070 Shake: Don’t Look Down

070 Shake is a reticent star. Intensely private in real life, her moody, uncontainable sound has quietly left fingerprints across contemporary pop’s landscape. Now, with a thrillingly adventurous new album and a carefully managed relationship with growing media glare, she’s ready to let in the light

“I’m in a place where I enjoy feeling deserted to a certain extent,” 070 Shake says, adjusting her body to sink more deeply into her chair. 

The subdued 27-year-old musician and rapper is recalling the circumstances that drove her to move to Los Angeles after years of bouncing from city to city. Her attachment to the sprawl subverts the usual narratives that have formed around LA – that it’s a place where meaningful connections are hard to establish, and where it can be treacherously difficult to find your footing – but that’s typical of Shake. If there’s any basis in these truisms, it’s this: the metropolis requires its residents to accept the realities of its astonishing expanse – to accept feeling deserted. Once that’s understood, they can find freedom in its vastness.

Shake, née Danielle Balbuena, was born in North Bergen, New Jersey, and spent most of her early life in and around New York. It’s an area she no longer finds conducive to her lifestyle. “My brain likes to see openness. I don’t like the sky broken up by these big, soaring, man-made structures.” While that slice of the world made her, she admits that New York now “fucks with my brain a little bit […] It makes me feel like I’m in a maze.” LA, by contrast, is a much better fit. It also happens to be a place where she’s found grounding, and love, through her relationship with girlfriend Lily-Rose Depp. With this newfound room to think, to experiment, and, ultimately, to heal, Shake has found an ideal backdrop for her fluid, uncontainable music. 

Shake, clad in an all-denim getup with a nubby white long-sleeve shirt underneath, is sitting in the corner of a sagging house in Los Angeles as preparations for her Crack Magazine photo shoot hum in the background. It’s a few weeks before her new album, Petrichor, drops, and the prospect of letting the record out into the world has her “feeling pretty nervous”, she says, taking a swig of Guayakí yerba mate. “Because I think when I’m creating these things, I forget that I have to put it out… well, not that I have to, but I choose to put it out. And I want to put it out because I want to be an artist in this world.”

This bold statement of intent feels as much for Shake’s benefit as mine. By her own admission, she is a resolutely private person, not given to vulnerable declarations. The act of releasing something so personal clearly doesn’t come easily: “This is probably the most terrifying part of being an artist,” she continues, her eyes seldomly meeting mine. “Having to show the world what I’ve been creating. It always feels like being bare and exposed.”

Shake first appeared on the global radar in 2016, when she was signed to G.O.O.D. Music, but her success had been building organically for a while. From her earliest experiments posted to SoundCloud, Shake has used music as a way of releasing her pent-up feelings. (Proud, one of her first breakthrough successes, was a narcoleptic paean to being a parent’s disappointment). In 2020, Shake set about bottling her amorphous style of emo-rap on her full-length debut Modus Vivendi, and later set out to tweak the recipe on the more muted You Can’t Kill Me (2022). The swirl of influences is striking: from the pop emo of Paramore and My Chemical Romance to the psychedelic whimsy of Pink Floyd, via towering figures like Lauryn Hill and Michael Jackson. Everything, though, is filtered through Shake’s unmistakeable, smeared lens. Indeed, it was Shake’s distinctive traits – her sad confessionalism and detachment – that laced Raye’s viral 2022 hit, Escapism. Yet despite these brushes with the mainstream, she remains an outlier. In 2024, when the biggest musical moments have come from artists finding massive audiences through theatrical pop (Chappell Roan), conceptual big-swings (Brat) and linguistic swerves that tickle the brain (Sabrina Carpenter), the yearning vulnerability that Shake pours into her contorting, genre-fluid tracks feels low-key and, even in a landscape full of weirdos, commendable. But with streaming figures in their tens of millions, pop superstardom is closing in.

To further complicate things, Shake tends to duck the expectations placed on artists in an era that’s as much about gaming the algorithm as it is about releasing quality songs. She rarely posts on social media (she’s called it an “evil force” in the past) and, for a while, didn’t even own a cell phone. Generally, she gives off an air of reticence that feels at odds with the current moment, allowing her voluminous brown locks to crowd her face when on stage or out in public. 

Shake’s fraught relationship with disclosure and privacy stretches back to childhood. Shake recalls herself as being “really a bad kid”. She grew up going to services in the Spanish Christian church multiple times per week, where her sister sang in the choir and Shake danced with ribbons in front of the congregation. But Shake would sometimes urinate on the pews and “just do terrible kid stuff”. There were also happy memories, like the months spent with her extended family in the Dominican Republic once school let out for the summer. During those visits, Shake’s mother would sometimes call her outside. She wanted Shake to breathe in the woodsy aroma – a smell known as petrichor – that only emerges when rain falls on parched earth.

Shake took to faith early on. “The thing I’m most grateful for in life, and in my upbringing, is that I was introduced to God at a very young age,” Shake tells me, thumbing a stray thread on the chair. Her spirituality buoyed her later on as a teenager, when she found herself “wrestling against darkness”. To ease her mental health struggles, she started writing poetry in a journal. “Whenever I felt strongly about something, whether it be good or bad, whether I was in love, or whether I was super hurt, I always turned to writing,” she says. “That was my thing, because that didn’t really talk to anybody about my emotions.” Growing up, she had seen how people could “get made fun of” for sharing their emotions, and so she turned inward. 

Music was another outlet. Shake had always known she was into a varied array of styles: she absorbed the hip-hop her brother turned her on to, her parents’ Spanish Christian music and her sister’s love of neo-soul multi-hyphenates, including Alicia Keys and India.Arie. Although Shake was “too cool for school” to play in the high school band, as her sister did, she always looked forward to visiting her aunt’s house in Long Island for Thanksgiving because she could tinker on the grand piano there. Yet that mix of shyness and self-preservation stopped Shake from fully delving into music. “I felt like it was really some High School Musical shit,” she says. Although her school put on talent shows and other music programmes, Shake instead preferred to play basketball and smoke pot with friends – even if it meant keeping her musical curiosities at bay. “I knew that I wanted to do [music], but I was too scared and nervous. Also, the culture where we grew up is like, people will cut your ass and make fun of you. Especially if you’re trash.”

In a fateful turn, a musician named Phi performed at one of those high school talent shows and made a big impression on Shake. “I remember thinking like, ‘Damn bro, this guy is amazing,’” she recalls. Around that time, she was out shopping at Walmart with her mum when she spotted a keyboard display. She offhandedly asked her mother for one. When Shake’s mother later noticed a neighbour throwing out a perfectly good keyboard during a move, she plucked it off the sidewalk and gave it to her daughter.

After that, Shake started writing songs in earnest. After graduating from high school, she reconnected with Phi, and the pair started making music together in 2015, rapping alongside one another on tracks like No Enemies. Along with a host of other talented local musicians and producers, including Malick, Treee Safari and Ralphy River, they forged a crew and called themselves 070 – a homage to the zip code where they were raised, which Shake always carries with her in the form of a small tattoo on her face. The group had a prolific 2016, releasing a collective album, The 070 Project: Chapter 1.