Influenced by Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, The Weeknd and Drake, KLOE is an up-and-coming, 19 year-old, Glasgow, Scotland, UK-based singer/songwriter and pop artist who burst into international prominence with the release of “Touch,” a single that received praise from the likes of The Sunday Times Culture, Fader, Nylon and several others. And adding got a growing profile across the UK and internationally, KLOE was nominated for and won a Scottish Music Award.
The young Glaswegian’s Teenage Craze EP was released earlier this year through IAMSOUND (the label home of Florence and the Machine, Little Boots and Charli XCX) in the States and Columbia Records in the UK and as she explains in press notes about the EP’s latest single, EP title track “Teenage Craze,” “‘Teenage Craze,’ to me, feels like the start of something big. I wrote it at the tail end of last year about everything that had happened to me in 2015. I had just started to work in London and became very disconnected from everything I’d ever known growing up in Glasgow, nostalgic about my past and the people who were in it. In retrospect, I think Teenage Craze is a dark, twisted love letter to my youth. A farewell to my teenage years.” And as a result, the song possesses a burgeoning urgency — the urgency that comes when you realize that your decisions and actions have consequences that will impact your entire life; that some will see their dreams unfolding in front of them while others will see their lives stalled and frustrated; the recognition that life is ultimately about uncertainty and transition, and how that uncertainty and transitions will cause friendships and relationships to crack and fade; and that all of this is equally exiting and terrifying.
Sonically, the song pairs slick and modern production consisting of shimmering synths, wobbling low end, finger snaps, layers of distorted vocal samples, tweeter and woofer rattling beats and swirling ambient electronics with KLOE’s coquettish cooing. Naturally, the song will be compared favorably to the likes of contemporaries like Phoebe Ryan, Chelsea Lankes, CAPPA and others who have taken the blogosphere by storm over the past 18 months or so; however, what sets the young Glaswegian apart from her contemporaries is the fact that “Teenage Craze” manages to accurately capture a young woman in transition — although she’s a strong and capable woman, confident within her abilities to attract and seduce others — and yet simultaneously, you can practically see the girl in the young woman and vice versa.