For an international model, whose 1970s blonde shag cut has graced the cover of Vogue in five different countries, Suki Waterhouse is a remarkably casual presence to share a Zoom call with. Popping up on the screen with wet hair fresh from the shower, phone in hand, she proceeds to pace around her Los Angeles home for the next hour. The 34-year-old might have 4.4 million Instagram followers but she’s also a mum with a lot to do in a short space of time.
It’s 9am in California and Waterhouse has already been up and at ‘em for a while, ticking off a “20-minute quick workout” and looking after her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, her first child with actor Robert Pattinson. Parenthood has inevitably shifted London-born Waterhouse’s worldview, but you get the sense that the multi-hyphenate artist was probably never the precious type to begin with.
Alongside her hefty catwalk credentials, Waterhouse has established an acclaimed parallel career as an actor, most notably for her portrayal of keyboardist Karen Sirko in the 2023 TV adaptation of Daisy Jones & The Six. But it’s music that was her first love. Her teenage days were spent “writing with anyone I could find and playing little shows around Camden”, while it’s her rapidly escalating status as pop’s premier retro-styled lovergirl that’s steadily becoming her most successful creative prong yet.
Suki Waterhouse by numbers
16 the age she was spotted by a model scout in a London shop
2016 the year her debut single, Brutally, was released
14 the number of tracks on her new album, Loveland
2018 the year she met her partner Robert Pattinson at a games night in Hollywood
6 or rather Daisy Jones & The Six, a pivotal acting role that spurred her on to making music
On Friday, Waterhouse will release her third album, Loveland: a swoony, playful ode to romance in all its forms, from the lushly produced doe eyes of Back in Love, through to the 1950s girl-group sass of Jukebox and the Fleetwood Mac-like melodies of Morals (featuring Mick Fleetwood himself on drums). “When I thought of Loveland, it was this love heart that was wonky and very imperfect and trying to figure itself out,” she suggests. “All the things that make up my reality — the rituals and the ways that I’ve been able to stay human and the things that have resonated with me — I wanted to keep them close so my future self, whenever I’m in trouble, will always have this. This record will be the thing I look back on.”
You can see why Waterhouse’s third album (and her first via a major label, Island Records) could act as a time capsule of sorts. Written during the early stages of life as a new parent, it was created during a period of “losing myself and also finding myself at the same time. Everything felt incredibly juxtaposed,” she continues. “I’ve never felt smarter, but sometimes I’ve never felt stupider. Everything I decided about myself would then be flipped on its head.”
The way that the world views Waterhouse has constantly shifted, too, ever since she was first scouted at 16, quickly becoming part of young London’s new fashion glitterati alongside her friends Alexa Chung and Cara Delevingne.
As a teenage model, Waterhouse, who was born in Chiswick, moved to north London, down the road from Liam Gallagher. “I had a boyfriend who was friends with him. It was great, really fun,” she chuckles. Jukebox, with its coy flirtations (“If you fall too hard for me, not my fault…”), finds the singer harking back to that era of adventure and infinite possibility.
“I was channelling that version of myself that was wearing my Doc Martens and being in some cool little bar in Islington with the Arctic Monkeys, just dancing and being dressed up,” she remembers. “I used to go around looking like I was in fancy dress, in mod attire wearing a John Smedley turtleneck.”
Meanwhile, the flat that she lived in for the majority of her twenties as her career really began to pick up speed is eulogised in Notting Hill. “It was one of those flats that raise you, and you have some of the worst nights of your life and some of the best; it was a place where I had a lot of solitude and joy and destruction, a lot of coming into myself,” she nods. “And then it just takes you by surprise that one day, you’ve suddenly grown out of that place and you’re living in another country, about to have a baby. Now that whole period is in a storage box somewhere.”
“I was doing what I should have been doing in my twenties”
Growing up in public has forced Waterhouse to be somewhat kinder to her younger self. “As I get older I just see everything with a lot of fondness and I don’t feel as embarrassed about it as I used to. It was just really fun, I was doing what I should have been doing in my twenties,” she says of her time spent popping up in the tabloids alongside former rock star boyfriends Miles Kane and Luke Pritchard of The Kooks. What in particular did she find embarrassing? “Oh, everything’s embarrassing…” she jokes. “I find it easy to be embarrassed about myself, there are many things that can make me an embarrassing figure.”
Back then, Waterhouse was frequently labelled an It Girl. “Well there we go, that’s something that sounds embarrassing,” she points out. “But then I also think of being a 90-year-old woman and talking to my grandchildren about what it was like to be in my twenties and my teens in London, and I think that’ll be a fun little tidbit to throw in…”
If the capital is where the singer cut her teeth, however, then LA is the city that accepted her as a musician. She’s sanguine about her relationship with the British press, but recalls being mauled in one article when her 2016 debut single, Brutally, failed to chart. “I’d made about 200 or 300 songs by that point, and that was the first one where I felt I’d found this sound and actually made something to really be proud of, and then there was this piece saying that it was a chart disaster,” Waterhouse recalls. “It was an acoustic song, just a guitar, with no publicity or anything that actually ended up streaming really well in the end. But I felt for a long time that there was a push back [against my music career] that I think can happen in England.”
A decade on, and the perception of Waterhouse couldn’t be more different. Far from just another model-to-musician pivot, she’s established herself as a genuine contender among pop’s top tiers. With a vibrant sonic palette that matches her 1960s and 1970s-influenced, Almost Famous-nodding aesthetic, Waterhouse might look and sound like a superstar but she’s also got the work ethic to match. Just six weeks after giving birth, she was on stage at Coachella; a few months later, she was out promoting her second LP, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, and supporting Taylor Swift at Wembley stadium.
“The Eras Tour, I definitely remember very clearly of course,” she enthuses. “What I took away from that particular experience was just how special [Swift] makes you feel. There’s a letter waiting for you; she’ll always come in and thank every single person on your team and in your band, she always takes the time to make everyone feel important and included. She does things that she doesn’t need to do or that wouldn’t be expected of her all the time.” But, she continues, “it’s hard to even remember [some of those post-partum shows] happening. It all feels very tender. It wasn’t easy doing them in any way. I definitely feel like it was difficult to be healing and be in public at the same time.”
Waterhouse met Pattinson at a games night in LA in 2018, and their relationship is written all over Loveland. It’s there in the album’s opening moments, as Back in Love speaks of forging a new kind of closeness as parents, and there dancing its way through the familiar everyday ups and downs of Tiny Raisin — “He’s all mine, and I hate his guts at the same time,” the track declares with an audible wink. “It’s funny, that song to me has unlocked another level of love song where you’ve been with someone for such a long time that you get to be playful in that way and say little cheeky things and it’s all with so much love,” she says. “It was fun for me to be able to do that.”
But it’s Waterhouse’s connection with her daughter that has clearly changed her life irreversibly. When she speaks of becoming a mother, it’s as though she still can’t quite compute the enormity of it all. “I think it’s made me marvel at our humanness. It’s so funny, even just your kid getting a fever — watching a little body recover from that, it’s brought me down to what it is to be alive and I really love that. It feels very survivalist and medieval in a way — especially birth, birth is medieval,” she nods, with a knowing flinch.
“I’m almost two and a half years in now, but when she was first born, I remember thinking that I can’t believe everybody does this and I can’t believe how vulnerable I feel. I was crying all the time. It makes me cry now thinking about it. It was just... shocking,” she says, with visible tears in her eyes.
Waterhouse takes a moment to gather herself. “It’s so f***ing weird! I’m not a cryer! I’m so not an emotional person, I’m such a Capricorn. But being a mum just f***ed me up in such a sweet way. It just absolutely broke open my heart, and I’m just madly in love and — despite my crying right now — I enjoy it so much and I’m so taken by my daughter and so in love with doing it with my partner and I just feel the preciousness of it very much.”
“Being a mum just f***ed me up in such a sweet way”
There is real, evident candidness to the way that Waterhouse carries herself, but there is also a steely determination to it all too. When we speak, she’s starting rehearsals for an extensive US tour later that day. Though her daughter has been on the road with her before, this next run marks a more evolved and exciting chapter for the young family. “We were looking at a book about our favourite jobs the other day and I said, ‘What job is mummy?’ And she pointed to a girl with a microphone on stage, so she does know,” Waterhouse smiles.
“We have the baby bus that we decorate, and she runs around backstage and has a little scooter. She’s the absolute queen of the tour. But she’s definitely into saying ‘no’ a lot at the moment, so I’m hoping that what everyone calls the terrible twos doesn’t just hit us very strongly in the middle of Wisconsin or something…” With Pattinson “filming a lot in the last couple of years” (most recently in London for The Batman: Part II), the trio are used to moving around and being in transit: “Being kind of everywhere, trying to stay together as much as possible but never being anywhere for that long.”
Loveland’s cinematic, Lana Del Rey-esque final track, Weirdo, sweetly documents the difficulties of being in a creative power couple: “You’re on a set, is that Ancient Rome? / Now I’m on a drive, you’re out on the road… I’m missing my favourite weirdo.” “Obviously my favourite place in the world is to be together, but there’s also so much enjoyment and fulfilment that both of us get from doing what we love and sometimes, if that means being apart, it’s OK,” she says pragmatically of its internal conflict. “Just thank god for FaceTime!”
There’s an awful lot to juggle right now, but for Waterhouse — musician, actor, model, mother — it’s a challenge she seems well-equipped to face. “[The last years] were definitely insane but I kept thinking that this would never have been an option for so many women before,” she says. “I felt so insanely lucky that I had one of the most incredible female artists in the world sharing her stage with me, and I’ve been able to have a baby, and I’m so surrounded by love and support. This wouldn’t have been an option for so many artists or felt like it was even on the table [before].
“I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who’s a musician and has started acting, and she was saying, ‘I’ve been doing music for so long and I’m so desperate to just show up and be part of a crew and not be the one in charge of everything.’ Whereas I’m so happy to be doing the opposite,” Waterhouse smiles as her daughter bursts into the room, just out of shot. “I’m so amazed I get to be able to keep making records, and I just want to keep doing it all.”
Suki Waterhouse’s new album Loveland is out on July 10
Photography: Miles Aldridge
