New Music
New Music
New Music: yergurl
We pick the hottest new live acts so you can tell your friends you heard them first. This week's pick is Bendigo's dreamy-pop wunderkind yergurl.
Ticketmaster New Music is your one-stop destination to discover the best emerging live acts before they explode. These are the artists we’re expecting to make waves in the live music scene, and we want you to know about them first.
Want a snapshot into the adolescent mind? Look no further than the debut EP Love Bite from Bendigo native Fae Scott and her musical alter-ego yergurl. She turned her focus to music at the beginning of 2017 – putting her tunes into the world just to see if people were interested. And it turns out they were, because since playing her first-ever gig in 2018, yergurl has gone on to be named a triple j Unearthed High finalist (that’s right, she only graduated high school last year), shared stages with the likes of G Flip and Wafia, and performed at festivals including St Kilda Fest, Bigsound, Live n Local, Changes, and Groovin The Moo.
Wearing the hats of vocalist, songwriter, and producer, yergurl makes dreamy pop beats in her bedroom. Her catalogue – right now, a neat little five-track, EP-sized snapshot and some other nuggets over on SoundCloud – is filled with raw, open, honest, and sassy songwriting, telling tales of growing up in regional Victoria, of life as a rebellious teen, and of the power emotions can have over you.
Yergurl’s unique storytelling is paired with swirling atmospheric synths, lo-fi beats, and layered reverb-soaked vocals to create the sort of pop that’ll soundtrack your dreams. Her sound takes as much inspiration from the ’80s as it does from the likes of The 1975, Charli XCX, or Lana Del Rey – and it’s this appreciation of genre-bending pop that has helped to shape yergurl into the charming, bedroom pop purveyor we are about to introduce you too.
Yergurl’s debut EP Love Bite bounces between radiance and darkness, rebellion and emotion, poking fun at herself as much as she is inviting you to get to know her. For all we know, she’s probably hanging out in another galaxy somewhere.
The Story
From the beginning
yergurl: “I’ve always had an instinct for music and was singing around the house my whole life. I would make up my own songs as a kid, which then became poetry in my early teens, and eventually back to songwriting. I already knew a bit about producing from “Computers” class as a kid but I rediscovered it and taught myself how to really make “my own” songs on GarageBand once I picked up songwriting again.”
What you’ll hear
yg: “In my mind, my music is kind of like emotional-synthy-reverb-heavy-pop-with-attitude. When I started my songwriting journey I was listening to a lot of Lana Del Rey and The 1975 which moulded my sound heaps. Those two are still massive influences on my sound and writing, yet as time has gone by it’s sometimes harder to detect now that my individual style has developed further.”
Influences & inspiration
yg: “Lana Del Rey, The 1975, Charli XCX, and Princess Chelsea predominantly at the moment. I tend to be inspired more by individual songs rather than a whole artist, however, these few could never go wrong with me. In terms of what inspires me to write, I definitely love writing about my teenage years, boys, bitches, my personal struggles, and just super emotional moments in my life.”
Inside the Love Bite creative process
yg: “Half of the songs I had written a year ago and we kinda just chucked them on there so they can have a place amongst my new stuff, but to me, the EP as a whole is kind of like my resume. I wanted to show a little bit of every side to yergurl and Fae and I think this selection of songs really does that. They’re all quite contrasting, therefore, nobody’s going to get any nasty surprises if I bring out a track that sounds different to say, ‘skateboard’ for example.
“There isn’t a central theme and that’s kind of the point for me. It’s an introduction to yergurl and it has to say as much as it can about me in five tracks.”
Down memory lane
yg: “My favourite track on the EP is ‘ICED OUT GRILLZ’. Not only because it’s the newest original song I’ve released to date, but I just didn’t expect it to work. I heard the beat in my head, made it up in Logic, and was about 99% sure I’d never find lyrics for it. Before I knew it, I was laying in bed about to go to sleep and all of the lyrics flew out of me. Even after writing lyrics I was still convinced that it wouldn’t be heard by others. Now we’re here, and I’m really proud of ‘IOG’. I love that it stands out and I always get confused looks or pleasantly surprised head bobs when I play it live.”
For the love of music
yg: “I love that the music you make can genuinely affect and change people’s emotions and experiences of emotions. That’s what had drawn me to music in the first place let alone creating music as a means of self-expression. Music isn’t even just emotional or moving, but it’s also fun and uplifting and can allow you to get fricken silly.
Kicking goals
yg: “Whenever I get asked this question the same thing pops into my head and that was playing at Groovin The Moo in Bendigo this year. It was surreal playing on a stage that I had been in the moshpit for for years in a row. Groovin’ holds such a special place in my heart as is, and I’ve made so many priceless memories at that festival and it was 100% a dream of mine that I never thought would come true. Plus, everyone I knew from Bendigo was there and regardless whether they watched me, it was a FAT flex XD!”
The year ahead
yg: “Hopefully I’ll have another single dropping later in the year, and I’m really keen on it because I feel like it will REALLY be something new. A lot of people already know ‘skateboard’, ‘boys think’, ‘hey ya’ and lots of my friends knew ‘Girls Like Me’, but the next single will really feel like I’m bringing some new music to the table now.”
Essential Listening
yergurl – boys think u look PHRESH!
yg: “This is a diss track. In ‘BTULP’, I’m 100% dissing a particular ho33333 but also myself and the kind of pretentious edgy teen culture I was surrounded by.”
yergurl – skateboard
yg: “This track is about me thinking me and my boyfriend would break up simply because every other high school relationship I’d had was trash. We’re still together!”
yergurl – ICED OUT GRILLZ
yg: “This one kind of came from a place of me fantasizing about being in a power couple with some dude and we’d be living luxuriously, being in magazines, and of course wearing some iced out grillz.”
Keep up to date with everything Ticketmaster New Music right here. Yergurl’s debut EP Love Bite is out now.
