Within seconds of opening her computer, Natalie Lu was under attack.
Just when the 20-year-old singer/guitarist, founder of the San Francisco shoegaze outfit Wisp, cracked open Zoom for an interview about her ferocious rise in heavy rock, she was promptly mauled by two of her cats, who crowded onto the screen and claimed the video call for themselves.
Lu apologized and frantically tried to scoop them off camera. But her guests were apropos — it fits her music to have something soft yet vicious arriving out of nowhere to claim a lot of attention.
In just a year and half, Wisp’s foggy, distortion-churning single “Your Face” blew up on TikTok (Wisp has 4 million likes and counting). It landed her a major-label deal with Interscope and a prime slot at this weekend’s nominally rap-centric Camp Flog Gnaw Festival.
Lu looks to be Gen Z’s new ambassador for the opaque and brutal.
“One of my main concerns when ‘Your Face’ came out was wanting to make music that people could relate to,” Lu said. “Shoegaze is great for how emotional the music can get. Writing things that actually come from the heart is a lot more important than trying to write a song for the sake of going viral.”
A lot of Lu’s reference points — Deftones’ menace, Cocteau Twins’ elegance — date back to more than twice her age. (Gen X guitarists still paying off their pedalboards will find much to appreciate here). Other influences, like the tastemaking Bay Area band Whirr, drew from similar wells a generation ago — Lu’s droll Instagram handle is still “whirrwhoreforlyfe.” The Gen Z shoegaze revival hit full stride last year, when veteran artists like Panchiko, Duster and Slowdive found new audiences on social media.
Yet Lu — sporting copper-dyed hair and a Hello Kitty guitar capable of insane noise — locked onto something distinctly young in her music. Wisp’s rise is a product of generational tastes and technology; like a lot of Soundcloud rap, “Your Face” was first written atop an online instrumental from indie producer grayskies. Her own pointillist lyrics and made-for-moodboards underwater imagery captured her peers’ ambient loneliness. Wisp — alongside acts like trans artist Jane Remover or Singapore’s Yeule — refract decades-old templates through new lenses of experience.
“A lot of the shoegaze bands I know, they’re very male dominated, and predominantly white as well,” Lu said. “I feel like having people like Jane and Yeule representing minorities or a queer group, I think it’s very powerful, and it’s definitely a gateway into more people feeling comfortable making any alternative genre.”
Just last fall, Lu was studying computer science at San Francisco State University, close to her childhood neighborhood near Ocean Beach, posting to deep-cut shoegaze Reddit forums and figuring out her sound. “I grew up loving Greek mythology and mermaids, and I wanted Wisp to involve the otherworldly things that I loved growing up in San Francisco, where it was always super foggy near the beach,” Lu said.
Once “Your Face” took off, she had to scale up quickly. At first, she kept anonymous and barely showed her face in videos or images. (Wisp has a wry merch shirt that just reads “Mysterious 19-year-old Shoegaze Artist”). She hoped she could preserve her private life as a student, but that veil couldn’t last. “I thought ‘I’m going to do music full time, but stay in college and get my degree,” Lu recalled. “But when I found out that I’d be touring so much, I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore’.”
Lu is an undeniable presence in Wisp — far from pop music, but alluring for a generation that loves dissociative vibes (“Your Face” has almost 86 million Spotify streams). She trusted Interscope, which has had a great run with young, autonomous female artists like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, to strike the right mix of guidance and freedom to explore a challenging sound. “They really reassured me that I had creative control over Wisp, that I would make the calls,” Lu said.
“Wisp’s music has always existed in this beautiful duality,” said Max Motley, an A&R executive at Interscope. “Her subdued whisper tones almost sit at odds with the crushing production, and the juxtaposition between the two drew us in immediately. It’s something we felt we had never heard before, which excites us more than anything.”
The Flog Gnaw gig is emblematic of her broader ambitions, added Motley’s Interscope colleague Sean Lewow.
“From the first time we sat down with Natalie, it was clear that she is an artist who strives to do something first of its kind,” Lewow said. “We have no doubt that Natalie’s audience will continue to grow far past any boundaries that being a part of one genre in specific brings.”
April’s EP “Pandora” raised the stakes for her writing and burgeoning fame. New singles like “Enough For You” and “I Remember How Your Hands Felt On Mine” brought refinement to her waves of gain (and some in-demand producers, Photographic Memory and Elliott Kozel). Lu’s songwriting is more impressionist than hook-driven, writing quickly to capture ephemeral feelings. “You once said you love white roses / So, I’ll grow flowers beneath my lungs,” she sings on “Pandora.”
Within a year, she went from a semi-anonymous bedroom act to performing at big fests like Lollapalooza and Outside Lands. She acknowledges there was a learning curve to handling crowds of that size so quickly.
“I’m a lot more comfortable moving on stage now,” she said. “In the very beginning I was kind of whispery, like ‘Hey, you guys can move if you want’. Now I’m much more confident in myself and the way that I deliver anything.”
As the stages got bigger, she decided she needed to spend more time in L.A. She was booked for a slot at the the now-canceled Desert Daze fest, which would have been an ideal home for her gauzy sound. Instead, at Camp Flog Gnaw, she’ll perform on a bill with Tyler, the Creator and Playboi Carti, which will be her biggest local date yet.
She’s never been to Flog Gnaw as a fan, but ”I feel like a lot of festivals are having more alternative artists,” she said. “I think it’s super cool for rap and pop audiences.”
So far, she’s found the L.A. scene much more freewheeling and open to collaborating and hanging out — including her old heroes in Whirr. “I never thought that I would get the chance to meet them here. I was so starstruck,” she recalled.
Did she fess up to her IG handle?
“Oh, they love it,” Lu laughed. “The first time I met them, they were like, ‘I’m surprised your label hasn’t made you change that.’ I told them, even if I get in trouble, I don’t think I’ll ever change it.”