LOST GIRL
“I don’t want the whole world to know me, when I don’t know myself yet.”
Lost Girl was born 20 years ago in Reading, UK, and began to find her way when she started making music just over a decade later. Raised on a melting pot of playlists and YouTube links, she started getting to know herself over Frank Ocean, Jhené Aiko and XXXtentacion type beats. Instead of burdening friends and family with her troubles, she’d turn to her pen and pad, making sense of her thoughts and feelings, by scribbling them into hooks and verses - the process became her therapy.
While she was on track to be the first in her family to go to university, where she wanted to study law, Lost Girl took a year out to focus on music. She’d been building an organic following on Instagram by uploading videos reinterpreting some of her favourite songs, and just months after putting her studies on hold, her cover of Yxng Bane’s ‘Rihanna’ went viral. The clip attracted the attention of boundary-breaking rapper Tinie Tempah. “I called my friend, ‘Tinie’s just told me to come to the studio in London… Let’s go!’” She remembers. During the session Lost Girl sang some of her original lyrics to Tinie, and while she admits with hindsight that she still had some growth to do as a writer, he recognised the raw potential and signed her to his management company, Imhotep, where she’d spend the next two years developing her abilities. After a year of juggling the two and writing hundreds of songs, she tattooed “Lost Girl” across her hands as a commitment to music, and eventually quit her day job when she wasn’t given the time off to attend a meeting with Island Records. Luckily the move paid off, and six months later she signed a record deal with the label, inking a deal with Imhotep Publishing shortly after. She has most recently collaborated with the likes of Katy B, Redlight and Shift K3y.
Raised on feeds of curated perfection, Lost Girl is the glitch in the pop matrix that reminds us that we’re all flawed and that that’s ok. While she won’t be boxed into one particular genre, her writing shares an honesty and emotional intelligence that draws listeners in, providing comfort and reassurance to their own situations. “I want everyone to be more self-aware and not try to be perfect all of the time,” she says. “Because life doesn’t work like that, and you’ll beat yourself up everyday for not being the perfect person.”