Aesthetic:
Words: Felicity Martin Photography: Sam Hiscox Styling: Lee Trigg Makeup: Thomasin Waite at Julian Watson Agency Hair: Waka Adachi
A few weeks ago, Coucou Chloe woke up to someone tagging her underneath a now-deleted Instagram post by Kris Jenner. The video in question – an advert for a DJ duo made up of hotel heir Barron Hilton and his wife – used a track produced by Chloe and Sega Bodega under their Y1640 alias called Weep. But the pair weren’t credited and, worse still, a comment underneath saying ‘stay tuned!’ implied that the Hilton duo, Humanmosaic, were releasing the track. “I just woke up like, 'What the fuck?!'” Chloe exclaims, as we sit in the bar of Hackney Picturehouse. Though the Hiltons have since apologised, writing “mad respect for them both”, it’s unsurprising that wealthy celebrities trying to shoehorn their way into the music business would turn to Coucou Chloe. The France-born producer and vocalist’s music sounds like it’s from the future. The austere, skeletal beats over which she often drapes her deadpan voice twist the idea of a club banger inside out: she sounds mysterious and unsettling, like nothing you’ve heard before.
STYLE
Chloe – real name Erika Jane – made her debut with Halo, a 2016 EP for Berlin label Creamcake, and has kept up a steady rate of releases since. Her most recent, Naughty Dog EP, reveals her tightest songcraft yet. Chloe is also one of the driving forces behind NUXXE, the forward-facing label she runs with collaborators Sega Bodega and Shygirl. The label is going from strength to strength: they’ve just released a bumping club freak-out called XXXTC by internet sensation Brooke Candy, with Charli XCX and Maliibu Miitch contributing verses.
In person, Coucou Chloe is as unassumingly cool as her music. She cites 90s hip-hop and Snoop Dogg as her style inspiration, and today she’s wearing an oversized ‘U MAD BRO?’ troll face t-shirt with a furry leopard bucket hat. She grins while flashing a Ween tattoo on her arm – a tribute to the alt rock band that made an unexpectedly huge stamp on her approach to making music. “I love the freedom they had, they were making everything they wanted to make. It definitely pushed me to create,” she admits. An avid gamer up until the age of 13, you can hear the influence of amorphous video game soundtracks in Chloe’s sound. Her dad would play music on long car journeys as a kid, where she’d uncover parallel universes in her brain and imagine herself as Lara Croft “going on crazy adventures”. Chloe also recounts growing up in “the tiniest” village of Biot, in the south of France. She moved to Nice to attend Villa Arson art school, seeing it as the big city, but left after realising it wasn’t the place for her. “It was so dry there. I started to feel like I was in a cage,” she tells me. London took in the art school dropout three years ago, and she instantly found her feet at outsider club nights like PDA, Bala Club and Oscillate Wildly before NTS brought her into the fold as a resident, and Boiler Room tapped her up for a show – an event she learnt to DJ for in just a couple of days. “It's crazy how everybody's working with everybody here, you know?” she says. “People from music, fashion. Everybody is just kind of together and it's so beautiful and stimulating.”
Doom, a strobing club anthem that sounds like the chain-clinking insides of a BDSM club, was cherry-picked by Rihanna for her Fenty x Puma New York Fashion Week show in 2017, when Chloe had just started making music from her bedroom. Now a firm favourite in the fashion world, Chloe recently DJ’d for Prada and Gucci, and her sharp-jawed model looks have found her fronting Burberry and Vivienne Westwood campaigns. With desires to soundtrack full catwalk shows (“Hit me up!” she beams), Chloe also wants to start to focus on producing for other people this year, naming Playboi Carti as her dream collaborator. “A lot of people assume – probably because I'm a woman – that I don't make beats. Sometimes people ask me, 'Did you make the beat?' and it’s an instrumental track. It’s like, ‘Who do you think made it, asshole?’” But Coucou Chloe’s sights extend beyond taking her production to even more futuristic heights. “I want to express myself through a lot of mediums,” she finishes, explaining she wants to delve deeper into visual art forms. “You know, there is the music, but I also want to build my own universe...” Coucou Chloe’s NAUGHTY DOG EP is out now on NUXXE
