Right now, the UK is starved of shameless summer pop hits. This year, our chart has seen plenty of smooth anthems from the worlds of disco, house, and hip-hop. We’ve had cool EDM-influenced bangers from Kylie Minogue and sleek garage from Jorja Smith. But what about the unabashedly saccharine, the songs celebrating teenage freedom, the summer heartbreaks?
Enter Elle Coves, the 18-year-old budding pop star whose sun-drenched sounds are picking up more and more fans. Her recent debut single, ‘Before I Fall Apart’, is a besotted plea to return to her lover, and its follow-up, ‘Summer’, drops today (July 19). ‘Summer’ has garnered its own reputation for its breezy, anthemic chorus across a series of viral TikToks, and feels ripe for meandering road trips and bonfire parties. Chuck in a Harry Styles shoutout, and you’ve got a legion of pop-obsessed teenagers who’ve been patiently waiting for Coves’ first recorded music for an entire year.
Born to Spanish parents in Freiburg, Germany, Coves was raised near the Black Forest and spent her summers in her parent’s hometown of Alicante. It was moving to Cork in the south of Ireland as a teenager that sparked Coves’ obsession with songwriting. At 14, her mother snuck her into the gig of Wild Youth (AKA this year’s Eurovision Ireland entry). There, frontman Conor O’Donohue was shown Coves’ cover of The Cranberries‘ classic ‘Zombie’. “It was not good at all,” she says. “I don’t know what he saw! So I’m always going to be grateful to him for giving me that opportunity.”
Since that fateful meeting, O’Donohue has become Coves’ manager, where he taught her how to write songs and casually introduced her to a friend of Wild Youth, Lewis Capaldi – whom she supported on tour earlier this year. Alongside NME 100 graduate Katie Gregson-Macleod, Coves is part of a generation of savvy songwriters fostered by TikTok that are equally interested in writing catchy choruses as they are poignant poetry. Coves’ music is a lyrical portrait of euphoria, nostalgia, and bliss in 2023: “Screaming to Styles, we must look insane / ‘Cause it feels like summer!” she sings exuberantly.
“I want them to feel different, to feel like they’ve been through something,” she says of the intended impact of her music on fans. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a big fight or something heartbreaking: I don’t want you to be the same person as when you started listening.”
NME: How did you meet Lewis Capaldi?
“We met at a Wild Youth gig in London. I was opening for them and he went to my soundcheck. We met backstage, but we didn’t really talk a lot – he told me he really liked my songs and my voice, which was very tricky for me to wrap my head around.
“Everyone always asks me if he really is that funny and humble, and he is. At one point, he turned to me and said, ‘Can I give you a piece of advice?’. Everyone went quiet, and I was looking at him. He told me not to move to London and to stay connected to my roots, because it was going to influence my songwriting and keep the essence of who I was. He talked to me as if no one else was in the room.”
You moved to Ireland when you were 13 from Germany – how did that impact your songwriting?
“I was based in Freiburg near the Black Forest. I was raised to go on hikes; the people there are very connected to nature, you’re outdoors all the time. It’s still very important for me to be around nature.
“When I moved to Ireland, I was very excited to move because I always loved speaking English, it was my favourite subject. I don’t think I realised what it actually meant to move somewhere, I realised I wasn’t going to be able to talk to my friends as much and it wasn’t going to be the same.”
You’ve written about a particular friendship drama which went viral. What was the aftermath like? Did it make you reevaluate the risks of confessional songwriting?
“It’s definitely tricky because I have to find the right balance between being respectful of people and staying true to my writing. Sometimes I write songs to process things, but it’s easy for me to say I’m just processing it because I’m not the one who’s being written about. If there’s drama in your friend group and you put it on TikTok and it goes viral, it isn’t really great. I did apologise and we hashed it out, but it’s tricky because I do write from personal experience 99 per cent of the time.”
Can you remember the first song you wrote?
“I was in Germany, and was homework for music class. It was the most generic song ever! It was called ‘You and Me’. Keep in mind I was still learning English at the time, I was using sentences I heard in other songs. The chorus went: ‘And I think about love / I think about life / I think about how fast time goes by / I think of all the songs you wrote just for me / I think how it used to be / You and me’.”
“I didn’t write another song for a while because I didn’t think I was very good at it – and then I met my manager Conor when I moved here. He taught me how to write songs.”
How did Conor help you write songs?
“When I met Conor, I only had one song, and he told me songwriting is a skill – you have to practice. He told me if I wrote songs and sent it to his email, he would reply.
“I wrote a song a day for a year and sent [them] to him. I actually took it way too seriously. I would be in school and I’d be thinking of melodies and rushing to the bathroom. Looking back, it must have been the most annoying thing ever. I’d write lyrics in the corners of my notebooks. This was the year I did the Junior Cert [GCSEs], and I was like, ‘No, I have to write my songs first!’”
“I don’t want you to be the same person as when you started listening to my music”
Given your connection to nature, what sorts of scenery inspire you to write?
“With songs like ‘Before I Fall Apart’, I always think of roads, cars, windows down. My dad is very into cars, they’ve always been part of my life. I love the aesthetic of an old car, and my dad likes old timers. When I’m in Spain visiting my family in summer, there’s one straight road that goes from the city to the beach, and there’s palm trees on either end. I recorded a lot of the ‘Summer’ TikToks that went viral on that road.
“I love the ocean as well. My family’s from Alicante, so every summer, me and my cousins used to go to this summer school. We would do water sports, so I was in the ocean all day.”
What’s one new thing you want to see from pop in 2023?
“I want people to stop rhyming fire with desire! It could be the most beautiful song in the world, it’s just… I can’t do it.
“I would also like people to think more about what they’re saying. I’m biased because, for me, lyrics are more important. If a song doesn’t have lyrics that I love, I can’t love it. So I would like for people to think about what they’re saying and what they want people to gain from it.”
Elle Coves’ new single ‘Summer’ is out now
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