One to watch: Liv.e

It’s a challenge for any new artist to break through at the moment, but Liv.e (the E is silent) has ingenuity on her side. The Dallas-born, LA-based artist’s lo-fi music evades categorisation with a knowing wink, weaving its way around experimental R&B, cosmic jazz, gospel, neo-soul, spoken word and the drowsy undoneness of chopped and screwed. Even she is unsure how to summarise her influences. “I don’t have any way of really explaining what my sound is,” she has said.

She’s also had some heavyweight support. Last year, the 22-year-old (real name Olivia Williams) collaborated on a track with the rapper Earl Sweatshirt, after he invited her on tour with him (he’d slid into her DMs, excited by her 2018 EP hoopdreams). And this summer she launched her debut album, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, with a livestream on none other than Erykah Badu’s website.

Liv.e wrote the album while living at her mum’s in St Louis, Missouri, and working in Urban Outfitters. Its 20 tracks come off as free-flowing fragments that evoke diary entries, the laptop glow from under the duvet and D’Angelo played at the wrong speed. But what’s also intriguing is how she thrives on the unexpected. None of her ditties are straightforward, with some dovetailing into contrasting musical postscripts and droll asides such as: “I know, I know, you thought the song was over.”

This is the sort of carefree risk-taking that feels lemon-fresh in 2020. “Damn, that’s what that new shit feel like?” she asks on another track. Yes indeed it does.

• Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is out now on In Real Life