“Someone called me the emo alphabet girl, so I guess I go by that – but I also go by Gayle,” the 17-year-old Texan gabbles breathlessly, darkly lined eyes peering through a vision-obscuring fringe.
Her inescapable 2021 single, abcdefu, charted at No 1 and made pinging Adele off the top spot look easy. It turned the anthemic power of nursery-rhyme repetition into a sharp-tongued, if ultimately quite safe flip-off: an illicit thrill for fans of an age who can’t yet swear perhaps as freely as they might like. Her sharp-tongued teen angst captured the TikTok zeitgeist, where, like Olivia Rodrigo a year earlier, her bitterness over a shattered relationship resonated with millions.
