Lauren Duffus makes music for a fractured, post-everything era

The London-based artist is mixing familiar rhythms with haunting melodies, eerie samples and adventurous production.

Lauren Duffus’ music is formless. The London-based producer and vocalist, who began creating music during the first lockdown, tunes into familiar frequencies – the rhythms of dancehall, trap and grime – but the signal is corrupted and ghosted by half-remembered melodies. The haunted result provides a fitting soundtrack for a fractured, post-everything era. 

Dialling in from her Lewisham home, Duffus is a few hours into the painstaking process of unbraiding her hair, with a couple more to go. She has her camera switched off – a level of obscurity that somehow seems appropriate. Despite its emotive quality, there is a guardedness to her music: a self-awareness that prevents it from seeming totally sincere. “I’ve always loved the way the artists on PC Music use styles ironically. It’s like they’re playing dress-up, you know?” she reflects. “When I’m singing, I like to think of stepping into a role, cosplaying as a singer.”

Her subject matter, however, is highly personal. Duffus first downloaded Logic in 2020, shortly after losing her father to suicide. Though not a conscious effort to navigate the complexities of grief, making music quickly became her outlet. It wasn’t long before snippets began to surface on her SoundCloud page. The first demo, titled Stir Fry, featured a mournful choral symphony that chants over a broken dancehall rhythm. Alongside two equally cinematic instrumentals – Soho Road (Crying Song) takes its percussive hook from spliced samples of sobbing – Stir Fry came to form one third of her debut EP, SULK. 

Released by London imprint Body Motion little more than a year after Duffus first began producing, it pricked the ears of AD93 boss, Nic Tasker, who enlisted Duffus to produce the seventh edition of the label’s dubplate series. Habits, and its B-side, Outro, would be at home on one of Arca’s early mixtapes, in the way it warps and processes traditional instrumentation to form cold, glassy soundscapes, blending synthetic and organic worlds with an off-kilter sensibility.

“When I was younger, my Tumblr was full of this kind of strange, dystopian imagery, almost Black Mirror-esque,” she muses. “It was a very clinical aesthetic, stuff that makes you feel a bit weird when you look at it.” Nowadays, Duffus promotes her music with stock images of penguins, screenshots of her Notes pages, grainy footage of a bodybuilding competition and slowed-down clips of Usher music videos. It’s iconography plucked from the same uncanny valley where Babyfather sourced his Union Jack hoverboard. 

In March, Duffus released N.U.M.T.E., the first single from her forthcoming EP on AMF Records’ Select Few imprint, alongside a music video in which she dons a spacesuit to aimlessly roam the streets of London. “There’s no real narrative or story to the video,” she explains. “We just wanted it to be interesting and weird.” Over a jagged breakbeat, her airy vocals are shrouded in reverb, making the lyrics barely comprehensible: “I need you more than ever.” In a characteristically innovative move, Duffus made the track’s eerie pads by stretching and reversing notes sampled from The Human League’s deathless 80s chart-topper Don’t You Want Me. 

When we talk, Duffus has just completed a run of live shows as the UK support for Brooklyn rapper, MIKE. She’s excitedly gearing up for Milan Design Week, where she’s booked to soundtrack a Miu Miu show – but her dream is to compose an original runway score. “I like to be in a really emotive space when I’m making music, so I love the idea of having some kind of narrative to convey,” she explains. 

It’s odd to imagine models strutting against these intimate portraits of grief. But the incongruity, you sense, is entirely the point. 

Sounds like: A radio tuned to digital drift
Soundtrack for: A night bus through uncanny valley
File next to: Klein, Babyfather, Liv.e
Our favourite song: Stir Fry
Where to find them: @laurenduffus