The 19-year-old from Brighton has already taken her unique sound from the teenager’s bedroom to the top of the charts
Name: Josie Proto
Location: Brighton, England
Style: Bedroom pop
Look out for: Latest single I Bet You Fall Apart
Website: josieproto.co.uk
Like many of the best new artists, there’s a freshness to Josie Proto’s debut EP Pub Songs: Volume 1 and follow-up single I Bet You Fall Apart which instantly grabs the listener. Such is the way of the world, any female artist making British bedroom pop will inevitably be compared to Lily Allen (something she deals with on the track BTEC Lily Allen) but her influences are far broader…
“My parents had a great music taste. I was exposed to everything, but especially the greats! Bowie, Elton John, ELO, Madness, The Beatles were all staples in my early childhood,” says the 19-year-old Proto.
Her own writing adventures started when she was just nine, plonking around on her piano, she came up with a song about a Willy Wonka-esque candy land. It took a while for her to develop her style, initially writing poems rather than songs.
“Nothing even remotely good came out of me until I was 15/16,” she says. “I still don’t think I have fully settled on my sound, but that’s the fun of releasing music when you know you’re in the middle of learning and developing. It’s so cool to be able to take people along for the ride!”
Joining her on that ride were the multitude of fans who helped take Pub Songs: Volume 1 to No 1 on the iTunes Pop Charts, all revelling in the way she filters what’s going on in the world around her and turning it into captivating music for the masses. Songs like Burner, written with Ben Matravers and based on a rant about the massive amounts of misinformation spread during the current pandemic, it’s a perfect pop distillation of these crazy times through the eyes of a wonderfully original songwriter.
Words: Duncan Haskell
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