She’s channeled teenage misery and drug use into songs inspired by her grunge heroes – and now the 20-year-old is being hailed as the voice of Generation Z
On the face of it, Beatrice Laus’s success looks like the plot of a far-fetched movie, the kind of thing knocked together by Netflix in the hope of snaring an audience of tweenage girls at sleepovers.
Seventeen-year-old misfit learns to play secondhand guitar after being expelled from school; writes first song, posts it online “because I wanted my friends to hear it”, then watches astonished as it becomes a viral sensation (49m plays on Spotify and counting). This leads to a record deal and ends up forming the basis of a Canadian hip-hop single that turns into a huge global hit: Powfu’s Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head), which racked up 10 billion plays on TikTok in the space of three months. She becomes the subject of online tutorials devoted to copying her makeup and look, tours America, plays arenas supporting the 1975, learns valuable life lessons (“It’s made me realise a lot of things, I’m a much more responsible child now, a nice kid”), radically overhauls her sound, attracts critical acclaim and finds herself being hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as the voice of Generation Z. Slow fade and end credits, perhaps over a track from her eagerly anticipated debut album Fake It Flowers, an impressively fresh take on the kind of US alt-rock you heard a lot of in the early 90s: the Breeders, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, Veruca Salt.
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