Waking up on New Year’s Day can be a mind-altering experience for many. The impact of overindulgence from the night before can make even the easiest daily task impossible; but for rising artist Mae Stephens, the first day of 2023 was astonishing for a very different reason.
A few days earlier, the 19-year-old musician had posted a clip of her recent single ‘If We Ever Broke Up’ to TikTok, sharing 15 seconds of a funk-laden melody. The short clip turned out to be an instant hit. With tongue-in-cheek lyrics that see Stephens repeat a brilliant kiss-off – “If we ever broke up, I’d never be sad” – over a distinctive synth riff and a slinky bassline that recalls Blu DeTiger‘s fluorescent pop, the track was a smash in waiting: only Stephens didn’t have to wait long.
“I woke up after my New Year’s Eve party, hungover, and I just got spammed,” she recalls to NME, describing how her video had blown up overnight. With countless missed calls and messages from pals who’d seen Stephens on their own TikTok feeds, and the video had gone viral.
“I was thinking, ‘This isn’t real, I’m probably just going to wake up in a second’,” she tells NME a couple of months on from her first flash of online success. Chatting in a cosy studio in north London, Stephens adds: “It felt like a fever dream, and then posting after that, I was thinking, ‘I’ll post another video, but I’m not sure it’ll do as well’. Usually, TikTok is for one hit wonders – but the views just kept racking up.”
Stephens’ original video now has over 11 million views, and she has grown an audience away from the app, too: after its official, full-length release in February, ‘If We Ever Broke Up’ hit over 18 million hits on Spotify alone, and landed at Number 23 in the UK Charts. And while it may seem like this success has happened overnight, it’s something Stephens has been working on for years.
Growing up, Stephens would spend her evenings after school playing piano. She started to perform live with a local open mic night in her early teenage years; and from there, she started playing gigs further afield. “Music festivals, charity events, Christmas events, we tried to hit every angle, and tried to get different audiences to adjust me to gigging properly,” she explains. With the assistance of her dad, Stephens took on any gig she could. “It made me pretty savvy to be able to adapt to different settings. It’s given me a hard shell when it comes to criticism.”
With more new music in the pipeline, and ‘If We Ever Broke Up’ continuing to grow, NME caught up with Stephens while she’s at the centre of a viral whirlwind.
Congratulations on all the success of ‘If We Ever Broke Up’. Where’s the craziest place you’ve heard the song so far?
“Radio 1. To be able to have the track on the station I listen to on my way to work, and most of my friends do, the first time I heard my song on there I had a cry. There was that, and I was getting another tattoo done the other day and it was playing in the tattoo shop. It was really strange to have my voice on that kind of platform.”
Have you got to a point where you can wrap your head around the track’s success?
“It still feels like a dream. It is very weird, especially going from doing small gigs, it genuinely feels like this has all happened and it’s all going to cut off completely. Literally like a dream – it’s very weird to get used to. I still feel like I’m in a coma somewhere in my head.”
When did you first start working on the track?
“It was in a week of working with different producers in Amsterdam last year. The song was written in the last three hours of a session before I had to run and hop on a plane back home. We’d just done this really big, emotional ballad, and then we switched and the producer [Morien Van der Tang] created this beat and put the synth on top. I was very hesitant to that sound; it wasn’t my style at all.
I was very used to writing heartbreaking, Adele-style music. And it took me a little bit of time to get into writing, but eventually we finished the song, the demo, vocals in literally three hours and I was almost late for my plane!”
Are there any musical influences that have inspired your new sound?
“For the sessions I’ve gone to, I’ve looked to Sigrid’s music. I’m a diehard Sigrid fan. I met her once at my first-ever BRITs afterparty. I was lucky I had my glasses on as I had to compose myself, I was literally tearing up in a photo with her. Her music saved my life multiple times, and so it was like I met my hero.”
When you finished writing it, was there a point where you thought ‘this is really good’?
“I remember being sat in my living room and being sent the finished demo. I said to my parents, ‘I’ve just had one of the demos come through from Amsterdam ages ago’. They hadn’t heard it, but my dad has this smile and he only smiles when he knows something is really good, and he pulled this little smile. The moment he pulls that smile, I know it’s good. I trust my dad’s judgement on everything.”
Are your parents the first people you’ll go to with your new music?
“Yeah, I think it’s because I’ve worked with my dad for eight years on this, and he’s always been my first port of call. He quality checked all my content, spellchecked everything. He was behind everything – captions, hashtags, thumbnails; all of that, I’d go to my dad for everything as he understands what we were going for. He spent five and a half years learning everything he could about analytics and the music industry. He was definitely the person I went to for absolutely everything.”
Growing up, was music what you always wanted to do?
“It wasn’t at first. My parents wanted to discover what me and my brother were good at. We went through art, martial arts, drama, skiing, and I had a really rough time at school. It was really bad; I got kicked down stairs, my hair cut, my shoes filled with water, and I’d come home and go to these clubs, but I never really found any release until I started playing on the piano.
“I started to find that writing music was a good way of releasing emotions, so I didn’t get too pent up or angry. It got to the point where every time I’d come home from school, I’d spend four and a half hours on the piano every day, for four years of my life. It became therapy. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for music and for writing, and of course for my family. Music kept me alive.”
Through your music, do you want to let other people who’ve been through similar things know that it can get better?
“Absolutely. If you want something enough and you work hard for it, you can get it. I was a girl who was working in normal, ordinary, crappy customer service jobs, that got horrifically bullied for her size, her personality, her looks. I was someone who was ridiculed their entire life, even as a kid, and yet now I’m doing something that other people can only dream of doing. I pushed through and I worked hard. I feel like I need to say ‘Look, it doesn’t matter who you are, if you want something enough go and do it’.”
Mae Stephens’ new single ‘If We Ever Broke Up’ is out now