For about two months when she was a child, Jessie Murph wished to go to Harvard.
“I watched ‘Legally Blonde,’ and I was like, ‘This is lit,’” the 20-year-old singer and songwriter says of the Reese Witherspoon law-school comedy that got here out three years earlier than she was born. However wait: Rising up in small-town Alabama, Murph was a proficient and devoted cheerleader. Does Harvard even have cheerleaders?
“They probably do,” she says, tilting her head as she considers the query. “I don’t know if it’s like the main thing, though. It’s true you don’t really hear about it. They have all the expensive sports: lacrosse, polo, horse riding.” She laughs. “Horse riding would be lit too.”
Regardless of the case, Murph quickly solid apart her Ivy League aspirations — to not point out her devotion to cheer, although that’s come again extra lately — and refocused on her past love of music. Now, as a substitute of getting ready for sophomore 12 months, she’s simply launched her second major-label album, “Sex Hysteria,” which incorporates the highest 20 pop hit “Blue Strips” and which — true to the LP’s title — has set off a minor web controversy with the racy music video for her track “1965.”
An Amy Winehouse-ish retro-soul quantity with a ringing malt-shop piano lick, “1965” is about eager for romance the way in which they did it within the previous days: “We’d go to diners and movies and such,” Murph sings in her scratchy Southern drawl, “We’d just hold hands and I’d love every touch.” Elsewhere within the track, the nostalgia darkens as Murph acknowledges that “I might get a little slap-slap” from her man and that “I would be 20, and it’d be acceptable for you to be 40.” (“That is f— up, I know,” she provides of the age hole.)
The track’s NSFW video goes even additional, with traces of pornography and ideas of home violence which have invited criticism that Murph is advocating (or no less than aestheticizing) a sort of tradwife oppression at a precarious second for ladies’s rights. Murph addressed the blowback in a video on TikTok, the place she has 11 million followers, writing, “This entire song is satire r yall stupid” — proof, maybe, that her level didn’t fairly land as she’d hoped.
But this week, “Sex Hysteria” debuted on Billboard’s album chart at No. 8, not lengthy after Lana Del Rey — a key affect on Murph with an extended historical past of on-line outrage — posted a video of herself pole dancing to “Blue Strips,” whose title refers back to the safety marking on a $100 invoice that could be tossed at an unique dancer. All the eye has mixed to place Murph within the dialog for a finest new artist nod at February’s Grammy Awards.
“Writing this album, I was in the studio every day for like six months straight,” she says on a latest afternoon close to Venice Seaside. “Didn’t go out, didn’t do anything — was just grinding.” We’re speaking on the finish of an extended day of promo for “Sex Hysteria”; she’s sporting denims and a Hysteric Glamour T-shirt, her inky-black hair hanging unfastened round her face. “But it’s so cool because you go in there with nothing and you make something out of thin air,” she says. “Then you get to listen to it, and it’s therapeutic for what you’re feeling.”
Although it opens with a monitor wherein she attributes her turning into a songwriter to “my father and the f— up s— he did,” “Sex Hysteria” is a extra playful document than final 12 months’s “That Ain’t No Man That’s the Devil,” which Murph says exorcised “a lot of anger and hurt that I needed to get out, even just for myself, before I could move on to the next phase.” (A consultant lyric from “Dirty”: “I woke up this morning kind of mad / Flipped the switch, I had the urge to beat your ass.”)
Right here, in distinction, she’s singing about her curiosity in “whips and chains” within the sock-hoppy “Touch Me Like a Gangster” and bragging in regards to the Malibu mansion she simply purchased in “Blue Strips” — a mansion, she clarifies, she doesn’t truly personal.
“Not yet,” she provides. “That line was just the first thing that came out of my mouth when I was writing the song. It feels so glittery, the thought of living in Malibu. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to do.” What formed her concepts in regards to the storied coastal enclave as a toddler within the Deep South? “I’m a really big fan of ‘Property Brothers’ — I’m sure I saw it on there.”
Murph moved to L.A. a few 12 months and a half in the past from Nashville, the place she established a foothold within the music business with collaborations like “Wild Ones,” a duet with Jelly Roll that has greater than 300 million streams on Spotify, and “High Road,” a No. 1 country-radio hit by her and Koe Wetzel that led to a nomination for brand spanking new feminine artist of the 12 months at Could’s ACM Awards.
“Sex Hysteria” dials down the specific nation trappings in favor of thumping bass strains and woozy entice beats; her friends on the album are Gucci Mane and Lil Child. But the album demonstrates a sure stylistic blurriness that’s involves outline nation music at least some other style within the streaming period.
“Whether it’s country or pop or whatever, I think Jessie Murph is just Jessie Murph,” says Bailey Zimmerman, the Nashville up-and-comer who teamed with Murph final 12 months for the rootsy “Someone in This Room” and whose personal music shares a casually hybridized high quality with Murph’s. “It may not sound country, but what she’s talking about usually is.”
Like many in her technology, Murph discovered her voice posting covers of fashionable songs on-line. The oldest video on her YouTube is titled “11 year old sings titanium” and, certain sufficient, reveals a younger Murph squinting into the digicam as she performs Sia and David Guetta’s 2011 stadium-rave jam. At 16, having constructed a following on Instagram and TikTok whereas in highschool in Athens, Ala., she signed to Columbia Information and began releasing singles; by 2023 she’d dropped a mixtape known as “Drowning” and recorded songs with Diplo and Maren Morris.
Jessie Murph
(Annie Noelker / For The Instances)
For “Sex Hysteria,” she drew inspiration from Patsy Cline, Wanda Jackson and each Presleys — Elvis and Priscilla. Murph says her mom advised her that when Jessie was 3, she got here into the kitchen and introduced that she’d been Elvis in a previous life. Has Jessie been to Graceland?
“No, but my mom went there when she was pregnant with me,” she says, widening her kohl-rimmed eyes.
She titled the album in reference to the dismissive manner ladies have been described as “hysterical” within the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s — “women who were depressed or anxious or just feeling normal emotions,” she says. Does she assume ladies are extra free to specific themselves half a century later?
“I definitely feel free if I’m feeling some type of way — obviously I’m saying it in songs and not holding anything back. But I think everyone’s experience is very different. I’m sitting in a different spot than somebody three doors down is, you know? And different countries and different political settings — I’m sure it’s something that’s a problem in places.”
To a level, the backlash to Murph’s “1965” has overlapped with the criticism Sabrina Carpenter drew when she revealed the duvet of her upcoming “Man’s Best Friend” album, which depicts Carpenter kneeling earlier than a person who’s pulling her hair.
“The weirdest part about it is that it’s a lot of women who are hating,” Murph says. “But I think some people are weirded out by my age. A lot of people met me when I was 16 or 17 and a much different person — which, thank God I’m a different person.” She sighs. “I don’t know. When people find you at a certain age, it’s like you need to be frozen in time. Let me live.”
This week, Murph launched a world tour behind “Sex Hysteria” that she previewed with a buzzy efficiency at April’s Coachella pageant wherein she introduced a few of her previous cheerleading strikes into the choreography she’s emphasizing for the primary time. (She’ll circle again to Southern California for a Sept. 27 cease on the Shrine Expo Corridor.)
“Certain things come naturally to me and certain things don’t,” she says. “The dance stuff is one of the things I’m grilling myself on.”
One other of her objectives this 12 months: spending much less time on social media. “That s— is terrible for your mental health,” she says at the same time as she admits that YouTube and TikTok have been essential to her ascent. “I’m on World War III TikTok right now, where they’re talking about World War III. And I just keep scrolling, because now I’m nervous about World War III.
“I think it’s scary how young kids are getting phones,” she provides. “That YouTube video you brought up — I could have posted something crazy at that age, right? Even being 16 and having TikTok — I look back at some of the things I posted, and I’m like, Why would you post that, bro?”
