Step right up! Haute & Freddy’s pop circus of wild imagination awaits | The Cover | NME.com
Haute & Freddy (2026), photo by Kristen Jan Wong
Step right up! Haute & Freddy’s pop circus of wild imagination awaits
Michelle Buzz and Lance Shipp used to be frustrated songwriters for hire. Now they’ve created their own thrilling musical world where crisp ’80s synth-pop meets flamboyant Renaissance fashion
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Haute & Freddy view themselves as “extravagant weirdos” who make music for other extravagant weirdos. They celebrate their outsider credentials on the rubbery club banger ‘Freaks’ (“Life is for the wicked – not so heaven-sent!”) and deliver club-ready catharsis on ‘Dance The Pain Away’, one of this year’s best pop songs. Their dazzling discography also contains a lustrous new wave nugget called ‘Fashion Over Function’, but this lot don’t do snobbery. The “Haute” in their band name is deliberately mispronounced like “hot”, rather than “haute couture”, because they always want to be more playful than posh.
The video for ‘Shy Girl’, an ’80s synth-pop glitterbomb that’s their most-streamed song yet, introduces us to their exuberant musical world. While vocalist Michelle “Haute” Buzz vamps inside a giant birdcage, wearing a massive orange wig that would provoke envious glances at a Renaissance fair, dandyish drummer-percussionist Lance “Freddy” Shipp pulls pearls from his mouth. In the comments section, one fan has written with pinpoint accuracy: “It’s like Kate Bush had a baby with Erasure and then sent it off to theatre arts [school].”
Haute & Freddy on The Cover of NME. Credit: Kristen Jan Wong for NME
The Los Angeles duo call their fanbase “the Royal Court”, a name that nods to their fanciful and entirely fictitious backstory as “runaway carnies” whose brazen performances seriously upset the queen and her uptight subjects. Pop’s ultimate extravagant weirdo, , is an honorary life member after she posted ‘Shy Girl’ on in March and wrote that she was spending her birthday listening to their debut album ‘Big Disgrace’, which had dropped just weeks earlier. “On New Year’s Eve, I wrote that our 2026 goal was for Lady Gaga to follow us,” Buzz says with a playful cadence in her voice – she’s owning the not-so-humblebrag. “I also wanted us to get to a million monthly listeners [on ], which I know is silly, but we also did that. So now, it’s like we have to dream again.”
Buzz and Shipp are speaking from their home in hipsterish Silver Lake – “we’re never not together!” Buzz quips when NME asks whether they’re roommates as well as bandmates. Though the Zoom camera is off, the duo still exude an infectious enthusiasm, especially when they wax lyrical about the ’80s pop icons they bonded over: New Order, Eurythmics, Phil Collins, Tears For Fears, Kate Bush. “My whole life feels like ’80s Kate Bush,” Buzz says. “There’s no Haute without Kate.”
Credit: Kristen Jan Wong for NME
This pair are self-described “music nerds” who love to get granular about their influences. “I’ve always been obsessed with drum machines and programming,” Shipp says, before sharing his favourite recording studio story. “You know, Phil Collins accidentally made gated reverb [production] because the talkback mic was on and somebody hit a snare, which triggered the reverb,” he says. “And then they were like, ‘Wait, that was so cool, let’s make it a thing.’ And then that sound defined the entire ’80s – I love magical stories like that!”
There’s also something magical about Haute & Freddy’s story. Buzz hails from Houston, Texas and Shipp grew up in Detroit, Michigan, but they each moved to LA to pursue songwriting careers. Working separately, they tasted some success – Buzz co-wrote Katy Perry’s ‘Never Really Over’ and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Magic’, while Shipp had credits on Calvin Harris, Rauw Alejandro and Hayley Kiyoko tracks – but then disillusionment crept in. “I was always trying to do an ’80s thing, but it was really frowned upon,” Buzz says. “When an A&R heard [my idea], they would say ‘no artist’s gonna record that’. And then that leaked into the creative circle out here, so all the producers would say: ‘We can’t even go there.’”
As jobbing songwriters in a highly competitive scene, Buzz and Shipp had been orbiting each other for years – they even hung out at the same clubs. But it wasn’t until the pandemic, when every creative in the city was making a pivot, that each revealed their true hand: the songs they wrote in private, away from high-pressure sessions for other artists. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute, we literally gravitate towards the same things!’” Shipp recalls.
“It’s crazy having people tell us, ‘The world needs you right now’” – Lance Shipp
Haute & Freddy have come to realise they share a lot of common ground – so much, in fact, that Buzz says they felt “friend embarrassment” for failing to exchange demos sooner. Both grew up making music in church, which provided a solid grounding in live performance, and both loved choral music and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. (“I am still absolutely spellbound by the synth sounds in his Cats score,” Buzz says today.) The duo’s musical theatre side emerges on ‘Symphony For A Queen’, the baroque opening song from ‘Big Disgrace’. It begins with Buzz singing a crystalline melody over pizzicato strings before the entire song morphs from Broadway ballad into a spangly toe-tapper. Lord Lloyd-Webber would surely approve.
Finding a like-minded partner-in-crime proved invigorating for the duo. “We were just so tired of having to be in a box when we were writing songs,” Shipp says. “So we basically said: ‘Let’s make music without really having a goal. Let’s just play.’ And that gave us the freedom to make whatever we wanted.” As they let their musical imaginations run wild, they also invented the characters of Haute & Freddy and concocted an outlandish backstory. The seed was an old-timey font they were drawn to – “it was very circus flier,” Buzz says – but the idea grew roots when they dropped their debut single, ‘Scantily Clad’, at the end of 2024.
Credit: Kristen Jan Wong for NME
“With that song, the music kind of led us to the circus lore,” Buzz recalls. “The lyrics gave us this whole narrative of us upsetting the queen and the nobles. So then it was like, ‘Who are we exactly, and why are we upsetting her?’ And then we started talking in the comments [section] with fans, and they really picked up on all the court language we were using.”
As Haute & Freddy, they’ve committed to the bit ever since. They set dressing-up themes ahead of their live shows, then watch in awe as “our crafty girlies”, as Buzz calls them, put their own unique spin on ‘Scantily Clad Cabaret’ or ‘Showgirl At Heart’, which is also named after a song from the album. “One fan showed up serving full-on peacock with feathers everywhere and their face covered in iridescent purple and green glitter. It was incredible,” Buzz recalls.
Credit: Kristen Jan Wong for NME
But, as befits a band who wed the sounds of 1984 to looks from 1784, Haute & Freddy’s lore is intentionally open-ended and anachronistic. They don’t see ‘Big Disgrace’ as a concept album and say they’re “still ruminating” over where their characters might go next. “With this being a music project versus a brilliant four-season series, it gives us this freedom where we don’t ever have to know certain plot points,” Buzz says. “Part of our approach is a whiplash from the rigidness of our [songwriting] lives before Haute & Freddy.”
At this point, Shipp picks up the conversational baton. “We put love, care and intention into everything we do, but we try not to belabour things,” he says. Haute & Freddy are supporting hyperreal pop queen Melanie Martinez in North America later this month – “our first stadium spot!” Shipp points out – and they’re ready for the challenge. “I can only assume that Melanie Martinez fans love world-building and anything a little eclectic, so I’m feeling excited,” Buzz says.
“My whole life feels like ’80s Kate Bush” – Michelle Buzz
Crucially, the looseness of the band’s lore allows for moments of affecting sincerity. Songs like ‘Dance The Pain Away’ and ‘Shy Girl’ hit so hard because they pulse with palpable emotion. “I have struggled with self-hate for the majority of my life. So many times, I’ve thought it was finally over and then it’ll smack me again: this little tug of depression,” Buzz says. She and Shipp wrote ‘Shy Girl’ as a way of excavating her pain after ‘Scantily Clad’ began to gain traction and Buzz wondered whether being an artist could actually become a viable career. “That song is such a lantern,” she adds. “It’s me saying: ‘Go out there and have fun. Don’t steal your own joy.’”
Perhaps because they combine high-camp visuals with high-impact hooks, Haute & Freddy have already built a fervent queer fanbase. ”With me being queer, I’m not surprised, but I just didn’t know whether that would happen,” Buzz says. “To be honest, I felt like in my [songwriting] career, a lot of my music didn’t resonate with anybody.”
For this reason, their main goal is to keep serving the Royal Court. “It’s crazy having people tell us ‘this song is changing lives’ or ‘the world needs you right now,’” Shipp says, which prompts an “oh my gosh, yes!” from Buzz. ”It still doesn’t feel real that we’re writing songs that people connect to,” she adds. “This whole project has been a huge gift to my life.”
Haute & Freddy’s ‘Big Disgrace’ is out now via Atlantic Records.
Listen to Haute & Freddy’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Nick Levine
Photography: Kristen Jan Wong
Make-up: Beau Cockrell
Hair: Gregg Lennon Jr.
Styling: Orchid Satellite, Elias Martinez
Label: Atlantic Records
