VMP Magazine

Mike Hadreas has been feeling crazy — and not just because of quarantine. The 38-year-old songwriter has been making viscerally personal, and increasingly theatrical, art-pop under the name Perfume Genius for a decade now. Whereas early records like 2010’s Learning and 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It were somewhat lofi piano-pop, the albums that followed — particularly 2017’s Grammy-nominated No Shape — became sonically grander, though no less intimate in their explorations of love, trauma, sexuality, and triumph.

Meg Remy has been thinking a lot about the past, both on a micro and macro scale. Between now and her last U.S. Girls record, 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited, she began going to therapy to work through personal experiences from throughout her life. She’s been reading a lot of history to help her better understand the current events of today, and to consciously deflect the “fascist techniques” that the mainstream news media uses to influence its viewers.

Mackenzie Scott vividly remembers the day she discovered her power. The Brooklyn-based musician who makes ornate indie-rock under the name Torres was a songwriting major in college, and she was once assigned to write a song about a random newspaper article and perform it for the class the next day. She doesn’t remember what the song was even about, and she recalls feeling totally indifferent to the lyrics she was singing. But after she played it for her peers, Scott’s professor approached her with oracular concern.

“If I took a look at your lyrics just by themselves,” Scott remembers him saying, “I would say ‘bullshit.’ But whenever you sing them, my fear is that you can make anybody believe what you’re singing.”

“Basically what he’s saying is that you better tell the truth,” Scott says. “Because there’s so much power in your words when they come off of your tongue.”

It makes sense that San Francisco artist Rose Droll is also a fiction writer. The 29-year-old’s songs pack the world-building details of an entire short story into three-minute pieces of music.
Her 2018 album Your Dog (a far cry from the Soccer Mommy song of the same name) traverses psychedelic pop, jazz, hip-hop and experimental R&B with the spirit of someone who has no interest in attempting to define their output.

VMP Rising is our series where we partner with up-and-coming artists to press their music to vinyl and highlight artists we think are going to be the Next Big Thing. Today we’re featuring Lately, the debut EP from Still Woozy.

Lucy Dacus is her own personal historian. The 22-year-old Richmond, Virginia, songwriter has the gifted ability to not only magnify her own experiences scrupulously, but to pick apart the associated emotions, determine their origins and then place them in their respective positions on her individual timeline. Aside from being her own topic of interest, the main difference between her and her fellow chroniclers is that she prefers to present her dissertations in the form of grand, symphonic rock songs—a medium with more gusto than a Ken Burns documentary.