Sasha Sloan’s route to purveyor of muted pop majesty is a decidedly modern one. In 2014, the 22-year-old Boston native’s parents decided to paint the front of their family home, lovingly daubing the word “dork” in big letters and underlining it with an arrow pointing to Sloan’s bedroom window. Sloan posted a picture of it to Reddit, where it went viral. Breaking the site’s protocol on self-promotion, she added a link to her Soundcloud page of song sketches in the comments underneath, a move that resulted in her signing a publishing deal, quitting Berklee College of Music (she studied music business) and moving to LA.
After a few years struggling in writing sessions (“I was a bit of a jazz nerd, and I didn’t like pop music that much,” she’s said), she started to find her groove, co-writing Camila Cabello’s woozy ballad Never Be the Same. A string of collaborations with various dance producers (Kygo, Odesza, Kaskade) saw her edge nervously towards Sasha Sloan: the Artist, a move solidified by last year’s Ready Yet (7m Spotify plays and counting), an emotionally rich, left-of-centre ode to frayed relationships.
Its subdued electronics and sharp, observational lyrics are matched throughout her delicious shrug of a debut EP, the knowingly titled Sad Girl. It’s heavy, songwriting as therapy, but filtered through a pop prism. “Sometimes I don’t even really know I’m feeling something until I’m writing about it,” she says, “and then I’ll write the song and be like: ‘Oh, shit. Yeah.’”
• Sad Girl is released on 18 April on Columbia
