Almost a decade in the music industry, Mabel, born Mabel Alabama-Pearl McVey, is entering a new phase of her career, this isn’t a phase that comes with a costume, a concept or an expiration date. Instead, the 27-year-old just wants the world to know her better. “There’s a female pressure to reinvent ourselves and to be perfect and I don’t wanna do that this time. As an artist, I feel I’ve already been various versions of myself and have enjoyed being creative and open to change. It was experimentation, it was a form of self expression. But now, the best expression for me is, I want to go out and be myself.” she says.
Having topped charts with hits like ‘Don’t Call Me Up’, ‘My Lover’ and ‘Fine Line’, won Best Female Solo at the BRITs and cemented herself as one of the UK’s brightest popstars, in the year of her Saturn’s Return – as her mum reminds her – Mabel’s emerging from a year of intense growth and transformation. “I signed my record deal when I was 19, So you don’t know who you are [at that age], even though you think that you do.” Reflecting on the last 12 months, she says, “I think I’ve grown the most as a person in the last year, more than I have in my whole 20s. I still felt like a teenager, but I’ve kind of ‘become a woman’,” she laughs. “I know who my people are now, and I think that’s reflected in my artistry as well. ”Mabel’s upcoming music is borne out of and explores that clarity of purpose, drive and intuition, both through the lens of Mabel as a young woman but also dedicated to the women in her life who support and guide her. Themes of embracing our inner contradictions, allowing ourselves to be imperfect, dealing with disappointment, but also luxuriating in our own passions and sensuality too, it’s an ode to divine femininity in the modern world.
New single ‘Look At My Body’ is an unrepentant anthem of this, flipping the narrative of being underestimated based on how you look. Calling on London’s queen of sexual reclamation Shygirl as the perfect partner-in-crime, Mabel unpacks, “Shygirl and I were talking about female beauty and sexuality and what a weapon you are when you understand how to use and control that. I was a late bloomer. But when I did bloom, probably at like 18, I was like, I have got this! Not that I need to explain myself but I do think that sometimes I have hidden behind that, I’ve used this powerful thing and people have thought that it was 100% of my make up… I think the new power in my physical presence is that I don’t let it bother me. I can do both. I can be both. I am both.” Paired with the sultry widescreen crooning of ‘Vitamins’, we’re taken on a journey of who Mabel is through all the places she’s been and come from.
Coming from a hefty musical household, Mabel grew up with hanging out at the studio as her after school pastime. She remembers being in a session with the Sugababes and her dad, Cameron McVey, and being treated like an adult, giving her A&R two cents worth as a child. While she set off on her first tour with her mother Neneh Cherry at just three months old. So while music is very much her birthright, for the majority of her own career she’s been determined to do things her own way and carve her own path, often with a clear separation between her family and her career, almost like church and state. These days she has a different take on it, and for new music, took an entirely new approach: “I think that when you are ignoring your intuition, and ultimately not living your truth, and also not happy, the people that are gonna call you out on it first are your family. And [for a long time] I didn’t want to hear it… This time, I sat them down and said I’m going to make music and I want you to tell me what you think about everything. You’re not going to love everything I do but I want you to police me on when you feel like I’m not being myself.”
The next phase in Mabel’s career is an exhilaratingly fresh start for a popstar you might have thought you knew, at peace with holding a multitude of worlds in her hands and being guided by her own instincts and journey – not what she thinks other people want from her. Right now, that’s prioritising “authenticity and realness and connection to myself,” she resolves. “I’ve always weirdly been really confident in who I am. And then that kind of disappeared as a teenager and then just progressively got worse, the more successful I became. Intuition is that thing that I would probably have ignored quite a lot. But not now – it’s a fucking superpower.”