By the time Billie Marten was 20, she’d already lived out an entire career: a nomination in the BBC’s Sound of 2016 poll at 16; a debut LP released via Chess Club Records, a subsidiary of Sony Music, the same year — and then an unceremonious dump into what she describes as the “cesspit whirlwind of pop music” when Chess Club parted ways with Sony, leaving her at the mercy of the major label for her second.
“I knew that it wasn’t going to work. I kept telling people that I wasn’t going to be that artist,” she reflects now. “There was something fundamentally misunderstood where sometimes people are there to be moulded and to become superstars, but I knew that I wasn’t going to write those songs or have those songs written for me.”
