Shygirl: ‘I’m not worried about being super explicit or revealing too much about myself’

The sought-after UK rapper is evolving her sex-positive persona on her debut album. She talks to Annabel Nugent about the ways it has changed her, loving poetry and period dramas, and searching for her name online

‘There was a lot of conversation about me being super body positive, and I wasn’t entirely, not at the beginning' (Samuel Ibram)

So far, Shygirl has not lived up to her name. The moniker suggests meekness. It suggests naivety, all fluttering eyelashes and flushed cheeks. What it does not suggest is a technically adept rapper who waxes lyrical about sex in, ahem, very explicit terms, spitting vulgarities about “getting [redacted] in the [redacted] while you [redacted]”. It’s hard to imagine the London musician, born Blane Muise in 1993, blushes at anything.

It makes both perfect sense and no sense at all that the 29-year-old rapper and DJ found her breakout moment during lockdown. Her 2020 EP Alias, an escapist reverie about writhing bodies on the dance floor and in the bedroom, arrived at a time when writhing anywhere was but a distant memory. Muise had been a fixture on the underground London club scene before Alias, but the EP brought with it new exposure – and new admirers. Like, say, Rihanna and Björk. Muise has since collaborated with FKA Twigs, Slowthai and Lady Gaga. She has worked with Burberry, Fenty and Calvin Klein. Everyone wants a piece of Shygirl: the infallible and outspoken symbol of modern sexuality and femininity. Only that’s not who Muise is. Or rather, not all she is. Her newly released debut Nymph is a testament to that.

This afternoon, for example, Muise is fragile. “I’m a tiny bit hungover,” she mews on our call, emphasising “tiny” in a way that implies the opposite. But besides the fact she has her camera off – and perhaps there’s a new nasal lilt to her voice, which is usually buttery soft – you wouldn’t know it. She’s warm and thoughtful, giving answers in long paragraphs without pause. In conversation, Muise is no shy girl either. Only on Nymph, she’s getting candid not on matters of the flesh (though, there’s some of that too) but affairs of the heart. As she divulges on the album’s delicious, hyper-pop track “Heaven”, this time around Muise is “here for more than the ride”.

Alias came at a time when Muise needed it. A lot of those songs, full of braggadocio and purred directives to lick this and kiss that, were flipping the script on how a previous partner had treated her. Her barbed lyrics were not weapons but shields. A year of healing later and Muise wrote “Cleo” in the throes of a new infatuation. In it, she casts herself in a glitzy fantasy as the Egyptian queen. “I wrote that song about being blissfully in love and throwing myself into it,” she recalls. “When that experience ran out, as it inevitably did, I wasn’t feeling that way any more. There were times when I was super sad and emotional.” That disconnect between what she was saying and what she was feeling triggered something in her. “I knew I wanted to make more songs that would give me room to feel all the different emotions I go through on a regular basis.” No one, not even Shygirl, can be a bad bitch 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

At the same time, Muise was witnessing her own mythologising in the public eye. Among media and fans, the story of Blane Muise begins to coalesce into the symbol of Shygirl: a one-dimensional character who is bold and brave, outspoken and proud, sex-positive and confident in her body. Basically, the girl you see in those Dove commercials about female empowerment – only she dresses in latex. “There was a lot of talk about me being this assertive person, which maybe I was a little bit but definitely not to the extent that was being spoken about,” she says. “There was a lot of conversation about me being super body positive, and I wasn’t entirely, not at the beginning.” A new album offered the chance to display her range, not just as an artist but as a person.

The resulting record is eclectic, while still telling a cohesive story. It is both sensuous and sweet, challenging the notion that female desire has only one note. There are still the neo-club anthems, this time leaning into a Nineties Europop nostalgia as on “Poison”, and the club-ready, bass-heavy dance tracks – but on Nymph, there is a softening, an invitation into more tender terrain. Perhaps the most telling testament to that is “Coochie (a bedtime story)”. On Alias, an ode to genitalia might have taken a different route but on Nymph, it manifests as a gleaming hyper-pop lullaby; twinkly electronics shimmer like a fairy’s wings.

Nymph then, is a changing of gears, a shifting of shapes – but Muise doesn’t see it as a departure from the bravado of her earlier music – because even as she professes her vulnerability, she does it without reserve. Nymph is an evolution, though not a linear one. She can and is all these things at once. “I still really enjoy those [Alias] songs; I don’t have any desire to cover them up. I stand by that music and say that music is good and it’s worth the time to be consumed more. I don’t like the speed with which we consume things and just expect to have more.” Having a bigger, more varied repertoire also allows Muise to feel authentic performing on stage. “I don’t want too many songs that are similar; I want to have a set that has a journey. When I started playing shows, that’s when I realised what was missing for me and what I need to build on to keep that space engaging for me.” Her worst nightmare, she says, would be going up there and singing karaoke to her own songs.

She wanted the album’s title to reveal herself a little more. Like a nymph immersed in her surroundings, Muise too feels tied to nature. Her family used to spend summers in the pastoral idyll of Wales and still now, getting out of the city is how she finds clarity in songwriting. “My relationship with the countryside is a big part of my life, but it’s not necessarily one that people would assume,” she says. “Every time I’m called a south Londoner or a south London native, the implication of that is urban. That’s what’s being said – and that’s not entirely something that I relate to.”

Muise was born the oldest of three siblings in Blackheath. She calls her upbringing creative, but implicitly so. “My parents fostered it, and they were interested in it, but they weren’t doing creative jobs,” she says. Muise used to work in a restaurant with her mum while her dad, an accountant, mostly worked office jobs. In their spare time, they would read. Her mum loved crime stories and her dad was partial to a fantasy novel, but Muise was a fan of the classics. Thomas Hardy, especially. “I wanted to know why other people thought these were worthwhile to read,” she says. “My dad was never really encouraging of period dramas; he always felt that it was a way to be exclusionary to Black people, but I love them.” It’s the brutalism of the romance that captivates her, she says. Such drama. Such intensity. “All of the romantic period in art, not just books, but paintings also…” she trails off, a little wistfully. “I was looking at that to contextualise what had been in the background of my tastes for a long time but hadn’t really focused on. I spent time reading up on it before diving into the creation of the album.”

“I think it was more my dad who encouraged poetry as a way to broaden intellect as well and be engaged with people and understand people and understand yourself.” She and her parents developed a shorthand between the three of them through a shared language of books and music. “It was a furthering of our own communication. Like with anyone, you get to know someone more when you know their tastes.” Her parents set the “baseline” for her taste, introducing her to a library of Aphex Twin, Björk, Roisin Murphy, Destiny’s Child and The Isley Brothers. It was on her own that she discovered “trashy stuff” like Basshunter. “It’s all about balance,” she laughs.

‘I crave praise,’ says Shygirl. ‘That’s why I don’t work very well in the room by myself’ (Jacqueline Landvik)

It was a “sentimental” household. Her mum used to craft bookmarks from wrapping paper and sellotape using poems Muise would write. “And whenever we would write cards to each other for Christmas and birthdays, I’d get off on making my mum cry,” she chuckles. “We’re romantics in that sense. My dad, when he talks to me, it’s very poetic. It’s like heknows that it’s a moment.” Her taste for melodrama became a coping mechanism, too. “Whenever I felt overwhelmed or hugely dramatic, I would write poems in my notes, and I would send the emotion up to the most it could be in this poem. And then I’d leave it – and that was therapeutic for me.”

Writing Nymph wasn’t easy; it went against everything Muise had grown up thinking about music. “My first instinct with songs is that they should have some emotional sentiment – but make it fab. Never to be too on-the-nose with how I’m feeling,” she says. The vulnerability of Nymph demanded that Muise fight her gut. “I had to address why I was avoiding being straight-up sentimental and why I wasn’t telling that part of the story when I obviously had those feelings and was going through that in my real life. Why do I feel the need to subvert it?” She had to find a way to “stand by” her feelings and “not be cringed out” by them. Opening up, in this case, meant dropping the smirk, ditching the wink. It meant being earnest, which felt much scarier than rapping about “big d***s”.

I love therapising. I’m talking out loud all the time

It helped that she was surrounded by family. Her pals and frequent collaborators Mura Masa, Sega Bodega, Cosha, Karma Kid and Arca all worked on Nymph. It was liberating, she says, to be writing with friends. “I can be as free as possible. I’m not worried about being super explicit or revealing too much about myself in the moment because I’ve probably already bored them to death about the subject matter anyhow,” she laughs. “I love therapising. I’m talking out loud all the time. That’s how I figure out how I’m feeling – and all my friends are privy to that process.”

She booked an Airbnb in Hove to work on the record. “I always try to work in as informal an environment as possible. There’s pressure that comes with working in a studio, but if we’re just hanging around the house, I know we’ll think of things.” That’s how Nymph came about. Someone would make a beat, and Muise would start writing something to go with it. “My access point to music has always been words first. I need the words to figure out the melodies.” Her friends would give her the reassurement she needed to hear. “I crave praise,” she laughs. “That’s why I don’t work very well in the room by myself.”

Muise didn’t start rapping until she was 23, after leaving the University of Bristol where she studied photography. It was a friend, Irish-Scottish music producer Sega Bodega, who first asked her to rap over his industrial-doom production on “Want More”. It had all the early bravado of a Shygirl song: “You wanna go slow, I ain’t into it/ You wanna talk shit, I ain’t into it/ You want more; I ain’t into it.”

Given that her biggest tracks are filthy hot-girl anthems – like “UCKERS” on which she growls about her sexual dominance, “I don’t give a f*** about you/ But I really keep on f***ing” – it would be understandable if she felt nervous about releasing an album that is, in some ways at least, a curveball. Muise, though, is hopeful her listeners will connect regardless. “I feel incredibly lucky that I haven’t really been misinterpreted. I’ve been pretty much understood in my creative endeavours by my audience.”

Shygirl during a live performance (Rhian Emanuel)

The Shygirl myth may not be the whole truth, but Muise has found power in it regardless. In a way, she says, it’s been self-prophesying. “I feel like I’ve grown a lot in confidence compared with the artist I was when releasing Alias. It’s almost actualising something that the audience has given me the space for,” she says. “When people give you that space to step into, you either do or you don’t, and I chose to step into it. I chose to embrace it as much as possible.” She continues, “I just did a Calvin Klein campaign; I’ve had many offers to shoot underwear before and I never wanted to because I didn’t want to see myself like that, not in a negative way or anything but I didn’t have the desire to. And then all of a sudden, I did.” Equally, she says, it would be hard to imagine the artist she was pre-Alias baring all in the sensuous music video for “Shlut”, an uncensored version of which will debut on OnlyFans later this month. “That was my choice. No one asked me to do that. I decided to do that because I felt I could give colour to the artistic narrative.”

Like many emerging artists, she has a devoted online fanbase. And like any emerging artist with a social media account, she has a complicated relationship with that fan base. “The opinions of your audience are heard way more than ever before and it took me a minute to acclimate to that.” You wouldn’t blame her, or anyone in the public eye, for turning off their comments. Or at the very least, avoiding them. “Nah, I literally read everything,” she cackles. “I definitely search my name all the time.” Muise does put up some boundaries, though. For one thing, her phone is always on Do Not Disturb. “I check my messages when I’m ready to because otherwise once I see something, I need to address it straight away – and that’s a weird by-product of being too accessible. It means the other person is deciding that they’re ready to engage rather than you who is deciding.”

That’s what this is all about, doing things on her own terms – even when it doesn’t feel natural. “The name Nymph kept coming back to me and I ignored it because I felt maybe it was too cute,” she says of the album’s title. “But then I asked myself why I was pushing it aside. Why wasn’t I accessing what I’m drawn to? It’s the same reason why I wasn’t being sentimental in my music, because I thought it was too cute. But actually, now I’m saying that’s a valid way of approaching things.” This time around, she’s embracing the cuteness, basking in the glow of her vulnerability and asking us to do the same.

‘Nymph’ is out now on Because Music. The explicit version of the ‘Shlut’ video will be available exclusively on OnlyFans on 11 October