Fousheé

Fousheé remembers when she decided to make the leap. She’d been serving drinks at Cafe Wha?, a Greenwich Village club famous in part as a fulcrum of New York’s ’60s folk scene, writing songs during off-hours. Eventually she started making hooks for sound packs—snippets that could be bought, sampled and looped. One a day was the goal. There were the vocal lessons, too. Her musical coordinates were still a mystery to her: She’d grown up on rap and R&B, but her own songs tilted towards a soul-infused take on indie folk—a Black woman in a conventionally white space. “I was just grinding, grinding, grinding,” she told Apple Music in her Up Next interview. But in the end, it all counted. “Even being in karaoke was really important,” she said. “Because there’s no one more honest than a New York crowd—and a drunk crowd.” Born Britanny Fousheé, she bounced around as a kid, eventually settling in a primarily white neighbourhood in suburban New Jersey—nothing she claims angst about, but a position that made her feel like an outsider. But it’s that outsider status—was she allowed to rap? allowed to sing in folksy falsetto?—that makes her music emblematic of a moment where your image and sound don’t have to correspond in the way they used to in order for people to get where you’re coming from. She can cover Depeche Mode one minute (“enjoy the silence”) and hint at ambient and trap the next (“clap for him”); she can shred (“candy grapes”) and reel it in with haunting intensity (“deep end”); she can get Lil Wayne to rap on a track without drums (“gold fronts”). The through line is her airy, slightly faded voice; the rest is up for grabs. “I’m going to be dabbling around different genres freely,” she said, adding “as freely as I want to be.”