As metaphors for breaking free from this wretched year go, flying through the air at night astride a furry pink dragon has to be up there. In the video for her featherlight R&B-pop jam Tuesday, 32-year-old Londoner Tyson channels The NeverEnding Story as she glides over the city atop a fantastical beast. There’s a gentle optimism to the track, with its dreamy bedroom musings about the fresh glow of new romance and wanting to be taken out on a weeknight. Oh, don’t we all.
Tyson is the girl next door, if the girl next door’s mum is Neneh Cherry, her father Massive Attack producer Cameron McVey and her siblings all musicians, including the pop singer Mabel. Her sound is low-key and effortlessly cool, somewhere between the hushed introspection of Tirzah and the jazz-tinged questing of Lianne La Havas – smoky and airy, soft and slow, like chiffon being dropped over crackling vinyl.
At one point Tyson wasn’t sure whether she’d sing again: the stress of balancing her previous alt-pop duo Panes alongside her masters degree in the 2010s led to her developing nodules on her vocal cords, which affected her speech for two years. But now she has found her voice in more ways than one, surrounded by her close circle. Her new Pisces Problems EP was written with childhood friend Oscar Scheller, previously known mononymously as Oscar, and mixed by Kieran Hebden, who collaborated on her mum’s last album, Broken Politics. And testament to the kind of unstarry artist she is, Tyson is self-releasing it via the label/collective she co-founded to fight discrimination in the music industry, Ladies Music Pub.
Pisces Problems is out now on LMP Recordings
