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Staying earnest in an era obsessed with detachment, the London singer-songwriter makes sunny, smart songs for the lovergirls
Words by Crystal Bell
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There is something almost spiritual about the way Flowerovlove talks about love. She describes it as invisible and impossible to explain fully. It is not just a subject she writes sweet, sunny pop songs about, but the thing that gives shape to everything else: her fantasies, her ambition. In the world of Flowerovlove, love is messy, embarrassing, beautiful and all-consuming. It’s her greatest muse.
“Love is so fun to write about,” she tells NME from her home in London. “My love life is actually humanly insane. Sometimes I just look around, and I’m like, ‘Am I in a movie scene?’” She laughs, but she means it. For Flowerovlove, love is not static. It changes depending on where you are, who raised you and what kind of life you have lived. “We all feel it, but we feel it so differently,” she says. “This is my language, so I get to express that in songs. I’m a lovergirl born and raised.”
As Flowerovlove, Joyce Cissé has built an entire mythology around those feelings. She speaks with the intensity of someone who has spent years untangling the difference between loving a person and loving the fantasy of them. It is a theme that runs through much of the 21-year-old’s music, from the yearning and projection of her earlier songs like ‘A Girl Like Me’ and ‘Breaking News’ to the more self-aware contradictions and confidence of ‘I’m Your First’ and latest single ‘American Wedding’.
“Sometimes it’s not even a physical attraction. It’s an energetic attraction. There’s this thing that we can’t see that we feel, and it takes hold of you like no other.” That distinction feels important in Flowerovlove’s music. Her songs are filled with whimsy, but they are rarely naive. Loving someone and building a life with them, she knows, are not always the same thing. “I don’t think just because you’re in love with someone that you have to be with them. I think loving someone from afar is really special.”
“Everyone wants to be the cool girl. But I don’t think I’ve ever been that”
That emotional intensity is what makes Flowerovlove stand out in a generation more interested in detachment than devotion. On recent single ‘Casual Lady’, she captures one of the defining contradictions of modern dating: wanting to feel deeply while also wanting to seem untouched by those feelings. She wrote the song during a West Hollywood studio session where it emerged in real time from a conversation about how she is not “casual” by nature. “I was just like, I don’t do casual. But then I am also, like, a baddie.”
Los Angeles has become something of a creative proving ground for Flowerovlove, who has intense flight anxiety but keeps going back anyway. There, she writes with more urgency. The city has become tied to a particular kind of ambition for her: the feeling that if she has travelled all that way, she has to come home with something to show for it. “I always get into an era when I’m in a mood, phase [or] whatever feeling when I’m in LA,” she says. “I’m gonna write bangers.”
The sessions themselves, though, sound less like high-pressure pop camps and more like an extension of the warm, deeply feminine world Flowerovlove has built around herself. She describes the room as sacred, built on trust and patience. Many of her closest collaborators have worked with her for years, giving her the space to discover herself as both a writer and a person. “The vibe I cultivate in the studio is always girlhood,” she says. “That’s gonna be number one.”
Flowerovlove is not reinventing the lovergirl archetype so much as she is capturing what it feels like to inhabit it right now. For a generation raised online, emotional vulnerability can feel both deeply desired and deeply uncool. Her music lives in that uncomfortable space of wanting to seem untouched yet also needing to be loved. “Everyone wants to be the cool girl. But I don’t think I’ve ever been that,” she says. “Love is the most beautiful thing we have. It’s universal. Everyone understands it.”
She laughs often throughout the conversation, sometimes interrupting herself mid-thought or groaning when she realises how earnest she sounds. But beneath the jokes, there is a seriousness to the way she thinks about emotion. She wants to be the kind of artist who says the embarrassing thing out loud. “I think people are scared of caring too much,” she muses. “Everyone wants to seem chill, but deep down, most people want love. They want someone to care about them.”
Born to parents from the Ivory Coast and growing up between south London and Essex, Flowerovlove spent much of her childhood fantasising about a bigger, more beautiful life. “Growing up with no money, very poor, an insane kind of life has always made me desire more,” she says. As a child, she often let her imagination wander – always daydreaming and chasing some fantasy bigger than herself. She was also, by her own admission, “always a romantic”, someone who yearned long before she truly understood what that meant. “I’ve always searched for more. I’ve always desired more. I’m a dreamer.”
That hunger fuels almost everything she does: her taste, her ambition to create and be the architect of her brand, even the way she thinks about love. Romance has never just been about another person: it has also been about possibility, fantasy and imagining a life bigger than the one you grew up in. “My becoming a lovergirl is my wanting for more,” she says. “I had a lot of time to just be like, ‘What will it be like when I can do this and when I have this?’”
“I want Black girls to know they can exist in this space however they want”
That same dreamy sensibility carries into her visual world: nostalgic, ethereal, girlish, slightly surreal. She calls herself a “miniskirt warrior”, a phrase coined by a fan that neatly captures the duality at the centre of her persona – soft and strong, romantic and intimidating, vulnerable and completely in control.
Every part of Flowerovlove’s world comes from her. She pulls inspiration from old photographs, paintings, films, fashion editorials and the women she grew up idolising. One image for ‘Casual Lady’ was inspired by one of her favourite photos ever, a 1972 photo of American artist LeRoy Neiman painting Playboy Bunny Gina Byrams. Elsewhere, she points to Grace Jones, Boney M., Donna Summer, Lana Del Rey, SZA and RAYE.
Flowerovlove even directed, styled, produced, and funded the ‘Casual Lady’ video herself, with help from her brother, who directs all of her other visuals. “It’s so important for me to be hands-on,” she says. “For many people, being on Team Flowerovlove is their job, but this is my life.” It’s about authorship, about trusting her own vision to build the world exactly the way she sees it in her head. “I trust my taste so much more than anything anyone in this world could put on my table.”
That confidence extends to the way she talks about being a Black woman in pop. Flowerovlove has been vocal about wanting more Black girls to feel like they belong, especially in genres that have historically sidelined them. Growing up, she says she rarely saw artists who looked like her occupying this particular kind of soft, hyper-feminine, lovestruck lane of pop music. “I want Black girls to know they can exist in this space however they want,” she says.
Yesterday (April 12), Flowerovlove made her Coachella debut, a showcase of her whimsical vision that included an entrance via giant miniskirt, a special appearance from Filipino girl group BINI and a performance of the unreleased song ‘In My Victoria Secret’. Speaking to NME a month before the milestone, she’s equal parts excitement and nerves. She’s got other major festival bookings for the summer – Governors Ball in New York and Benicàssim in Spain – but Coachella, in particular, feels symbolic. “Things like that help people see you more seriously,” she says. “If you can be like, ‘I’m playing Coachella,’ it’s like, ‘Oh shit, she’s a real artist.’”
The validation she feels from booking Coachella is not because she needs permission to believe in herself, but because she knows how difficult it can be to truly feel seen. “Being seen for me is so important,” she says. “Being taken in and felt is so important.” Imagining the props, the outfits and the fantasy of it all, she talks about performances as a chance to tap into her inner child, to dress up and be a little strange: “Why has society stopped me from being like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna jump out of a massive shoe’? It’s my show, so I should.”
She wants her performances to feel like an escape, a place where people can forget whatever is waiting for them outside the venue and spend an hour inside her world instead. At a Flowerovlove show, adulthood is suspended for a little while. You can be strange, emotional, over-the-top. You can dress up, scream too loud, and care too much.
Those same instincts are shaping the debut album she’s working toward now. She describes her music as “intentionally conversational”, written to sound like the messy back-and-forth of real emotion – almost like a group chat come to life. It helps that she never seems to be short on material. “My love life is crazy,” she laughs. “It’s like, ‘I can write a song about this’.”
Flowerovlove’s single ‘American Wedding’ is out now via Capitol Records. She plays Coachella weekend 2 on April 19
Listen to Flowerovlove’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Crystal Bell
Photography: Emily White
Styling: Shereen Assopiah
Hair: Lauraine Bailey using Dyson Hair Pro and Manketttioil
Makeup: Tina Khatri
Label: Capitol Records