Lighters out: That’s why the emo revenant Gayle is currently having crazy success

Sometimes they are ungrateful, the record buyers of this world. There’s a Billie Eilish bending over backwards to break with the production and beauty standards of pop that made life difficult for Britney Spears and her predecessors, and all Naslang a phenomenon like Lil Nas X jumps out of the cake, the wants to lead the pop mainstream into the future – and then the lazy consumer nutlets end up only buying what they already know. There is no other way to explain why the just 17-year-old singer Gayle from Nashville landed at number 3 in the single charts out of nowhere with her song “abcdefu”.

Because the emo revenant Gayle not only wears a hairstyle that colleague Sia has practically always taken for walks (two-tone Cruella de Ville light look), but also makes music that people like Pink somehow managed to make more fun in the early noughties ( pop with well-calculated outbursts of anger and the courage to use nanana refrains). In the video for the song, shot in Gen Z compatible cell phone video quality, Gayle and her gang have a blast at her ex-boyfriend’s house, but if you’re being honest, you’ve seen even such revenge more entertaining.

One would have to ask her gigantic followers on TikTok why Gayle made the big breakthrough with this breakup number, which, admittedly, mills into your brain shockingly fast when you first meet her. Her song “z”, cheekily released a year before “abcdefu”, is a similarly infectious pop single, but it doesn’t have the heavy, out-of-the-lighter vibe of her current super hit. I guess every generation − Lil Nas or Eilish − needs its own mid-tempo stadium bangers for moments of melancholy on the school bus. In any case, Gayle’s first single for the major label Atlantic, which the social media phenomenon had grabbed at lightning speed, is exactly that. But the alphabet still has a few letters. And maybe more to tell Gayle soon.

This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 02/2022.