Artistic alien finds her tribe
CXLOE TAKES FANS ON A PERSONAL JOURNEY AS SHE EMBRACES HER DIFFERENCES
FOR as long as she can remember, Chloe Papandrea has felt like an alien. After three years of songwriting “therapy”, the artist known as Cxloe has discovered she isn’t the One and Lonely, as she sings on her latest single.
Since releasing the breakthrough single Tough Love in 2017, the alternative dark pop artist has released a succession of songs that have filled the headphones of many thousands of her fellow aliens around the world.
As songs including
Monster, Show You, I Can’t Have Nice Things and Sick generated more than 23 million streams and became playlist staples on Triple J, she split her time between Sydney and Los Angeles crafting her debut EP called Heavy Pt 1.
When she assembled the six songs for the first significant body of work, Papandrea was struck by a light-bulb moment, finally identifying what she had been trying to figure out about herself through her creative expression.
Her artist alter-ego Cxloe showed her why she always felt that tightness in her chest, why her emotions pinballed to the extremes, why she felt pain when betrayal thwarted her dreams of how life should be.
“I’m in a family full of pharmacists who think with this part of their brain and I think with the other part of my brain and I don’t feel normal,” she says.
“It was like a three-yearlong therapy session in all these rooms with all these different songwriters, just talking it out and coming to terms with loving the way I am even though it’s different to a lot of other people in my life.
“For so long I thought it was a bad thing, to get so invested in things and get so hurt and feel everything is so extreme. It is the absolute artist’s curse but I’m learning to love that part of myself.”
Papandrea is one of a new generation of Australasian artistic aliens shapeshifting the pop landscape with their genre-defying sonic brews and lyrical vulnerability.
You can hear it in Tkay Maidza’s gritty R & B-rooted hip hop, the sophisticated atmospherics of Benee, the folk-flecked narratives of Alex The Astronaut and fearless neo-soul of Miiesha.
Cxloe has carved out a community of like-minded – and like-feeling – artistic souls to not only collaborate with but navigate the big beast of the music industry.
Songwriters like LA-based hitmaker Alex Hope, who has worked with Troye Sivan, Alanis Morissette and Alec Benjamin, and rising producer Kito who has remixed
Beyonce and Jay-Z tracks, helped out on Cxloe’s new track Swing.
“I love where our generation has come to but it can be scary when you give too much,” she says.
“I wouldn’t want it any other way, I’m too exhausted to put up a front. You have to be vulnerable.”
That vulnerability, bravely displayed on the EP’s single 12 Steps about addiction – whether it be drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping or toxic relationships – has connected her with fans who are equally unafraid to share their own dark times via her DMs.
Her team may excitedly measure her success by the streaming stats or playlist additions, but Cxloe chooses to focus on the fan comments.
However, like most empathetic artists, the 25year-old can find it difficult to find the balance between appreciating the connection between songwriter and fan and becoming a defacto counsellor.
“I am, to my core, a fixer. I can’t just sit and listen,” she says.
“I want to help fix whatever the situation is, so it has been hard when people send me messages like ‘I love this song because I’ve been bullied at school’. I want to invest my time with them – what can we do about this?
“But that isn’t always good for me because you can’t always fix people. You have to figure out how you give of yourself and keep a little bit for me. It can be hard to know when you’ve exhausted yourself because you want to keep giving … and you’re not a trained counsellor.”
Being a dark pop star – as she is most often described both by choice and to make it easy for an industry which stills feels the necessity to categorise music even in the genre-shifting era of streaming – isn’t all gothic and angsty.
There’s the costumes and the make-up and the makebelieve worlds she gets to play in for music videos and live performance.
“I just love it so much. The song is one thing but the costuming and make-up is so fun,” she says.
“I’ve been watching a lot of (TV series) Euphoria; I love the hair and make-up on that, so whenever I go to music shoots I’ve been experimenting with those looks a lot more.”
She mock growls when asked about the frustrations of not being able to share the songs of Heavy Pt 1 from a concert stage.
While the prospect of an EP tour next year remains uncertain, she will get a launch of sorts when she performs at Sydney Great Southern Nights series of COVIDSafe gigs in November.