NME’s latest star of The Cover, COBRAH, has created an exclusive playlist to accompany the story’s launch – check it out below.
The boundary-pushing Swedish pop artist is on this week’s (February 2) edition of The Cover, a manifestation of NME’s commitment to supporting emerging talent across the globe on a weekly basis. Every week, a rising artist will feature on The Cover – you can read COBRAH’s profile here, written by Bailey Slater and featuring photography by Julius Hayes.
Alongside her The Cover story, COBRAH has curated an exclusive playlist, titled ‘Crying in transparent latex’. The playlist reflects COBRAH’s own artistry – an endeavour in control, domination and the celebration of female pleasure – with selections by electronic and club pop favourites such as Charli XCX, FKA Twigs, ADÉLA and Robyn. Listen to the full playlist on Spotify below and on Apple Music.
COBRAH has felt a magnetic pull to create for as long as she can remember. “I still feel it now,” she says. “It’s like when you fall in love in the beginning, and you can feel it in your body all the time.” Pursuing this connection, she took up piano, guitar and flute from an early age, and as a teen turned to musical theatre and played in a succession of local bands. “I thought maybe I was going to be a performer. And then I had a feeling that I wasn’t meant to recreate works, I was meant to create them myself.”
Instead of drawing from Sweden’s more famous pop exports – Ace Of Base, Robyn, ABBA – COBRAH’s musical education came from a burgeoning overseas electronic scene, such as releases from Skrillex’s OWSLA label, as well as Stockholm’s alt-metal scene. “I was never a Britney, pinky-pop girl in that sense, that kind of happened later in life,” she says. “When I started doing COBRAH, it was more on the avant-garde and experimental spectrum, but I started to find the more I did music, the more I came to appreciate pop and lean into those kinds of Max Martin structures with verses and choruses.”
While a brief stint in Berlin as a student would give her a taste of the BDSM world later featured so breathlessly in her music (and even her uniform of spiky leathers and glossy latex), COBRAH found true community in the sex clubs she frequented across her home city. She describes finding this scene, which hosted many of her early performances, as “pivotal” in the incubation of her artistry and penchant for rattling club beats. “You realise very quickly you cannot force where you resonate,” says the singer. “I feel very bonded to that scene, it was there I could try and explore and try things out.”
Read COBRAH’s full Cover story here and find out who else has been on The Cover here.
Every year, NME produces 50 Cover stories, showcasing the future of music via in-depth profiles and exclusive photoshoots. Check out our coffee table book NME The Cover 2024-2025, which features the likes of Kneecap, Lola Young, Amaarae, LE SSERAFIM, Oklou and many more.