And you also have to realise you have the choice, like, what do you want to do with this feeling? Do you just let it weigh you down and waste your life? “You need to be aware of what makes you feel lesser than you are. “There are two things you need to make use of: awareness and choice,” she says more convincingly than any £70-an-hour therapist. In a year packed with so much negativity, we could all use a little schooling on how to lift the fog. But despite a difficult childhood and an emotionally tough year (Bree lost pregnant friend, YouTuber Nicole Thea, this summer a track on the mixtape is dedicated to her), Bree radiates positivity and confidence, no signs of past or recent trauma weighing her down. As a child growing up in East London, she was badly bullied, with colourist remarks prompting her to bleach her skin in the hope she’d be accepted into the fold at school. But it doesn’t really bother me honestly, because I’m not a sheep, so whatever.”īree’s individuality is her superpower, but she didn’t always see it that way. “Like, ‘Let’s only hype up what everyone else is hyping up’, rather than stepping out of line and hyping something else that’s a bit different. ![]() “And not to sound mean, but I can see that sheep culture thing here,” she continues. “I feel like, in the UK, people often bash what they don’t understand rather than opening themselves up to something different,” she reckons as to why our pop stars all seem to fit a certain mould. But over here, she’s carving her own path. Across the pond, she cites the likes of Lil Nas X, Lizzo and Doja Cat as changing what it looks and sounds like to be a pop star. “That’s 100% true.”Ī melting pot of different styles and ideas, Bree’s fresh approach to pop is breathing new life into the UK music scene. “I took it on the train,” she notes of the latter. Obsessing over everyone from emo rockers The Used (“I definitely found my crew in that scene”) to Lady Gaga, she even took to wearing a singular leather glove and carrying around a teacup in homage to Miss Germanotta. ![]() Growing up, Bree’s influences were as diverse as her sound suggests. That really marks strength in such a tough year.” “I didn’t think I would be able to pull something together like that in lockdown, and for it to turn out how it turned out? I’m so proud. “That video was my highlight of 2020,” she says. Summer bop ‘Damn Daniel’, with its “unapologetic Black girl magic” and Fresh Prince-inspired video, was recorded entirely from the confines of Bree’s Hackney bedroom during those long, locked-down days - not that you’d know from its multiple outfit changes, slick neon visuals and guest spot from Georgia’s Yung Baby Tate. Her mixtape flits from thrashing nu-metal guitars on ‘Little Nokia’ to the reggae beats of ‘Rolls Royce’, all the while loaded with an energy and polish that’s fast becoming synonymous with her output.Ī restless creative, while most of the world was halted this spring, a little thing like a global pandemic wasn’t going to stop Project Runway in its tracks. That same thrilling unpredictability is felt in Bree’s music and aesthetic today. You never knew what to expect from them.” Artists were constantly reinventing themselves, the sound was always fresh. ![]() “They were just loud and proud and so punk, in a way. “That era of music really defined what a pop star is,” she explains. As the title of her mixtape would suggest, the beginnings of Bree Runway The Pop Star began in the early noughties when her eight-year-old self – known then as Brenda Wireko Mensah – spent her days glued to MTV, waiting to see what “icons” like Missy and Madonna would do next. It still feels so weird that I have a song with Missy Elliott!”įor the rapper, there is no higher co-sign. ![]() This is a legend.’ My mum was just staring at me with her mouth open. “When I got her verse for ‘ATM’, I literally almost threw my laptop on the floor, like tears just started streaming out my eyes,” Bree recalls, genuinely excited now. Oh, and it has THAT Missy Elliott track on it, too. A few weeks ago, she released latest mixtape ‘2000AND4EVA’, a genre-bending riot of a pop record that set out her stall as a megastar of the future. They sent me a screenshot of it recently, like, ‘You literally said that you and Missy would collab!’.”īree’s high-glamour Class Of 2021 photo shoot has just wrapped and – as in the manner she arrived – the pop star is back in her own personalised hooded dressing gown, name emblazoned on the back like a tiny, twerking prizefighter. There’s a text from March 2020 where I told someone, ‘Just watch’. “My whole life is not a surprise to me,” she says nonchalantly, chewing on Tangfastics at a photo studio in Hackney. Bree Runway manifested her collaboration with Missy Elliott months before it actually happened.
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