ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

We had the absolute pleasure of being able to sit on a panel and interview flowerovlove. Ahead of the date, as always, we started to find out more. Who is flowerovlove? What makes them so cool? And how, at her age, do you create such a beautiful personal brand?

It sounds like a bold claim. But actually, everything about her screams with the loudest voice: I made this happen, I’m making this happen, and I’m going to look incredible doing it.

Picture her at fourteen. Her name is Joyce. She's in London, sad, and scrolling TikTok in the way that only makes the sadness worse. She sums up that whole stretch of life without any drama. It was, she says, "not the best."

Then one ordinary day she goes out with her brother. They end up in a magazine store. She picks up a book about the law of attraction. She doesn't really know why. She starts reading it anyway.

Something clicks. She reads more. And at fifteen, she decides to be happy. Nothing had improved. Her life, by her own account, still wasn't good. "But I was like, I'm choosing to be happy because I woke up today." She knows how that sounds. "It's a very controversial take," she admits. She kept it anyway.

Now picture her at twenty-one. Joyce is flowerovlove now. Her debut album is out, she's on the road opening for a childhood hero, and her streams run past 156 million. Olivia Rodrigo, SZA and Halsey are fans. So is Elton John, who rang her personally to say he loved what she does. Not bad for someone who started with a book from a magazine store.

The album is MINI SKIRT WARRIOR. It's an ode to girlhood and growing up, written around the wobble between the teenage years and adulthood. The title comes from the one garment she treats as a small daily source of confidence. Across the record she moves between witty and raw. It closes on GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS with WILLOW, one of the artists who first made her want to make music.

When 1824 gathered a roomful of writers on a Tuesday Zoom to celebrate the release, the invite billed her as pop's rising "thought daughter," a 21-year-old Londoner who romanticizes everything, right down to what she wears. Big claim for a press invite. She backed it up. She took the most ordinary questions and, in her words, made them "extremely deep for absolutely no reason." She clearly loved doing it. So did we.

That teenage decision became a habit. By fifteen she was journaling and choosing her mood over her circumstances, and she's kept it up "hella consistent" from fifteen to twenty-one. She calls it manifestation. Roll your eyes if you want. She has receipts.

She and her manager "were seeding" the Niall Horan support slot long before it existed, so when it came, it "wasn't out of the blue." The WILLOW feature arrived unsolicited, with Willow reaching out to say, "I think we'd make great art someday." She won't claim she made it happen. "I'm always in a state of abundance, so it just came along. I had to be on some sort of frequency to be aligned with her." What's she manifesting next? "World domination. Happiness for as many people as I can, even if it's just for an hour." Reasonable targets.

There's also more than one of her. There's Joyce, the private person. There's flowerovlove, who she describes as "just me with more glitter, because I don't dress down, that's how I look all the time." And there's Mini Skirt Warrior, the armor, the one who gets to be "your first bad bitch." People clock her by silhouette, "usually the shoe or the sock or the hair," and she loves that they do. "People need to feel like, I know her, this is the world."

Which brings us to the zebra. Asked by Chris from On The Back Edge of the Beat why she's posed on the cover between mountains and a zebra, of all things, she said the animal tracks the record's mood as it lurches "from I'm such a bad bitch to I want my baby back, I'm so sad, why don't you love me." A zebra, she added, is "just a better horse." It's glamorous, it's a little 80s, and it's a nod to an era she keeps coming back to because "the root of pop is disco." We have no notes on the zebra.

In May, one of those selves started to scare her. She realized that believing she was Mini Skirt Warrior had become unhealthy, because this industry doesn't compare people, it compares "your sales or your art." Tying herself to something being sold wasn't going to hold. So she separated them. "I'm a completely different person to this thing that's my brand," she says now. That's a lot of clarity from someone who calls herself "still a 21-year-old girl who is developing and having some feelings for the first time." She doesn't call it rebellion. She calls it becoming.

You hear that most in the soft songs. She admits she was "a very out-of-emotions person," and writing how she actually felt "was a huge deal." Her older songs were "masking." Ask which track carries the person she was turning into and she says BABY straight away. It was the first time she went to bed and woke up "with butterflies" over her own work, the day she decided, "I am the songwriter I've always wanted to be." She says a sad song is far harder to write than a pop banger. Anyone who's tried both will back her up.

She couldn't have done it alone, which surprised her. She used to believe "no one could ever write something that I feel, so why would I let anyone in the room." Writing with women like Amy Allen changed that. "Sometimes you need someone at the start of the race saying, you got this, ‘ I'm standing on the other side with some water."

The one person she's always let in is her brother. He works across her videos, her writing and her direction, and his opinion is the only one, besides her own, she really values. "I'm not a what-do-you-think person at all," she says, "but when you have the one hand who actually cares about your well-being, it sustains you." In a business full of people "with their hands in the mix," his are the ones she trusts. He's on the record too. The opener LEGEND HAS IT is a demo they made together when she was fifteen, put on the album partly so he'd be on it. Her famous fans almost never give her advice, she says, because everyone "assumes I have it together all the time." So the advice still comes from him.

Under the dreaminess, she's practical. Every song is written with the live show in mind. "You make music to play it live. That's the whole point. That's when we feel the most joy, not when it comes out on streaming." Her videos start with her eyes closed, picturing the outfit and the aura first. BREAKING NEWS came from a fantasy about falling in love in a library. IN MY VICTORIA'S SECRET was mostly freestyled on the day, and she says those are often the best ones.

She's also clear about being a Black artist making pop. Asked by Ruby from Girls of Pop how the album's more experimental edges reflect her growth, she said it straight: "We get boxed into a genre just because of how we look, but Black artists do make pop music." The album, she says, is "undeniably pop, if this is what people are calling pop now." Asked what she'd say to young Black women afraid to break the mold, she called it the best question of the day, and answered:

She wants people to see the full range, "how alternative, how quirky, how awkward, how amazing we can be," until nobody needs reminding that Black artists make pop.

Asked by Ones to Watch what her music would smell like, she built a scent on the spot: cinnamon, sandalwood, "and that fresh smell of grass when you step into a park," something to take you back to a peaceful moment from childhood. Her dream festival has ABBA headlining, plus 2015 Justin Bieber and Grace Jones, "full of love and light." We'd be front row. She refuses to write for TikTok. She wants a song to catch on the way a Steve Lacy track does, by accident, "not because you made it for that." She keeps her inner child close "because it's the only thing I truly think can make you happy." And she overthinks exactly one thing on purpose: why. "I care about it enough to let it ruminate."

Asked for artists to watch, she named two: Q, who was about to open for Harry Styles, and Alamida, a singer with "a very beautiful voice." On the day of the call, she was days away from opening for Niall Horan, with no idea how she'd act when she finally met him. "There will be videos of me not being normal," she promised.

Since then, MINI SKIRT WARRIOR has come out and the Dinner Party tour has started. Somewhere, those videos presumably exist. We'd like to see them. And for all the talk of frequency and abundance, she's the first to say manifesting only works because she puts the work in. Being an artist is "very high maintenance," people "really don't know what it takes," and she finished the album because she told herself it had to be done before the tour.

We came into the call already knowing the music. We left a little in love with the person. She's confident without being arrogant, self-aware and down to earth. She's still figuring herself out, and she's doing it on purpose. Give it a few years and everyone will know her name, probably while she's collecting a Grammy.

She'd tell you she manifested it. She'd also tell you she worked for it.