Rochester artist Lo Lauren is on a personal pop mission to put the glitter back into music

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Is pop back? Some would say it never went away. But in the packed schedules of modern radio, where genres from grime to DnB have infiltrated the peak-time airways, it’s certainly not front and centre anymore. Unlike its 80s and 90s heyday, when pop artists made up the celebrity world, you now have to go looking for it. You could say that pop is now the alternative.

“From my own experience, I think we’ve got amazing, big pop stars that have come back, like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan – they’re getting their flowers. But I think a lot of the pop music that’s being supported right now is kind of indie/alt,” says Rochester artist Lo Lauren.

“The problem is, to make big pop music, you need a big machine worth of people you know that you can work with. It requires a lot of ammunition, so there’s this big divide between you’re either a massive pop star or you’re trying to fight for your pop music, which is kind of what it does feel like at the moment for me, especially in the UK.

“It seems to be like we’re going against the grain!”

Lo Lauren describes her style as ‘glitter-pop’, and her infectious melodies and synth-driven production have struck a chord with fans up and down the country. A quick check on Spotify reveals 125k monthly listeners – but that doesn’t really tell the story.

There are classic pop milestones being hit.

A former student of Rochester Grammar School, Lo has club GLO, a monthly event where she will be meeting fans up and down the country for one-of-a-kind, intimate performances and crafting clubs, where they can make personalised hairclips with the star.

She has previously supported Rudimental and 220 Kid and played to 25,000 at The Hundred cricket final, alongside Cat Burns, Nell Mescal and Zara Larsson.

Two of her tracks, Only One on Earth and Before the Kiss, were used as Love Island backing tracks – including one in the final episode, aired to millions.

“I don’t watch Love Island, but I know that the final is a big moment, isn’t it?” she says. “I didn’t actually know it was specifically going to be played until my sister called me and told me to turn on the TV.”

Invention has been at the centre of the campaign to break through – in fact, even her name Lo Lauren is inspired by the phrase ‘lo and behold’.

“Hi, I’m here!” she says. And grabbing the attention comes naturally – take, for example, stealing her mum’s wedding dress to film the video for No Good in Goodbye.

“I just imagined Runaway Bride-type vibes because it was so melodramatic, and it worked so well,” she says. “With a lot of these videos, it’s just been basically me and my friends running around the streets with cameras, because there’s no budget. That’s my mum’s dress and my friend’s old red car. So you just make it and you just make it do.”

Taking a leaf out of the book of Ian Brown and Coldplay, the video for Before the Kiss saw Lo memorise an entire song backwards and act it out.

“It took me about two or three months to learn it, to be honest. It’s like learning German or something. So the video was just literally me, with the song reversed, slowed down, and I’m so glad we did it. It was so funny because we did it in Notting Hill and people were so confused, asking ‘What are you doing? Are you speaking another language?’. I’m like, ‘Yeah, basically’.”

Signed to independent label Believe, Lo is turning over digital plays but also grabbing air time, with plays on BBC Radio 1 by Mollie King, while Before the Kiss was featured in multiple Spotify playlists, which led to the track being discovered by Hollywood director Jordan Weiss, who immediately asked for the song to be featured in the movie trailer for her new film Sweethearts, which is out on HBO Max. Elton John even gave Lo a spin on his new music show.

Taken from new five-track EP Wonderlust, new single Born to Run (there’s no homage to Springsteen) has been described as her most raw and brutally honest yet, exploring her dedication to her dream of making it as a music artist and letting that take priority above all else, no matter the cost.

“I had the title and it’s really funny because I thought it was original. And then my manager was, like, ‘Springsteen? Are you mad?’.

“Wanting to be an artist in the music industry means making that your sole focus

over absolutely everything and all kinds of relationships, be it friends, family or love interests. This song is about my feelings of ambition, lack of wanting to settle and constant battle of prioritising ‘real life’ versus my dreams. It’s so hard and pretty savage! But it’s also just the reality and the sacrifices that come with wanting the things I do, soz.”

While the EP is described as an amalgamation of experiences and stories from her and her friends as they navigate their 20s, Lo wants it to feel uplifting.

“Find the beauty in life, find the magic in life,” she says. “And yeah, it’s hopefully a feelgood body of work that just covers a few different situations and emotions that I’ve been through, and hopefully people can connect to.”

That dedication to her artform is obvious. Lo wrote her first song aged 16 and knew pretty early on this was the path she wanted to take.

“I always knew. I don’t know why, but I didn’t really know what a pop star was, but I knew I wanted to do that,” she says. “It was only when I wrote my first song that I was, like, ‘Oh, it’s songwriting!’. So it wasn’t until I started reaching out to different musicians and writing songs with them that I was, like, this makes so much sense.

“I gradually met the people that I really loved working with. Time passes and you write a million songs and, yeah, we’re here. It’s just always kind of been the destination – it was figuring out how to get there that was really hard.”

While there are eyes on the established pop markets of Europe and Asia, the appetite for performing on the big stage has already been whetted by taking to the stage in front of 25,000 people at last year’s final of The Hundred.

“There were two sets, and I did three songs and then two songs,” she remembers. “On the second set, the sun had set a bit and it was later in the day, so the crowd were a lot more lively because the drinks had been flowing. And I just remember standing on stage and feeling ‘Oh my god, this is what Glastonbury might feel like’. And I remember thinking, yeah, I need to do this for as long as possible.”