Sensuous, funny, and smartly produced, the London artist’s full-length debut transforms dusky electronic beats and trending pop sounds into a singular celebration of sexual agency.
Midway through “Shlut,” a sultry entry from Shygirl’s full-length debut, the singer poses a simple question over skittering trap beats: “Is it so bad to just like to be touched?” Sexuality, especially female sexuality, is often seen as frivolous, fleeting, and tempestuous, something that by nature can’t be defined or qualified. Across Nymph, in both the content of the songs and the eclectic nature of their instrumentation, the artist born Blane Muise challenges that notion by giving full breadth to her fantasies and desires. What does it mean to be “bad”? What does it mean to want? With futuristic neo-club anthems like “Freak,” “Nasty,” and “Gush,” Shygirl has long worn her sexuality on her sleeve. On Nymph, her siren song lures us deeper into the forest, past the dank dancefloors of her early discography and toward somewhere brighter and more introspective.
To achieve this feat, she assembled a coterie of co-writers and co-producers, including longtime collaborator Sega Bodega, Mura Masa, Arca, and underground pop denizens Danny L Harle, BloodPop, and Vegyn. Each is known for a unique sound, but from track to track, they never clash. To her immense credit, Shygirl maintains the thread throughout, her barely-there falsetto and never-faltering bravado keeping everything laser-focused. On “Shlut,” she, BloodPop, and Bodega distill aspects of classic Y2K pop, like Darkchild-esque plucked acoustic guitars and a staticky looping sample, and mesh them seamlessly with the hip-hop and electronic influences you’d expect from a Shygirl track. The sound transcends nostaglia, evoking the low-rise jeans, belly tees, and brazen sex appeal of the early 2000s without resorting to mimicry.
Elsewhere on Nymph, Shygirl and her cohorts achieve the opposite effect—taking a very contemporary sound and reverse-engineering it so that it resembles the genre from which it evolved. While Shygirl has never been a hyperpop artist, her creative development has coincided with the genre’s rise. It’s an easy first reference for “Firefly,” where she, Fade to Mind producer Kingdom, and Bodega marry a bouncy, glitchy synth melody with a wispy electro beat and downpitched vocals. But instead of summoning an (increasingly stale, if we’re being honest) hyperpop sound, a satisfying UK garage track bubbles forth. Shygirl’s understanding of how these musical elements interact and inform one another feels alchemical.
That’s not to say Nymph is all heady production values and technical minutiae; it’s also a showcase for Shygirl’s whimsical and carnal humor. Call me juvenile, but I have yet to get through the intro to “Coochie (a bedtime story)” without a hearty chuckle: “Hello?” Shygirl breathes down the phone, “Is there anyone there? It’s the coochie calling.” She sounds like the grime Betty Boop. Even that image gets subverted, though, because as the song kicks in, we realize it’s not Shygirl’s coochie that is doing the calling; rather, she’s on the receiving end of the request. “Anytime that coochie calls/I’ll be on my way,” she sings, once again using her sexuality to underline the point that she has the agency to fuck, or be fucked, by whomever she pleases.
Like “Coochie,” every track on Nymph reveals some new aspect of Shygirl’s persona, musicality, or, most often, both. “Poison” is as much four-on-the-floor club fare as it is ’90s Europop fantasia. “Nike” is a tongue-in-cheek minimal dance track built around a flickering melody that sounds like a Nokia ringtone from 2005. Even when the pace slows in the final third, Nymph remains everything you’d want from a debut album: a definitive collection of songs that builds upon what already makes the artist remarkable. The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is Shygirl’s chosen pseudonym; coy, maybe, sly, definitely, but Shygirl? There’s nothing reserved, nothing toned-down about this record. Though she seldom sings above her speaking register, it’s the proverbial strength of Shygirl’s voice that gives Nymph its undeniable power.
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