On a night out in east London, the producer and DJ tells us about her heady new mixtape Fever Dream, her love of Lara Croft, and why she ‘hates’ going out
COUCOU CHLOE arrives at NQ64 bar in Shoreditch and almost immediately spills a drink over herself. Although her ultra-gorpcore Ana Selivanova jacket is collateral damage, she styles it out – her skin and hair glisten with a glass’s worth of booze and she adds a slick of lipgloss to finish the wet look. The drink in question is someone else’s gin cocktail (complete with a flashing ice cube), while she goes for a bourbon on the rocks with Dr Pepper syrup.
The bar we’re in is dark and neon-lit with flashing retro consoles and a very loud Chief Keef soundtrack. Glancing around, we can see shy freshers meet-ups and after-work drinks for tech start-ups. The gaming theme extends to the toilets where you can go “multiplayer”, i.e. have a wee sat next to your mate. COUCOU CHLOE has brought a couple of friends along, and bounces between shooting hoops to racing on Mario Kart and rocking out in the Guitar Hero booth.
When we chat outside later in the smoking area, away from the ear-splitting notes of Tyga’s “Rack City”, COUCOU CHLOE gives off a calm, relaxed energy with an air of mystery, chatting about Tamagochis, Paris Hilton and her love of cats in a strong French accent, as well as the severe sleep deprivation she’s experiencing. She tells me she started playing video game when she was two years old, which is partly the reason we’re here. Well, not exactly – her dad would play them and put the controller in her hand – but she instantly connected with them. She later got into classic games such as Crash Bandicoot, Pandemonium!, Jersey Devil, Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider. “I just loved seeing this fucking girl who’s so hot and so strong and just doing her shit,” she tells me. “I hate to say the word ‘role model’ but it was like: You’re the shit!”
The London-based producer, vocalist and DJ grew up in Biot and Antibes, in the south of France. While living in these small towns, she immersed herself in books, music and games. “I remember – this is going to sound so cringe – but I used to listen to The Fugees, ‘Killing Me Softly’,” she says. “And I used to always listen to a lot of music when I was younger in my room. I’d just imagine scenarios where I was travelling through music, and when I listened to that song by The Fugees, I remember I was imagining that I was Lara Croft.”
She believes game soundtracks are under-celebrated for their musicality – a favourite of hers is Final Fantasy, while she also namechecks the spooky harpsichord-filled “Cave 1” from Croc: Legend of the Gobbos as a particular inspiration. “Digimon and Ico OSTs are really good too. I listen to Animal Crossing a lot today still,” she adds. There’s a through line from these atmospheric sounds into her own heady, pounding club productions (and her recent collaboration with Kelvin Krash, “Thief In The Night”, earned a spot on the Need For Speed: Unbound soundtrack).
The Nuxxe collective member has just released mixtape Fever Dream, a collection that is “two years of friends and life and everything”, she says. It draws together an impressive crop of collaborators including Eartheater, 645AR, Brodinski, Yurufuwa Gang’s NENE and mop-haired teen rapper Matt Ox. “I had this track with an open verse left on it,” she says of their track “Ice Castles”. “And I was thinking, ‘What can I do? Should I do it myself?’ Then when I thought about it, I was like, I imagine Matt Ox. I really had a vision of Matt. And even if he didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have had someone else on it.”
Fever Dream’s cover art is a sketched caricature of COUCOU CHLOE, with an exaggeratedly large forehead, droopy-lidded eyes and a plumped-up, dissociative pout. She chose the art form as “I think I kind of don’t care about how I come across or am received, because I can’t control how people see me,” she says. “So I liked the idea of a caricature, or a grotesque, as a way to let go... It was really interesting to see the perspective of someone who doesn’t know me at all. It's like, ‘What do you see?’”
On 2022’s EP 1, COUCOU CHLOE drafted in Huddersfield bassline legend DJ Q to remix her ‘Wizz’ track, bringing in some of that bounce – and he’s joining her on the UK leg of her imminent European tour. Bassline, she says, has been one influence on her sound – with hollow warped synths cropping up in her “Drift”, “Snakes” and “Pokerface” productions. “I’ve always had a very big attraction to bass,” she says. “Even when listening to trap music or club music, whatever, I listen to the bass more than anything else. And I feel like, living in London, I discovered how to create big basslines.”
About her own listening habits, CHLOE says, they’re varied – but she’s “not really sensitive to today’s music”, other than the rappers Lucki and Baby Smoove who she loves. Her favourite artists are Ween, Daniel Johnston, Chopin, Sonic Youth, Can and Neil Young. Rather than spinning any of the Top 40, you’d be more likely to find her watching old live shows of Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
While the majority of the mixtape is heavy, throbbing COUCOU CHLOE featuring her dead-eyed, machine-like vocal, closing track “Never” is an outlier – a glacial, lamenting ballad featuring Drain Gang associate Woesum. COUCOU CHLOE says she’s always surprised at how people respond to her music. “When people talk to me about my music, they say, ‘Your music is so dark.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, is it?’ It’s always kind of unconscious when I do it.” In 2021, COUCOU CHLOE was invited to apply that magic touch of dystopian gloominess to Lady Gaga’s high-spirited “Stupid Love”, a track now loved among both Gaga and CHLOE fans.
Moments before we get interrupted by a smoker asking why we’re recording, COUCOU CHLOE talks about her lack of interest in the clubbing scene nowadays. “I actually never go out,” she explains – a somewhat surprising claim due to how dancefloor-focused her music is. “I don’t go out to clubs, don’t go out to parties. I mean, if there’s an act I really want to see, I would come to see them, but truly, I never go out. I hate clubs. I don’t dance. If I go to a club, I don’t know what to do. I’d rather listen to the music at home or on a big sound system.”
In person, after various rounds of Jurassic Park-themed shoot-em-ups, COUCOU CHLOE gives off that same air of mystery as her multi-layered, distorted music and caricatured portrait. It’s on stage, though, that she unveils a different side of herself, with snippets of her live shows on TikTok showing her crowdsurfing, squatting in her typical wide-legged power stance, and throwing flower stems – in a fun reversal of the crowd-performer relationship – into a writhing moshpit.
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