Tracey make anxious anthems for the post-afters bus ride

The anonymous London collective’s genre mashing sound is a vehicle for their playful observations on love, shame and subservience.

There’s something to be said for exploring the darker side of sex,” says one member of anonymous London collective Tracey (hereby referred to as Tracey One). She’s talking about the group’s breakout hit, Sex Life – an off-kilter, dubstep-indebted track that compresses themes of sexual compulsion into an unexpected dancefloor destroyer, recently deployed by Pearson Sound during his set at Glastonbury’s IICON stage. Female vocals are spliced up, then stuck back together again, lending a robotic intonation to the blunt confession, “All I wanna do is fuck.” 

This alienating effect strips the song of sensuality, instead hammering home a sense of cold detachment. “I wanted to explore the more compulsive, addictive and damaging aspects of sex,” Tracey One continues. “I wanted to try and evoke something about that compulsivity, where you want it, but you don’t even question why until afterwards.” The track’s stark digital distortion feels apt for an era in which so many actual sex lives are orchestrated through the distant realm of screens.

When we speak via video call, each member of Tracey joins one by one. Their cameras are off and each username is mysteriously identical. At first, it’s unclear whether this is a technical glitch or some kind of prank. There are two core members, but when a fifth anonymous Tracey joins a few minutes into the call, Tracey One explains that the collective is “ever-evolving”. Its core members – Tracey One and Tracey Two (or Girl Tracey and Boy Tracey) – are the only ones to speak, but at the end of our call, a third Tracey sends up a flurry of thumbs-up emojis. 

Tracey One and Tracey Two, both in their late twenties, initially met through mutual friends. They started making music together roughly two years ago, when Tracey One was living abroad. “[Tracey Two] was visiting, and we made a track with just our laptop and a microphone,” Tracey One says of the spontaneous recording session behind When I Choose To Be Here With You – a shimmering dream pop number with minimalist keys and hazy, drawn-out vocals. 

In May, they released their self-titled debut EP on London’s AD93. Sex Life is its dizzying opener, but the record is a ball of contradictions – opening with urgent dubstep rhythms before melting into stripped-back folk and sludgy R&B. “It’s pain, but it’s joy. It’s opposites,” Tracey One says. “It’s a full picture of how it feels when you’re out of control and desperately trying to get in control of your life.” Listen to it on a loop and the record gains new meaning, circling back to eat its own tail. Take Care, the EP’s closing folk salve, ends with the pleading wail of “I care” – a sincere admission that stands in stark contrast to Sex Life’s disconnected mantra about fucking. This wasn’t exactly intentional, but Tracey One describes it as “evidence of the cyclical nature of my personal emotional journey”.

The collective’s preference for anonymity is both a personal and creative choice. “The music is personal, but it’s nice not having to think about how we’re perceived,” Tracey Two says. Instead of conventional photo shoots, they choose “weird pictures from our camera rolls” of car bumpers or shop signs. Their EP cover, depicting a ‘Tracey’ lower-back tattoo, was taken a few years ago at Hackney Carnival. “It’s fun for our faces to not be centred, so we can centre other things that are a little more interesting and stimulating,” Tracey One adds. 

They might reveal “an element” of their identities in the future, but “no one’s getting everything”. For now, they just want to continue making music that is “equally weird”. Upcoming single, Sleazy, for instance, was written “from the perspective of a doormat”, according to Tracey Two. This offbeat starting point created space to explore shame, subservience and abuse through a thumping club beat and more teasing, spliced-together vocals. It’s another example of the Traceys’ uncanny ability to look at topics sideways, distorting meaning without losing the warmth at the heart of it all. 

Sounds like: Anxious anthems for the post-afters bus rides
Soundtrack for: Picking apart sex and desire
File next to: Tirzah, Loukeman, Smerz
Our favourite song: Sex Life
Where to find them: @traceyisyourfriend