The DJ, singer, and all-around multi-hyphenate Blane Muise has always relished challenging people’s expectations. It first began when she re-named herself Shygirl, a stage name that’s playful and subversive in equal measure. She took on the name like a new skin, moulding it in her own image. ‘I never want to feel shy in baring myself publicly,’ Shygirl reflects on the oppressive nature of shame. ‘If I’m truly happy with who I am, I should be able to show that to the world.’ For the musician, shyness isn’t about hiding, rather it’s about exposing her truth, and refusing to play along with other people’s power games.
Loquacious and clearly uninterested in small talk, we catch up with Shygirl via Zoom before the release of her new album, Nymph. She’s glowing from her Club Shy event in Los Angeles the night before. Her speech accelerates with every sentence, racing against her thoughts. ‘I’ve been wanting to get back to the club for a while. It’s a brainstorming place for me, I get to mix different things. That’s where I get my eclecticism from,’ she says.
Born and raised in Blackheath, south-east London, Shygirl didn’t explore her queer identity until she moved back to London, aged 24, after finishing her photography degree at the University of Bristol. ‘I didn’t have that space to explore until my early twenties, whereas I look out at the crowds at my shows and I see so many young queer people who now have that space to find themselves, and the language to express it,’ she explains.
During her mid-twenties she worked at a modelling agency, and at night began frequenting the London nightclub scene. She credits the club PDA Dalston as a cornerstone in helping her discover her queer identity. ‘PDA was the first queer, Black scene I immersed myself in,’ she explains. ‘Those club nights helped trigger the real release of who I am. It was like a breath of fresh air.’ Shygirl reflects on her past with a razor-sharp clarity. ‘I didn’t realise I’d been assimilating for ages,’ she says of her youth, adding: ‘Being a mixed-race person, there’s so much of my life where I’ve felt out of it, not really in any tribe. But, it did make it easy to step in and out of things, because it’s in the boundaries where I’ve always found my comfortable space.’
Before she found music, Shygirl wrote poems onto the backs of scrap paper and in phone notes to savour the cathartic release that came with expressing her thoughts. ‘My mum wrote me poems, my dad texts like poetry. Expressing sentiment with words was implied as a wholly worthwhile endeavour in my house.’ In a bid to explore self-expression further, she developed a friendship with Irish-Scottish producer Sega Bodega, who asked her to ad-lib over one of his tracks. The result was an earth-shaking club banger, her debut track ‘Want More’.
She’s since released two critically acclaimed EPs and established her behemoth status in the queer club scene. The fashion world is equally enamoured with Shygirl. In recent years she's performed at a Fenty fashion show, provided the soundtrack to a Mugler show, appeared in a campaign for the London brand KNWLS, and collaborated with Burberry on its AW21 presentation and the launch of the brand’s Olympia bag. Days after our interview she performed before the Balmain SS23 show during Paris Fashion Week.
Listen to the first second of any Shygirl song and it’s clear that she has complete mastery over her own desire. Take for example, ‘Uckers’, in which she boasts: ‘I don't give a f*ck about you/ But I really keep on f*cking till I f*ck all of you’ to the sound her own piercing shriek against the thumping bass. Playing with the idea of lust and control, Shygirl enjoys exploring her own desire as much as that of a partner’s for her. ‘When I’m talking about subverting stereotypes or living up to them when thinking about female desire, it’s about finding out what I need for myself in that conversation,’ she tells ELLE UK. ‘Sometimes you have to act out other people’s fantasies to find out what you need for yourself.’
Meanwhile, in her EP, ‘Alias’, she explores the idea of personifying each track as a Brat-like doll to represent different aspects of her personality (Baddie, Bonk, Bovine and Bae) from whom she can dissect, learn and evolve.
With her new album Nymph, out now, rather than breaking herself into parts, Shygirl is ready to expose the complicated, inseparable aspects of her personality and challenge any preconceived notions about her. ‘People see me as this strong, confident, untouchable woman,’ she explains, adding: ‘But that’s not true. I’m vulnerable, and I don’t feel good about myself all the time.’
‘I never want to feel like I don’t have control over how I’m perceived,’ she continues, noting that she’s conscious of the way the media, strangers and lovers often expect her to fit into a specific mould as a Black woman relegated to the role of ‘strong’ and ‘outspoken’. ‘I am an active contributor in that space, not just trapped there.’ Refusing to be labelled and packaged into a neat box for public consumption, Shygirl is on a mission to challenge people’s ideas of her. ‘The way I present myself is a choice. There was a lot of bravado in my previous tracks because that’s what I needed to hear from myself. I was being very vulnerable in real life, and now that I’ve actualised that sense of confidence, I want to share myself more. It’s so thrilling to be vulnerable.’
Contrary to her approach in her earlier music, where she ‘emulated the tonality of the male gaze and tried it on for size’, but consequently received ‘unwanted energy’, for Nymph she has focussed on her own self-discovery. In ‘Shlut’, while seeking out a lover for a night, it’s her own body she envisions before anyone else's. A line from the lyrics read: ‘Body right, p*ssy tight, you can try that easy/Never mind I'm f*ckin' with myself’. ‘When I send someone a nude, I’m feeling myself. If I’m feeling sh*t, you’re not gonna get nothing,’ she tells us, explaining that her desire is fully entwined with her own pleasure and self-confidence. ‘I’m exploring different parts of my femininity now, and Nymph is part of that allure,’ Shygirl explains.
Despite doubts over her album’s title (‘My friends asked me if I was were sure about the name Nymph, because they imagined a waif-like pastiche, pale creature'), Shygirl says that it’s by taking on the spirit of a nymph that is helping her to subvert its character altogether. ‘That’s the power of my existence,’ she says.
Shygirl reflects on why Black women are often written out of fairy-tales and denied access to fragility and fantasy. In Nymph, she says she is the myth itself, and that in showcasing her siren-like power, she is able to conjure up new sounds to draw the listener in. ‘I have this shroud of desire that I weave with my voice. I have this power to lead you somewhere, just like a siren,’ she says, matter-of-factly. No matter where Shygirl leads, we’ll be following.
Shygirl’s debut album Nymph is out now.
