By Syndicated Content
Charlotte Rutherford
More than a year after the song first came out, Ava Max s hit Kings & Queens is still going strong on the charts. Ava says she thinks one of the reasons for the song s popularity is because it s about female empowerment. I think we all need a female anthem all the time, every single year, every month, every day, y know, we want to have a female anthem! laughs the singer/songwriter. And I think women in general definitely gravitate towards it most. And I think for me, growing up with a lot of strong women, I wanted to show support and show that, you know, yeah, kings are great, but queens are better! Ava declares.
As Zara Larsson prepares for the release of
Poster Girl, her first album in four years, she s writing herself into the canon of great pop performers. Having studied the influence and confidence behind the craft of the women whose photos adorned her bedroom while growing up in the pop music headquarters of Stockholm, Sweden Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Rihanna the 23-year-old singer is positioning herself to be her own pop idol. I was just covering the walls with them, looking up to these people, Larsson recalls over Zoom. Now, I might not have myself on the walls, but I m looking up to myself and seeing who that is.
February 03, 2021, 2:05pm EST
With Daisy rising on the Mainstream Top 40 Airplay chart, the London-based artist believes and is banking on songs about pleasure is more than an industry trend.
Sitting on the floor of the Los Angeles home where she’s been riding out the pandemic, her signature blue hair pulled back in a ponytail, Ashnikko is attempting to explain her sound. The 24-year-old, born Ashton Casey, has been called everything from pop to rap to rock to alternative but none seem right to her. The only label she wants to put on her music is “feel-good,” she says, smiling.
Sitting on the floor of the Los Angeles home where she’s been riding out the pandemic, her signature blue hair pulled back in a ponytail, Ashnikko is attempting to explain her sound. The 24-year-old, born Ashton Casey, has been called everything from pop to rap to rock to alternative but none seem right to her. The only label she wants to put on her music is “feel-good,” she says, smiling.
Born in North Carolina, Ashnikko spent much of her childhood on the move as a teenager, she bounced between Estonia and Latvia before eventually moving to London by herself in 2014 at just 18. “I went to public school in a language I didn t speak, and was expected to graduate from that school,” she says, before sardonically adding, “Surprisingly, I didn t graduate high school.”
Indeed, the fury bubbles up on songs such as “Toxic”, a braggadocious rap kiss-off aimed squarely at social media trolls (“
What’s a sheep to a tiger?”), and the Kelis-sampling “Deal With It”, Ashnikko’s most “pop” single to date, on which she trades in a unfulfilling beau for self-confidence – and the guaranteed satisfaction of sex toys.
Elsewhere on the mixtape, the pain rears its inevitable, ugly head: Ashnikko licks her wounds after the implosion of a relationship on the acoustic guitar-driven “Good While It Lasted”, which sees her “taking responsibility for being an immature hothead”, and on the nu-metal-fueled Grimes collab, “Cry”, she rages and anguishes in equal measure in the wake of an ex-friend’s betrayal.