Break-up anthems are a pop stalwart, but no one makes music that’s a soundtrack to having a crush like Flowerovlove, aka Joyce Cissé. “Having a crush is amazing. I love it,” she tells me. “It makes life feel complete when you just have someone to fixate over.”
The London-based singer-songwriter is about to be everyone’s music crush. She dropped her latest single New Friends last week, is joining Halsey for stops on her North America tour, as well as opening for Olivia Rodrigo at BST in Hyde Park and playing Lollapalooza in Chicago. She’s already released three EPs, had a track featured on Netflix hit Heartstopper, and made her Glastonbury debut last year. Not bad for an artist yet to release their first album, let alone one who is just 19 years old.
“I just want to make pop the way I would have loved to have had it growing up,” says Cissé. “My music is very conversational, it’s somewhat nostalgic, and it’s super fun.” She cites everyone from ABBA to Justin Bieber as an influence. “I Iove dumb songs. I love when the lyrics are very unhinged.”
Music was her first love, but it’s not her first career. Cissé began modelling at 15, booking campaigns for Gucci and walking the runway at Paris Fashion Week. While she learned lots from the experience, she was soon eager to return to making music. “I felt my calling was just greater than being a model,” says Cissé. “It was to express myself, and it has nothing to do with the way I look.”
“I recently got blocked because someone thought a song was about them”
She implicitly understands the importance of iconography in contemporary pop, the way top artists encode messages to fans. She’s also got a much cooler term for it than the phrase Easter egg: “lore”. She’s creating her own mythology. “I like to do things with socks, I’ll have little snippets of text written on them.” She loves it when her fans go on the hunt for the hints she’s dropping. “Sometimes they think stuff is a clue when it’s not, and I love it,” says Cissé.
Singing about love inevitably means people are desperate to work out who the subjectof a song is. There has been more than one occasion where someone in Cissé’s circle mistakenly thought they had become a muse. “I recently got blocked because someone thought a song was about them,” she says.
Performing is clearly home for Cissé. She would rather be on the bill at a festival than in the crowd. And she can’t wait for fans to hear her new work and learn more of that lore. “It’s been a long time and I’m ready,” she says. “I’m excited for people to hear my music and understand my lyrics and feel something.”
Don’t fight the feeling, it’s about to be a summer of love — or rather, Flowerovlove.
Flowerovlove’s single New Friends is out now on Capitol Records
