Who would you trust with your art? When you’re a musician, there are countless voices who are all eager to offer their “expert” advice. From management to studio execs in suits tucked away in their offices, producers and your popstar peers; but for UPSAHL there is one voice she has always been in tune with. As she creates her second album, it’s the close bond she’s built with her audience that’s taking centre stage.
Over the past few months UPSAHL, real name Taylor Upsahl, has been sharing snippets of demos that she loves with her Discord community, encouraging feedback to help guide the track selection of her new LP. “I’ve asked for them to give me their honest, honest opinions, and they’ve been saying: ‘love this, hate this’,” she reveals with a grin. “They’ve been so honest, and so I joke that they’re my A&Rs. They’re piecing the album together.”
We’re chatting in a trendy sideroom in UPSAHL’s label offices in North London, the remains of a healthy lunch abandoned as we perch on bar stools. Dressed in a chic oversized denim jacket and matching boots, she’s in town to play a headline gig at Lafayette as part of the European leg of her international ‘Melt Me Down’ tour.
It’s a rip-roaring show that sees the sheer scale of her ambition and creativity shine through. When she jumps on stage a few hours after her chat with NME, she channels other powerhouse performers like Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Avril Lavigne. From joining fans to mosh to bringing her sister Ryan onstage to cover Dua Lipa’s ‘Good in Bed’ (a song UPSAHL co-wrote), and blitzing through a mega set-list that spans both genre and her impressive back catalogue, it’s electric.
“You have to remind yourself, especially as a woman in the industry, that you’re the reason you’re where you’re at”
“In the past, I’ve loved making [a live show] feel like a rock show and high energy,” UPSAHL tells NME, teasing how the shows are intrinsically linked to a brand-new era of music. “I want to keep that energy on the tour, and also add a little bit of a story that relates to my album I’m going to put out next year. The whole theme of it is like ice and fire and melting.” That is, if the singer ever gets over what she describes as “the classic ‘I never want to stop writing for it’” phase of creating she’s currently locked into.
The record will follow a hefty back catalogue of releases and years of grafting. Starting to release music in her teens, UPSAHL penned a record deal in 2018 when she was only 19. In the seven years that have followed there have been EPs (including 2022’s excellent ‘Sagittarius’), tours supporting the likes of Yungblud and Melanie Martinez as well as her own headline gigs, viral TikTok smashes like catchy tune ‘Drugs’, and her debut studio record ‘Lady Jesus’ in 2021.
Early childhood influences imbued these first releases. Growing up on a diet of Weezer – the reason why she “got into songwriting so early” – and No Doubt (“I thought [Gwen Stefani] was the coolest bitch on the planet”), she was also inspired to pick up a guitar and write her own songs by watching her dad in band practice and playing shows.
Now, though, UPSAHL is moving into a new era. “This is the version of myself that I’ve wanted to become for a really long time, and I sort of woke up one day and was there,” she voices today. “That felt really fucking cool, and I feel like this album needs to honour that. With my music and my career over the past seven years there’s been so many ups and downs, and so much questioning myself, and so much confidence and insecurity, it’s been all over the place.
“To be in a place now, where I feel like a whole person for the first time in my life, is really, really cool. And I hope the music reflects that sense of wholeness.”
“People love where pop music is at now because it’s so brutally and unapologetically honest”
For her new era, UPSAHL is ready to move away from the “fire and passion and intensity” of previous projects, to instead lean into “coldness” that she has “always really looked up to in other woman artists”. She tells NME that the icy new energy she’s bringing is “kind of bitchy, but because it’s confident and secure”. The attitude is, as she puts it, “‘Fuck it, I know what I want, nobody get in my way, this is who I am, and if you have a problem with it? Don’t talk to me’.”
It’s a confidence UPSAHL perhaps didn’t always have within her career – especially in the beginning. “I think starting music, or even being signed when you’re young, it’s so easy to, as a young woman especially, be like: ‘Oh my god, I want to listen to all these other opinions because they probably know better than me. They’re older than me, more successful than me, a lot of them are guys,” she says candidly.
UPSAHL reflects honestly on her past self, both able to look back with affection and put her previous work under a critical microscope. “There are some songs that I put out where at the time I was like ‘this is sick’, and now looking back I’m like ‘what the fuck was I doing?! Why did I put that out into the world?’ But it’s all a part of the journey, which is why I tried to make this unapologetic attitude throughout my career a really big part of my brand.”
She acknowledges that in this industry, it can be easy to have your mind swayed by other voices, but sometimes it takes going in that direction to discover your true path. “I’ve done that so many times that now I can build the walls up, and build the iciness up to be like ‘we’re not doing that’. You have to remind yourself, especially as a woman in the industry, that you’re the reason you’re where you’re at, and what makes you special is the sauce that you bring to the table, not what somebody else brings to you.”
UPSAHL brings that special sauce in abundance. Her recipe? A no-fucks-given attitude, a dash of genre-hopping sonics rooted in alt-rock energy, one juggernaut live-show and the secret ingredient: her wicked songwriting pen.
Take recent release ‘Tears On The Dancefloor’, a seductive earworm inspired by early-noughties legends like Nelly Furtado and Britney Spears that’s ready-made for sweaty clubs (and makes for a goosebump-raising opening number on UPSAHL’s current tour). It’s a track that she wanted to feel “sad and sexy at the same time”, evoking the ‘crying in the club’ elements of Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’.
Dualities like this are a throughline within UPSAHL’s songwriting. “I’m always feeling both extremes of everything at all times. Either super fucking happy or super fucking sad or super hot or super insecure, both of these things – I think I’m learning – can exist at the same time,” she explains. “Even if I were to write a song that was like ‘I’m the baddest bitch alive, fuck everyone else’, there’s still going to be a little voice in your head. So [I’m] trying to combine both of those without being too confusing lyrically, just showing both sides of being a human.”
UPSAHL regularly writes for other artists as well. Aside from Dua Lipa, she’s also worked with Reneé Rapp, an experience that was “so inspiring” due to Rapp’s ability to be incredibly open and vulnerable. “To be able to immediately emotionally connect with everyone on that level, as an artist and as a writer, that’s the most powerful thing in the world. That’s how you’re going to get the most real songs,” she explains.
“This is the version of myself that I’ve wanted to become for a really long time”
It’s something UPSAHL now tries to implement into her own songwriting, by “trying to bring that emotional nakedness and vulnerability into sessions”. But the singer also sees how this mindset of brilliantly honest lyricism is currently permeating pop music – and one she’s actively relishing and drawing inspiration from the moment. “So many people love where pop music in general is at now because it’s so brutally and unapologetically honest,” she muses.
UPSAHL singles out recent releases by Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, fellow NME Cover star Chappell Roan and, especially, Charli XCX on ‘Girl, So Confusing’. “She’s saying, ‘sometimes I think I might hate you, you might hate me’. It’s not nice lyrics! That’s how she feels, and it’s such a reminder that that’s what art is for, to say some of the things that go unsaid.”
Ultimately, though, UPSAHL is among these artists, her songwriting standing shoulder to shoulder with current pop royalty. Her respect for this current wave of songwriting shines through as our time together draws to a close. “I feel like we went through a dark age [of music after COVID], where everyone was just chasing this TikTok virality or whatever. I fell victim to that,” she admits. “Now we’re back to real artists, having real shit to say, and it’s so inspiring.”
Her own music – which she describes as “pop with that grit” – fits the bill. It’s a theme of UPSAHL’s live show, too – a space of collective catharsis she hopes fans leave feeling “sweaty, empowered and just free”.
“That’s why we go to concerts, it’s to escape for a second. Especially right now, we need all the escape from the real world as we can get,” UPSAHL reflects. “If I can just provide that for an hour and a half of this – ‘that was such an emotional release, that was so fun! I got to be present and not think about all the other shit’ – that’s my goal.”
Listen to UPSAHL’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Hannah Mylrea
Photography: Ashley Osborn
Hair: Gabriella Mancha
Makeup: Rosie Sanchez
Styling: Alabama Blonde, Cassidy Jane Hill
Label: Sony