experiencing, rather than freeze a single day’s feelings into a final version. For someone who describes herself as a workaholic, the process required a different kind of control: knowing when not to rush and leave something alone – much as she’s approached her current romance. “I’m not just trying to be in love so I can get to the end of it and experience it completely. I’m in it to be present every day.”  

Shygirl is careful not to credit her relationship with a newfound sense of self, though. “This is where I want to be,” she says. “Regardless of my partner, he met me in a place that is way more grounded and loving of myself and accepting of myself. And it’s so nice to be affirmed by the love of someone else.” 

Looking back at her 2022 debut, Nymph, Shygirl describes a record shaped by longing for someone who might not want her back. “I felt really submissive on Nymph. Lyrically, it is me asking to get back with someone,” she says, citing tracks such as ‘Firefly’ and ‘Wildfire’ as songs about lamenting a relationship and trying to pull someone closer. She continues, “It’s me trying to be a siren, trying to call someone to me and mythologising myself, and then landing in SWALLOW! feels way more grounded for me.” 

Shygirl had already stepped away from clubbing in her personal life when places she’d once been able to lose herself in became places where she was recognised and watched. Having become a fixture of British dance music, her name was tied to the club’s hedonism, sexual bravado and electronic excess. But she was never interested in being confined to one version of herself. Creating her club night Club Shy in 2022 gave her a way back into the scene on her own terms. It grew into a series of parties and two EPs, giving her room to experiment, DJ, host and bring other artists into the space. Now she’s bringing Club Shy to Tate Modern, turning the South Tank into a club for the night on Friday 30 October.  

She’s learned that exploring different sides of herself doesn’t mean every direction will feel the same. “Some things feel more authentic than others,” she reflects. “It’s not that any of it isn’t authentic; it’s just some things fit better.” That process of discovery continues on SWALLOW!, which she sees as another addition to her repertoire, rather than a departure from the music that came before. “I don’t really like to box myself in,” she says. “SWALLOW! is just another feather in my bow, rather than anything else – it’s not me saying goodbye. I’m widening the space I’m able to enter into.” 

For Shygirl, one of the complications of making music is that what she puts into it and what people take from it don’t always line up. “Each time I write an album, or I go back into the studio, and after seeing how people consume me or understand me, it makes me reinvestigate how to share and what I share in order to be understood,” she says. “For me, everything is obvious, but obviously to other people it isn’t, because they’re not living my experience.” Even her sensitivity, she realised, wasn’t necessarily coming across as she intended. “I didn’t realise I needed to communicate my sensitivity. I thought it was inherently obvious,” she admits. “But then when people omit it or don’t see it, then you realise you need to pay more attention to it.” 

That misreading has a history. Shygirl knows she’s been “sexualised, regardless of if I do it myself or not”. “That is my experience in life before music, before anything else,” she says. She describes how people reduce her to what they feel equipped to understand about her – “my colour of my skin, my body. In general, all of those things of me being a woman” – before projecting their assumptions onto her. The Shygirl project gives her a way to articulate those experiences and examine them outside herself. On her 2020 EP ALIAS, she was writing about “anger or aggression, or hopefulness”, but the language was read differently when it came from her. “Often when men say it, it’s attributed to violence. But as soon as I was using it, it was attributed to sex.” That response was “almost like, I guess, gratifying to see”, she reflects, because it confirmed something about how people perceived her. But she also recognises how those experiences shaped her own behaviour. In her personal life, she sometimes objectified men to normalise the way she was objectified herself. “Then you grow out of that. You realise that emulating what’s been done to you isn’t a healthy practice.” 

That visibility has also shaped how Shygirl’s body is understood. Sharing it without hiding it or expressing shame became a statement in itself, even when she hadn’t set out to make one. Although her presence as a plus-size woman increased visibility for that community in music, fashion and culture, she wasn’t “necessarily body-positive early on” and says the role was “almost forced on” her. “I also created that situation by putting myself out there so widely. Some things in an experiment happen by accident, and I’d say that was probably one of them.” On SWALLOW!, she is finding more ways to express herself without having to anticipate every possible interpretation. 

Shygirl finds the idea of being idealised uncomfortable. “I am normal. I’m a human being,” she says. “I don’t want to be idealised, because it’s a really hard space to live in. It’s not real for me. I’m not perfect, and I’m not trying to be either.” She values the connection she has with her audience, describing meeting the people who listen to her music as “the most gratifying part because I actually like them”. Fans have offered emotional readings of her work that differ from her own, and she wants to leave room for those interpretations rather than tell listeners what they should feel. 

Now in her early thirties, Shygirl has begun to understand confidence differently. There was a time when, as she puts it, “there’s a level of bravado that happens in your early twenties,” accompanied by a rush to do things and see yourself in certain ways. Now, she says, “I don’t need to be the first to say something, and I don’t need to do everything all at once.” The shift has made room for a fuller picture of herself: one that can accommodate the artist who made her name in the club, the woman learning to be present in love, and the person whose body and music have so often been interpreted by others before she’s had the chance to explain them. 

Still, Shygirl has never wanted to dictate what people should find in her songs. She says she hopes listeners can take something of their own from SWALLOW!, because “any work that has to have the explanation next to it is a vanity project.” After years of making music in which desire could mean submission, defiance or something more difficult to name, she has arrived at a place where she can express what she feels without needing to determine what everyone else should hear. “I’d love to just let my work speak to you and let you draw your own conclusions,” she says. As an artist who has spent so long being read through other people’s assumptions, that freedom may be one of the most meaningful things love has given her: the confidence to put herself out there and let the rest unfold.

Photographer: Stuart Nimmo @stuartnimmo_
Stylist: Ella Lucia @ellaluciaa
Stylist assistants: Crystal ‘Crusty’ Lim @crutsalm, Rain Gilani @gaggidyg00p, Jessica Sharp @j_esssssaaaa
Make-up: Luz Giraldo (@psychwitch_)
Hair: Virginie Moreira (@vpintomoreira)
Nails:  Angel My Linh (@angelsnailz)
Set Design: Freya Wentworth (@freyawentworth)
Movement Director: Angelica Wolanska (@angelicawska)