From Viral Covers to Original Tracks: Inside Lusaint’s Musical Evolution
25th April 2024
By Anna Kerr
Hoezine catches up with rising pop-jazz singer Lusaint as she opens up about her journey to authenticity in the music industry, her upcoming EP Self Sabotage, and breaking free from expectations to embrace her own unique sound.
“When you lose that sense of self-control when you're doing something that you're so passionate about, it's scary – you feel like you're being misled,” confesses Lusaint. Her fifth single for her upcoming – and first original – EP is set to be released in September, and she is reminiscing on the moment in her musical career when she diverged from what she felt was expected of her.
Facing the labyrinth of the music industry where success often hinges on conformity, Manchester-grown Lusaint is defiant: she has begun carving out her own, distinct musical identity with her upcoming EP, titled Self Sabotage. The EP’s four singles have all held a surprising pop-jazz infusion that feels nostalgic – it’s a sound that seems to have been abandoned in the 2010s when Paloma Faith was charting.
The EP has been in the works for nearly four years now, and Lusaint has been drip-feeding it to listeners via singles dropped over the space of a year. “Before [I started creating the EP], I was releasing a lot of covers online – I'd always wanted to release original music, but I didn't really know how,” Lusaint says.
She entered the music industry overnight in the summer of 2019 when her pop-ballad cover of Don’t Let Go by En Vouge went viral after featuring in an episode of Love Island. From there, she found a manager, and started working with writers and producers.
“At first, I was going down a pop-ballad route – that’s where my success had come from, so I thought that I had to lean into that,” she shares. But as someone who deeply loved jazz – she cites the jazz greats of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald as her music idols – something didn’t feel right. “I was definitely very influenced by the writers [I was working with at the time] to believe that [pop-ballads] were the style that I should be doing. And because I didn't have a clue, I just knew that I wanted to write music, and I thought that was it.”
“I was in London at the time. I was staying in this really awful Travel Lodge, and I swear they put me in the worst room ever. I remember going back to that room just breaking down. I didn’t know what was wrong with me – I was feeling so frustrated with the work that I was doing,” she recalls. “When I was in that place of writing the wrong music for me, I felt so lost and I felt like I just want to give up because I thought yeah, I’m writing nice music and it sounds good, but there's just something that's missing.”
That night, at the height of her disillusionment with her music career, the EP was born. “I was freezing cold in this room and I'd just had enough. I started to make voice notes on my phone of random poems [documenting] how I was feeling. Then a few melodies came out.” She sent the voice notes to her now-producer, and they started piecing everything together. “Two of the tracks on the EP were written over the course of maybe like three or four hours – it happened really quickly.”
Lusaint sees it as a stroke of luck that she was able to pivot out of inauthenticity to create music that truly aligns with her. With so many artists being trapped in unfulfilling deals and forced to churn out music for profit, including the singer Raye who last year publicly detailed her struggles with her old label and referred to the music industry as “evil” and “manipulative,” Lusaint values the freedom that she has found. “Having creative freedom is such a privilege in this industry, you know, because you can have a lot of people in your ear,” she shares.
The singles released so far – Sweet Tooth, Dream Life, Fool for You, Dark Horse and the soon-to-be-released Sober – all seem to identify the different ways in which Lusaint has at some point betrayed herself. “There was definitely a reason behind me choosing the name [Self Sabotage] for my EP,” she confesses. “When I was making the wrong music [for me], I didn't know how to take myself out of that – so I made everything worse by drinking more, going out more, eating more, or just doing things that were not helping me.”
While the process of creating the EP was cathartic, Lusaint admits that she still self-sabotages. “My go-to all the time is just to eat, like sugary sweets. If I'm stressed, I eat. I do that all the time. I think we all have those tendencies to do things that are bad for us when we know that we shouldn't. I think a lot of people can relate to that, so I’m really excited to get [the music] out.”
Despite her growing recognition across Europe, as her French tour looms next month with a sold-out Paris show, Lusaint remains cognisant of the challenges faced by Northern artists in a London-centric UK music industry. “Manchester definitely lacks resources for musicians who want to further their careers,” she observes. She cites The Smiths and Stone Roses as some of Manchester’s success stories, but points out that those who reach acclaim in the North usually are men. “I like to think that I'm breaking the mould a little bit, as a female, and doing this independently,” she said.
The EP is a love-child of her influences, which she identifies as a melding of classic jazz with the softer contemporary indie sounds of Michael Kiwanuka, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and Lianne la Havas. The album is eclectic, raw, and honest – and her authenticity seems to be paying off. “I’ve had ten plays now on Radio One. I remember when I first released the [original music], I was hoping that I would get like at least one play on Radio One. Now I’m ten [Radio One] plays in!”
The next single, Sober, will be released on 3 May, and it centres on a toxic relationship. “Everything is very specified [in the song], from the minor details of the relationship, to where it all went wrong, and when I [recognised that it] was really bad for me. I'm just really excited to get it out because I think a lot of people will definitely be able to relate.”
Having found her own distinct musical identity, Lusaint says there's so much more that she wants to explore with her new-found sound. “For the next EP, I would love to bring in more of the jazz and soul, for sure. It's definitely been a journey, but I feel like now, where I'm at with the music, it definitely feels right. It just feels very natural, and there's nothing that's feels like it's not clicking.”
Sober will be available on all streaming platforms on 3 May.