FEATURE: Spotlight: Seraphina Simone

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Seraphina Simone

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I have some male artists and bands…

coming up but, at the moment, I am being influenced and affected more by female (and non-binary) artists. With such amazing new talent out there, it is great to feature as many artists as I can. Even though there are not many recent interviews with Seraphina Simone, I was keen to include her, as her music is really good and worth a listen. Here is an artist with an amazing pedigree and simply awesome talent. There are some interview bits from this year I want to include, after I include an interview from 2020. Prior to that, here is some background about the amazing Seraphina Simone:

“On the other she is musical aristocracy, although the term makes her cringe. Her father is the musician Terence Trent D’Arby aka Sananda Maitreya. Holidays when she was a girl meant long trips through California, brushing shoulders with everyone from George Harrison to Billy Idol, or being babysat by Pamela Des Barres. Some artists might claim their ‘godparents’ were Prince, Miles Davis, Christie Hynde, Pete Townsend and Mary Greenwell. Seraphina’s actually were.

A childhood only takes you so far. From all these influences, from her deep-South pastor grandfather, and a heritage that is black, Greek, Irish and Cherokee, Seraphina Simone has created a sound that’s wholly her own. These are smart, sun-drenched tales of heartbreak and longing, queer sultry odes to the bad decisions you wished you hadn’t made and the ones you wished you had.

If you listen out for BANKS or Lana Del Ray or Bat for Lashes or Lorde, then you might hear traces, as well as the ghosts of Human League, Blondie, New Order and Cyndi Lauper. These are the songs of a young woman finding a path through an impossible 21st century.

But she is also none of the above: wholly sui generis. In her hands the ordinary becomes uncanny. With her head in London and her heart in California, Seraphina Simone has written the soundtrack to this longest and strangest of summers”.

I was interested learning how Seraphina Simone got into music. I think I first became aware of her music in 2020. That was a rough year for any artist to try to establish themselves – what with the pandemic and the impossibility of playing live. In June 2020, she released her first single, Cherry. WIMITLA spoke with a superb artist already primed for big things:

“How did you get started making music?

My dad's a musician and had some success in the 80s, so music was always just around or happening growing up. Like I remember being in LA with my dad as a kid, and he had to go meet a friend quickly to pick something up, and the friend turned out to be Madonna— but I was like 9 at the time so it kind of registered but also kind of didn't. But I guess subconsciously I grew up with this feeling that musicians were my family, and felt like they were my tribe, even before I was making music myself. It took me a minute to actually commit to it though, I think I was too scared to fail so I just hovered around the music industry on the business side for a bit before realizing I was kidding myself and had to at least try or I'd go mad.

Favorite non-music activities?

Reading, but a lot of the books I read are about music or musicians so maybe that doesn't count... I'm a bit of a pagan and love being in nature, so being somewhere that feels elemental - the woods, the beach, by a lake. Throw in some mates and the classiest bottom shelf boxed wine and we're talking. Maybe I'll bring my tarot cards and freak people out.

Any future projects that fans can look forward to?

I've got a few more releases planned for the year so keep an ear out for new music... I'm also in another project called TRILLS and we're planning on putting a single out this year, but it's kind of in corona-limbo right now. We wrote it in LA with a producer called Boom Bip and were finishing in London with John and Ned from Franc Moody, but quarantine kind of halted everything”.

I am going to move onto a recent interview. Seraphina Simone’s Milk Teeth ranks alongside my favourite singles of the year so far. Some big beats and synths mix with a vocal that scores a song that has some personal and somewhat dark lyrics. A sense of sadness and struggle can be found on the song. That contrast when it comes to the energy of the composition and the nature of the lyrics stands Seraphina Simone’s work out. The Line of Best Fit spoke with the wonderful artist about the song’s background and her music:

“Struggling herself with matters of racial identity and insufficient representation, as well as navigating life between London and Cali, Seraphina Simone turned to one of the few constants in her life; music. Vibrating with 80s chirrups and otherworldly warbles, but sang with a deep and profound bitterness, "Milk Teeth" is a perfect encapsulation of Simone’s sultry twenty-first-century style. It’s only the second single from her upcoming debut EP of the same name, but manages to elegise the treacherous and perplexing path of one’s early twenties with astonishing poise and candour. The refracted glamour, the societal yearning, the struggles, and the downfalls.

“It’s a track about growing up feeling ugly and invisible,” she muses. “Beauty standards were inextricably white, with the idealised woman being a gamine, long-limbed, milky-skinned waif. I was brown and short with frizzy hair and I dreamed of waking up one day looking like Alexa Chung or Cory Kennedy.”

In the absence of role models in the music tableau that look like her, Simone has decided to become her own. From a heritage that is black, Greek, Irish and Cherokee, and a long lineage of masterly musicians (did we mention Terence Trent D’Arby is her dad?), she has whittled a sound that’s wholly her own.

Smart, sultry elegies of heartbreak and social anguish that feel at once achingly anecdotal and timelessly relatable are brought to life through spacious synths and reverb-drenched production, before being doused in the sleaziness of California glamour and a healthy dosing of smoky, London grit. These are tracks about being suspended between two worlds but fitting into neither: “Those manic pixie dream girls never had brown thighs,” she snuffs on her latest chorus, “I’d be happy if I had those milk teeth.”

“Rather than questioning the system and thinking how fucked up it was that I was made to feel like I wasn’t enough because of the colour of my skin and body shape, I internalised and made it my mission to fit in, spiralling into self-loathing and self-denial about my own heritage because of some fear of being too Other,” she reflects. “It’s ironic that as an indie kid that scene was all about a community of awkward misfits, except all the misfits looked the same. It’s taken me a long time to unpick all that bullshit and accept myself as I am.”

Having been performing as part of pop royalty Self Esteem’s band since 2020, as well as opening for her on the electric Prioritise Pleasure tour, Simone’s early aplomb and eye for cutting one-liners are no coincidence. In using music to reconnect with her black heritage and reject music’s tired one-size-and-shade-fits-all maxims, she’s crafted a sound that’s as important as it is catchy, and alongside characters like Rebecca Lucy Taylor, is ushering in pop’s long-awaited new world order”.

I am going to finish off with CLASH’s coverage of the amazing recent track, Lovesick. It is from the must-hear Milk Teeth EP. Here is an artist who is primed and ready for the biggest stages. One of the finest new young artists coming through right now:

“Travelling to London from her native United States, her academic gifts saw her accepted to Oxford University, reading English. The stifling atmosphere saw her burrow inwards, however, and music became a source of respite and escape from the stale surroundings.

Word of mouth spread, with Seraphina Simone invited to become part of self esteem’s live band. Touring around the country as the songwriter’s work reached countless new fans, Seraphina kept working on her own music, kept focussing on her own plans.

Her debut EP is out now, melding together synth-pop tropes with her own unique brand of melodic melancholy. The process behind the EP became therapeutic, a way of Seraphina Simone excising old emotions.

“The EP is a reflection of me dealing with my shit for the first time in my life. I’d had some quite heavy emotional trauma growing up, and not dealt with any of it – I just pushed it down into a black hole inside me and it (obviously) manifested in other ways, one of which was a kind of phobia of vulnerability,” she says. “Then 2020 hit, we spent acres of time having to confront ourselves, and I started working through my shit properly for the first time in my life.”

Seraphina adds: “The songs on this EP mirror the early stages of this process – It’s me unstitching big parts of my identity and trying to re-patch them together in ways that reflect who I am now, and figuring out which beliefs and feelings and judgments are innately mine, and which I’ve just had transplanted onto me by society or the value systems around me or as a reaction to my own insecurities.”

Lead cut ‘Lovesick’ bristles with promise, a self-described “cry-dance” banger worthy of Robyn, or even Lorde. Written in 2020, it’s come to form the fulcrum of this new phase of her work. “‘Lovesick’ is me processing the fallout of a big relationship, where we’d broken up not through lack of love but because it wasn’t right. That kind of grief, where you’re breaking your own heart and someone else’s, took a while to get over.”

She adds: “I couldn’t write a single song for about six months, until ‘Lovesick’ tumbled out. It’s about heartbreak and hurt and apathy and doom-spirals and the fear of being alone and self-sabotage, but I was going out a lot to numb the sadness and doing lots of crying on dancefloors, so I wanted the song to reflect that”.

I will round up here. If you do not know about the sensational Seraphina Simone, then go and follow her on social media and check out the new Milk Teeth EP. It marks her out as someone with a very bright future. Since 2020, she has put out such incredible music and built this great fanbase. Gaining attention and traction from the likes of BBC Radio 6 Music, everyone needs to know about her. She plays Paper Dress Vintage in London on 28th September (the date is sold out). Seraphina Simone may be rising right now, but very soon she will be…