SPIDER is shaping alt-pop in her own delightfully surreal image

“I‘m alt-pop like all the other white girls in alt-pop, and I’m alternative like all the other white boys in alternative,” SPIDER, born Jennifer Irabor, says. “So put us on the same bill!” The 23-year-old says it with a laugh, but she does that a lot, getting to the truth with humour in conversation with NME at south London’s Canova Hall.

She wears the alternative label proudly, an act of reclamation for a genre which hasn’t historically invested in underrepresented voices. Irabor’s upcoming EP, ‘Hell or High Water,’ out on April 27, is a collage of very specific components: fuzzy guitars, crackling percussion, vocals that are at times loud and echoey and at other times smooth and sweet.

It’s a sound she carefully curated by taking notes on what she specifically liked about different songs – the wall-shaking bass from Charli XCX’s ‘Vroom Vroom,’ the propulsive guitar throughout Grimes’ ‘Flesh without Blood.’ “I have a very analytical brain,” she says, and it extends beyond songwriting: the treatment she wrote for the video for her confident, raucous track ‘America’s Next Top Model’ – in which Irabor stands tall in the face of white men yelling at her – was 19 pages long.

Irabor grew up in Tallaght, Ireland, and has been writing music since the age of 15, before moving to London three years later to study songwriting at BIMM Institute (alumni include MARINA and Ella Mai). She listened to a lot of Lorde and Halsey growing up – she credits the latter’s 2015 debut ‘Badlands’ as the album that encouraged her to pursue production – along with 5 Seconds Of Summer, for whom she ran an update account on Twitter along with two other girls.

Irabor remains connected to music online, now through TikTok, where her song ‘Water Sign’ gained over 160,000 likes – putting the track in front of people after blogs had declined coverage. It also helped her make connections in the industry which ultimately led her to Earl Saga, who produced two of the tracks on the new EP (‘America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Why Would I Bother’). Early last year, Irabor was making TikToks about her ‘I’m Fine! I’m Good! I’m Perfect!’ music video, which took inspiration from teen pop culture aesthetics – house parties, Tumblr, Skins. “There’s so much whitewashing in coming-of-age media,” she says, explaining how she wanted the video to focus on young people of colour.

“Our lives are not all about oppression,” she says. “Sometimes we also fight with our best friend at the party and we also get really drunk – trivial things that you see white young people do in movies. When they’re in media, their oppression or position in society is never attached to them. But when it’s young people of colour in media, it’s always this other thing there.”

One of Irabor’s TikTok clips about the video garnered a lot of attention, initially from people of colour expressing support and appreciation towards her. But she was also receiving a lot of negative comments, and soon after, the video was taken down. Another user suggested Irabor might have been targeted by a mass reporting campaign, where users persistently report accounts – often by creators of marginalised identities – and get them taken down or banned.

“I made a video about this, being like, ‘TikTok’s reporting system is being used against marginalised communities,’” Irabor explains. “And then that video had so many people, anybody who wasn’t literally white, cis, able-bodied – it was trans people, disabled people, people of colour – all saying, ‘Actually, yeah, this happens to me.’”

After taking some time to process the fallout she experienced on TikTok, Irabor had a session with Saga, where they both talked about how they felt current music was “boring”. She explains: “There’s so much space for artists to say important things, make radical statements. And if anything, we’ve had so many artists come before us who’ve opened up that space for us.” It was in that session that ‘America’s Next Top Model’ came together.

“I’ve always envisioned myself as an artist who would make people a bit angry,” she says. “I don’t see myself being a very likeable character. I always saw myself as, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be the artist that makes a lot of privileged people – or people who are not oppressed – mad because of how opinionated I would like to be and the and type of art I want to make.” Irabor says she finds hateful remarks funny now, and wrote “literal noise pollution” – a comment she received on social media – on a shirt she recently wore on stage in London.

‘Hell or High Water’, then, is the product of that commitment to self-expression. The EP confronts her personal frustrations head-on, no matter what the consequences may be. Whether it’s being open about her family dynamic on ‘Why Would I Bother’, or calling out her friends’ clout-chasing boyfriends on the ironically upbeat ‘Growing Into It,’ Irabor is putting it all on the table.

When Irabor looks towards the future, her ultimate goal is for her fans to attend her shows and have the same experiences she did as a young music fan. “I want whatever audience I end up with to feel like they’re making friends in line for a show, or to have found each other because they’re both fan accounts, and they both like the same song,” she says. “When I think about what I truly care about, I just want that.”

SPIDER’s new EP ‘Hell Or High Water’ will be released on April 27

The post SPIDER is shaping alt-pop in her own delightfully surreal image appeared first on NME.