![]() But for older audiences, Mai’s retro-leaning style can summon decades-old musical memories. On Boo’d Up’s parent EP, Ready, tracks are linked by straight-talking interludes aimed at a partner, like Destiny Child’s The Writing’s On the Wall for the WhatsApp generation. Mai strengthened those connections to fans with sincere songs about self-acceptance, and biting kiss-offs (“I hope the next girl you love ends up fucking you over,” she sneered on one early track). I was just being myself: the girl next door.” “I had no makeup on my hair looked crazy. “That was a huge part of building my fanbase,” Mai says. She first truly found her audience on Instagram, belting out soulful takes of Drake and Kanye West hits. At 19, she auditioned for The X Factor with a couple of mates, performing a well-crafted, if unmemorable, cover of a Little Mix ballad. When she got a teaching job in New York City, her daughter, then 12, joined her and moved to the city’s Queens neighbourhood, before returning to the UK at 17 and studying at London’s BIMM music college. Growing up in Wimbledon Chase and Mitcham in south-west London, Mai’s mum gave her a love of music, and would play Mary J Blige, Lauryn Hill, and old jazz records around the house. Over a beat that sounds like a lost classic from SWV or Xscape, Mai’s swooning vocals transpose teenage heart-flutters into the chorus’s giddily onomatopoeic hook, on which she scats: “Ba-dum, boo’d up/ Biddy-da-dum, boo’d up.” Among the sharp-edged trap and hip-hop that dominates today’s playlists, Mai’s laid-back style is a welcome rush of nostalgia, like the first sip of Ribena on a summer’s day.Įlla Mai … ‘Super proud to represent the UK’ With its puppy-love lyrics, Boo’d Up is a rose-tinted trip back to a time when a Friday night canoodling at the local arcade was dating goals, and the only right-swiping was at a Tesco checkout. ![]() “For a purely R&B song with no featured artists,” she says, “that’s insane.” ![]() She giddily reels off chart positions in the song’s ascent to its current eight-week reign in the US Top 10 as if she is still pinching herself. “It’s the way it’s steadily progressed,” she says, speaking from LA. ![]() Eighteen months after its release, south London singer Ella Mai’s infectious single, R&B throwback Boo’d Up, has gone from being a sleeper hit to the US-conquering song of the summer – last week she became the first British artist to top the US R&B charts since Lisa Stansfield in 1992.īut when asked to pinpoint a standout moment from her song’s rise to US radio dominance, Mai’s response is decidedly level-headed. ![]()
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