Photographer: Jonathan Tomlinson
Styling: Roma Mitchell
MUA: Tom Easto
Words: Sophia Hill
The Curious Case Of Lauren Duffus
Ormside thrums on a Sunday night, packed tight as Lauren Duffus performs a selection of tracks before DJ Spanish Fly and Tommy Wright III take the stage. Rumours of tickets going for 400 quid circulate as bodies clash like Spinjas. She exhales the contents of her catalogue into the charged room, verses tumble from her mouth and out of the speakers, sounding like they’ve been submerged underwater: slightly muffled. Standing behind the decks, she’s in a blur of smoke, posted up in a dark corner.
Just a few days earlier, we’d spoken on the phone. She was walking through Catford, heading home to Lewisham, where she’s been living for the last three years. The conversation was cut short when someone shouted a slur from across the street and the police arrived to find out what was going on. The second time that week. “Catford 🤪” she DMs me shortly after.
Raised in Finchley, a particularly quiet residential suburb in north London, and in the same breath, perhaps not the most welcoming, Duffus felt like she stood out. Her move to Lewisham, however, was triggered by a period of grief. “It wasn’t really a good reason why I moved here,” she says plainly. But the area has since become charged with meaning. “Lewisham is a very significant place to me, for a lot of reasons.”
The third track on her latest EP is titled after the borough, something that emerged naturally in the process. “I wrote the piano part first. That’s how I usually start. Then I found this old footage of someone walking down Lewisham high street, laid over some vocal parts and named the track after that.” Like much of her work, meaning tends to arrive retrospectively, not by force. Duffus’ music sleekly incorporates all of her disparate influences and surroundings. It is an exemplar of the modern deadpan aesthetic that gives little regard to genre purity.
If Duffus’ discography was a collection of imagined chimeras, the songs on her latest EP, Can’s Gone Warm, are almost like an out-of-body experience. They lean into reality but with a sticky sense of unreality: she waltzes around the bedroom she’s spent the past few years constructing, picking up familiar objects, observing them, turning them over and then placing them back down. Like much of her earlier work, these songs have a pensive nature, modulating and multiplying Duffus’ murmurs to match the “faded,” “sedated” state she sketches out. Her chops are literally chops, which she then grounds in sinuous new shapes through her own style of production.
“N.U.M.T.E” begins as a head-bopping saunter, until the 30-second mark, where Duffus’ murmurs drift over a breakcore beat-switch. “I’m not a lyricist at all,” she tells me. “I definitely don’t lead with the lyrics or the poetry side of things.” Instead, Duffus works from a place of instinct. “I’ll just record and kind of freestyle a mumble, almost ad-lib over it… so in a cool way, people take whatever they want from it.” Her process is impressionistic. If you think of language as malleable or incomplete, Duffus’ music lives right in that liminal zone, always hinting at form without resolving into one.
There’s something cryptic about her approach, like Jane Lane from Daria sketching on a napkin, half-smiling, letting the ink run past the paper’s edge. The hours that suit her best are the early ones. “It’s quite frantic,” she says of those half-awake spells. “You’re less self-critical and more open to just trying on random things.” Most of her recordings begin at home, in solitude, before she brings them into the studio to mix.
But that seems to be the point: for Duffus, connecting the dots between seemingly disparate things. And in that sense, the process matters more than the final spit and polish. “With this project there’s things I’ve started to do which feel more like tokens of myself. I’ll take the final vocal recording and chop it up, then build harmonies. Not by actually singing them, but by creating them electronically. I use transposing software, layer the same vocal over itself, that sort of thing.”
In 2018, Duffus lost her dad, a moment that reshaped everything. Naturally-so, grief is a cruel kind of education. “My mental health just took a bit of a turn,” she says. The first song she made that signalled a shift in that dark period was “Love Love Love”. “It was quite a happy song,” she says, almost surprised. “I usually make more emotional, dark music. So this song really became a way of representing hope.” It tracks. I remember feeling a subtle change in tone around its release, even if I couldn’t quite place it.
Heavy music offered comfort in those darker times, genres like hardcore and metal. She mentions Rammstein, Linkin Park, and Casual Gabberz. Music that feels battle-ready, guttural. Her dad, a dental hygienist who DJ’d on the side, passed down his gear to her. “He had some CDJs, tried to make remixes, which were awful by the way,” she jokes warmly, “but all of his equipment has his writing and personal touches on them, like stickers. It feels really special that I get to use these things now. My mum always says he’d be super jealous. But super happy all the same.”
Her introduction to music-making came during lockdown, and her entry into singing has been even more recent. “I often find myself singing gibberish and then laughing… basically just trying to figure out what sounds the same. That’s probably quite disappointing to hear,” laughing off the idea. Before long, she was sharing early pieces on her SoundCloud. Her debut, “Stir Fry”, blended haunting elements with a fractured dancehall beat. Together with “Soho Road (Crying Song)”, which cleverly used samples of crying as percussion, these tracks made up a third of her first EP, SULK, released via London’s Body Motion label. It soon caught the ear of Nic Tasker, founder of AD93, who then asked her to create the seventh edition of the label’s dubplate series.
I had an urge to scroll through my old Tumblr the other night (circa 2011), while listening through the demos for the new EP, the two felt weirdly in conversation with each other. Not because of any kind of teenage nostalgia in the sound, but something about the aesthetic scatter, all half-formed and found references, mirrored in the project’s shape-shifting slant. Can’s Gone Warm isn’t interested in objective themes. It’s more a catalogue of sensations, quiet shifts and flickers of memory – songs that resist straightforward categorisation.
We spoke in tangents. About never being able to remember the lyrics to our favourite songs, about object permanence and the fear of perception. Maybe that’s the heart of it; Lauren Duffus makes music that embraces the fragmented, the non-linear, the felt but not always fully formed. And that’s precisely what makes her so compelling.
Listen to Lauren Duffus’ debut EP ‘Can’s Gone Warm’ below.