By Shaad D'Souza
The centrepiece of Nymph, Shygirl’s long-awaited debut album, is a love song. It might be one of the sweetest love songs you’ll ever hear: doting, mellifluous, as plush and as comforting as a vanilla marshmallow, it gives off the soft, warm glow of a Noguchi floor lamp. Over a blinking, feather-light beat, Shygirl sings sweet nothings: “Sweet sounds / I can hear the melody / Floating in the clouds… Yeah, the coochie is so heavenly.”
For anyone else, a song like this — a honeyed ode to vaginas titled, amazingly, Coochie (A Bedtime Story) — might play like a punchline. But in the six years she’s been making music, Shygirl has taken the art of musical ribaldry to unforeseen new heights. The 29-year-old singer and rapper is pop’s new high priestess of smut, a proudly lascivious siren whose brutalist, ultra-catchy songs will, for better or for worse, never make it to Nova radio’s hit list.
Shygirl – aka, South London singer and rapper Blane Muise – makes bawdiness beautiful on her long-awaited debut, Nymph.Credit:Samuel Ibram
Madonna had the Sex book, but Shygirl has a song called BAWDY, on which she narrates a sexual encounter in such detail that it would make Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion blush. But Coochie is far more than provocation: it’s a show of vulnerability and pure tenderness from a musician for whom sexual innuendo carries as much potential as the rest of the English language combined.
“It’s funny — as far as my songs go, Coochie is probably one of the least horny for me,” Shygirl laughs. Calling in from Los Angeles, where she’s in the midst of a promo blitz in the weeks before Nymph’s release, she’s yawny but still far sharper than most, always game to unpack her music on a cerebral level.
“As a woman, the fun thing about objectifying a woman is that I can relate it to myself. There’s something so earnest and sweet, for me, about a relationship between women — ‘coochie’ is a term of endearment, rather than being overtly sexual,” she says. “There’s no cute words when talking about that stuff, it’s all sexualised. I wanted to get to a place where it’s not sensational to be saying the things that I’m saying.”
For all its fairy floss airiness, Coochie cuts to the core of Shygirl’s debut album. After making her name in the electronic pop underground as a brash, sharp-tongued but occasionally invulnerable figure, Nymph is her way of showcasing a side of her art that’s softer, stranger, more human. The beats still boom, and the lyrics still get to Tampongate-level explicit, but, for the most part, this is a record that seeks to pierce Shygirl’s steely exterior — and, hopefully, reveal the intellectual, driven, nuanced artist beneath.
And she’ll be the first to say that. “I wanted to make an album that could be considered critically acclaimed, that was my goal,” she says. “I had other songs — I could have made a straight-up club mixtape and I could have made a really fun, super pop album. But I wanted to make something that was smart because…,” she pauses and laughs, “I really have fun when I’m congratulated on my intelligence.”
Shygirl was born Blaine Muise in South London, to a Grenadian father and a Welsh mother. The oldest of three, her parents were young when they had her, and they – along with her grandfather, a collaborator of reggae group The Aces – introduced her to music from a young age, giving her Now That’s What I Call CDs and Ministry of Sound compilations (“I was into like, trance, when I was 12,” she says).
“Because my parents were quite young, music was a big part of their expression, between them and their friends — I was exposed to that from an early age,” she says.
From early on, art was embedded in Shygirl’s life. Her parents took her to galleries and encouraged her to engage with art of all kinds, in order to cultivate “a fuller existence”, and, on the Welsh side of her family, music was a constant. “In Wales, singing is a big part of sharing stories and bringing people together,” she says. “If there was a gathering, by the end of the night everyone would be singing — that was us.”
Still, music wasn’t a part of Shygirl’s life until her early twenties, when she started making music with her friend, Irish-Scottish producer Salvador Navarrete, aka Sega Bodega. Until then, she had been an amorphous figure in London’s creative scene; after studying photography at university, she took up work at a modelling agency and as an occasional DJ. One day, Navarrete asked Shygirl to lay something over a beat — “Just because he liked the tone of my voice” — and, almost immediately, people began to respond to the sound, a clash of fabulously hard-edged industrial beats and Shygirl’s deep, velveteen voice.
That was 2016. In 2018, Shygirl released her debut EP, Cruel Practice, and quit her day job; in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, she dropped ALIAS, an EP of unabashedly hedonistic, high-pass-filtered house and jungle that featured production from the late electronic luminary SOPHIE — an impossibly powerful co-sign. Over the next year, she drip-fed singles, like the Slowthai-featuring BDE, which sounds like the racy, feminist rap of 2000s icons like Gangsta Boo remade in a scrap metal yard, and collaborations, including songs with Arca and FKA Twigs and a remix for Lady Gaga.
Now, after making her mark as a kind of modern dance music vaudevillian, Shygirl is looking to showcase another side of herself. “There’s like an essence of bravado in a lot of my older music, which I did need — I needed to bolster myself. Oftentimes, I wasn’t entirely confident [in real life]. By giving myself the words, or the bravado, I ended up actualising it,” she says.
This time around, her distinct intention was to push herself to “be more vulnerable”. The title Nymph — referring to a kind of female Grecian deity who embodied the natural world — is a big part of that. “I wanted to lean into subverting peoples’ initial responses to that concept of a nymph. If you think of it, you probably think of someone who’s slight, pale, vulnerable, feminine,” she says. “I don’t often see representations of someone who looks like me as someone that’s vulnerable. And ultimately, I wanted this record to feel like a space that has vulnerability.”
Nymph is the perfect space for Shygirl to explore the way she’s perceived: ultimately, seeing and being seen is what Shygirl’s music deals with, especially at its most porny. Desire can be objectifying — a term she rarely shies away from when talking about her own music — or even dangerous. Woe, Nymph’s opener, deals with what Shygirl describes as the “entitlement of an audience” (“Bitches pree me all the time / Do they even know what it’s like this high?”), and ultimately accepts that entitlement as part of many kinds of desire, including her own.
“No one can ever understand your experience in life — that’s a fact, really,” she says. “And that’s fine. A lot of Nymph is about laying bare certain truths, and as much as I endeavour to give people an insight into how I feel, people will only ever see it through their eyes.”
Ultimately, what Nymph advocates for is a kind of embodiment — the kind of self-possession that Shygirl herself has been forging over her six years as a musician. It’s a bold message, but a fortifying one. “Life doesn’t always provide spaces that feel comfortable,” she says. “You have to carve them out for yourself.”
Shygirl’s Nymph is out on September 30. Shygirl will perform at Beyond the Valley in Victoria on December 28, and in Sydney at Field Day on January 1.
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