photography JACKSON BOWLEY
She has a shock of dark chopped hair, has just signed to the same label as Fontaines D.C. and Cameron Winter, and will stand by her scatty and singular Northern soul until she dies. If you are bored of rock music’s pivot to home county-centric, violently self-serious nepo culture, you’ll be glad to hear that its legend-in-waiting is pretty much the antidote. She’s called TTSSFU, and is funny, idiosyncratic, and something different.
The musician, real name Tasmin Stephens, is in London for a few days from her hometown of Wigan, wearing a white dress stained slightly with mud. Yesterday, she filmed a music video for a single taken from her excellent forthcoming EP, Blown, and got a little too into the soil strewn across the floor. Now, though, she’s sitting in the i-D offices, a gigantic poster of FKA Twigs looming over her. Earlier in the year, she and her sister went to Liverpool for a Eusexua album signing. “It was the most intense thing,” she recalls, dumbfounded. “She, like, held my hand.”
At 21, Stephens is the kind of artist who seems both enamoured with and indifferent to the music industry. Maybe that’s because she’s nailed her sound so suddenly. There’s a moody undertone many people her age can relate to, especially the ones who feel a little outside of the fold. Drawing from that—the embarrassment of falling for someone, the realization that you can be a shitty person sometimes—Stephens’ songs are like sodden sponges, all angst begging to be wrung out.
You could call it alt-pop, or guitar pop, or maybe even shoegaze. The fact that it’s not easily categorized works in her favor. “I wasn’t intentionally trying to be a shoegaze artist,” she says when I bring up the label often applied to her. The heavy reverb and hard-to-decipher vocals allow her to speak her mind without spelling everything out. When she first started releasing songs on Soundcloud, she blocked her family on social media in case they listened and thought: “‘What if they know what I’m talking about?’” she says, laughing about it now. “I was just hiding behind it a little bit.”
Sometimes, her tracks screech with guitars that feel like a brick wall of sound. Her voice remains the one constant—lilting, a little muffled, drifting somewhere in the distance. You could say she’s like Sky Ferreira, if Ferreira had spent her childhood in the gray of the North.
Raised in Wigan with a Nirvana-obsessed older sister and a VHS copy of Yellow Submarine (“I literally watched that every night before I went to sleep”), Stephens was always bound to find music as an outlet. She played flute and twisted her teacher’s arm to let her play guitar too. She now plays, on the side, as part of the post-punk Manchester band Duvet. As a kid, she would paint alone in her room to process her feelings, until she discovered Kurt Cobain, and was so moved by his work she began trying it herself.
The scuzz of Americana and a fixation with other musicians fed into the music she started writing around age 15. ”Every recording sounds like a different person,” she says. She began refining her sound when she figured out what resonated most deeply: the strange vocal stylings of John Maus and the spectral, warped melodies and lyrics of Grimes.
She spent two years releasing singles she’d produced on Garage Band and working on an album titled Jesus Dream, which will likely never see the light of day. “I just wanted it to be perfect [but] I didn’t have the skill to make it how it should be,” she says. “I just accepted that I couldn’t do it, so I was like, fuck that, and scrapped it completely. There is one copy of it, which I gave to Alex G when I met him.”
Thankfully, she made something else. Wallowing in her own pity, she opened Netflix one day last year and watched The Andy Warhol Diaries. What she saw felt eerily familiar. “I was going through a really dark time,” she says. “I was sort of dating this guy. He was a really good person, but because I just couldn’t handle it.” Using Warhol’s relationship with Jed Johnson as a framework, she crafted a story about her own life. The resulting EP, Me, Jed and Andy, was born. Its success earned her tour slots with artists like Mannequin Pussy, Soccer Mommy, and Kim Deal.
After the Mannequin Pussy tour, she returned home ready to write her follow-up—only to hit a wall. “I had nothing go on,” she says, “and then, luckily—or unluckily—I met this person, and then they fucked me about a bit and really upset me.” Just as she’d signed with Partisan Records and her team awaited new material, the heartbreak hit.. Enter Blown: a project about scorning shitty people, “going out and getting fucked up,” and the best friends who got her through it. This time, she brought in her live band for added grit and depth and collaborated with talented indie producer and mixer Chris Ryan. It’s got echoes of The Clash, with lyrical nods to her OG, Alex G. The lead single, “Call U Back,” is about how we embarrass ourselves to be with people we (regretfully)crush on. There’s also a standout called “Cat Piss Junkie,” its title inspired by Ariel Pink’s knack for gnarly, irreverent wordplay—before he became, in her words, “a shitty person.” She’s quick to clarify: “I like his music, not him, yeah? Just to be clear—I’m not a Trump supporter!”
She’s open about the backstory behind most things. The title Blown? “It’s a Wigan thing,” she explains. “If something bad would happen, or she’d had a bad day, my mom would go: ‘I feel absolutely blown!’” But the one secret she’s keeping—for now—is the origin of her stage name. Just know that the “FU” stands for exactly what you think it does.
SOME EXTRA QUESTIONS FOR TTSSFU
Where are we going on a night out in Manchester?
I always go to the same place, but I feel like I shouldn’t say because my friend works behind the bar, so I get free drinks. I’ll be there til 1 a.m., then we go to this place called Peer Hat. That place is wild. Everyone you know goes in, and you see them come out in a different form.
And for scran afterwards?
It used to be McDonald’s. You know I harassed them online to make a McPlant Happy Meal for ages? I sent them the lyrics to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” on Twitter.
What do you get from a vending machine?
Regular chocolate M&Ms. I separate them and eat the blue ones last. And chilli Doritos.
You’re in the elevator of a 15 floor building. What floor number are you pressing?
Six.
Tell us what meme account we should follow.
@still_on_a_downward_spiral, obviously. I follow one called @meghan_trainor_updates_ but there’s never any updates on Meghan Trainor.
And can you come up with a name for your own meme account?
I have loads of Instagram accounts that are me, but no one knows. There’s one called bug.facebookmovement or something like that—that’s mine, but I’ve forgotten the login. I used to post made-up celebrity conspiracy theories., Like how Anne Hathaway was secretly taking over the world. None of them were true. This actually makes me sound a bit insane. I stopped posting on that in 2022.
Were you employed in 2022?
No.
TTSSFU’s Blown EP will be released on 29 August.