On the Rise
Aimée Fatale

Fatale first started out playing open mic nights at The Adelphi in her late teens, sticking to a short set of ol’ reliables. ”Whoever would book me would be like, ‘Can you do a full half an hour?’ I was like, ‘No, the three or four songs I know, and that's it’,” she laughs. The set was comprised of two or three covers — usually Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel", Dolly Parton's "Jolene", and Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" — and concluded with one original song, "Is Love Real”, a track that Fatale wrote when she was sixteen and has not revised since. Despite leading with such timeless, beloved songs while also showcasing her own songwriting prowess, Fatale was just cutting her teeth within the music scene. Her name wasn’t yet known, and commanding the 200-capacity room wasn’t the easiest feat. "Even the bands I was supporting would leave to go get tea, and I would just play it to the bar staff," she admits, reflecting on those early nights.

Nearly a decade later, Fatale returned to the same venue this year for her first-ever headline show, which sold out in half an hour — a rare happening for The Adelphi, she notes. Sticking to her roots, she closed with ”Is Love Real" again. But this time around, she wasn’t just singing to the bar staff. “I walked out, and there was just a sea of girls all dressed like it was the sixties, all screaming,” she smiles. “And I genuinely had tears in my eyes, because that venue means so much to me. This is for sixteen-year-old me who always played this to an empty room, and now she's playing it to the same room but sold out.”

Before fully coming into the identity that she hones now — vintage glamour, 1960s nostalgia meets contemporary indie pop — Fatale found herself performing as a member of a post-punk band that she joined at nineteen. It was a swerve from her solo covers, but reflected the music that she grew up with. ”It's kind of funny, because I grew up on punk music,” she says. “My favourite bands when I was eleven, twelve, were Ramones, Blondie, The Clash. And then I got into riot grrrl stuff when I was fourteen. So it's not that far from me."

While the sound was familiar, what Fatale wasn't prepared for was the scene that existed around it. She recalls a heavily male-dominated culture, where she and the band's one other woman had to assert themselves for a baseline of respect. "There were a few times where we'd show up with the instruments, and they'd be like, ‘Oh, is your boyfriend's band playing?’ And we'd be like, no.”

When the band eventually split in 2022, it took Fatale some time to regain her footing and stand as an artist without it. "When you're in a band, you become like one group, and it's not about you and who you are, but about who the band is," she says. This was exacerbated by the fact that Fatale toned down her own personal style and leaned into a sharper demeanour, as she explains: "I diluted it, because the audiences you're playing to are very male-dominated, and I didn't want to feel more vulnerable in front of them. You had to put on a bit more of a hard exterior, because I felt I would get more respect.”

Coming out the other side, she is blunt about what that experience called for her to realise. "You realise it's got absolutely nothing to do with how people should respect you as a musician or a woman," she says. "I find more power in it now, because it's who I am. I don't really care if some old man doesn't like it.”

Fatale would go on to pour that sense of reclamation into A Modern Girl, her debut EP released back in February. As an introductory statement, the material synthesises different points of Fatale’s journey of coming into her own as a songwriter rather than leaning too heavily into concept.

”I've cherry-picked songs from across my entire time as a songwriter, rather than sitting down to write it,” she explains. “I’ve picked the songs that best represent my experiences as a girl becoming a woman — and also the lighthearted emotions, like having a crush on someone or missing somebody," she says. Intention is woven through every choice made for the EP, even down to its tongue-in-cheek title, which is borrowed from sixties mod culture. "Modern girl was always used as a way of saying — oh, she's cool, she's trendy,” she says. “But I just wanted to claim it as a little title for how I felt about being who I am.”

As Fatale revisits moments that shape her understanding of what it means to be a woman across A Modern Girl, she takes her time articulating it, doing the exploratory work to ensure that “womanhood” isn’t confined to one oversimplified experience.

With this in mind, some songs needed more time than others for Fatale to truly understand what they were about. Or, equally, to understand what they would mean to the work. The EP’s centrepiece ”Blood”, in particular, needed years to untangle. Fatale wrote the opening verse and hook at eighteen and shelved it, before coming back to the song in 2021 after a string of experiences with men who'd tried to control or reshape her.

"It was when I was listening to a lot of riot grrrl, and it was just an empty throwaway verse. Then I rediscovered it and was like, oh, that is so applicable to how I feel now," she explains. Consequently, Fatale regards it as the most rewarding song on the EP, and the most difficult — explaining that the furious bridge that pulled everything together came out of her in one sitting, after a draining, angry encounter with a man who treated her with disrespect and deception in the past. "I was so angry that I just jotted these lyrics down. When we recorded it, I was like, I'm just gonna fucking shout it," she says. "It's the most personal to me — a way of saying 'fuck you' to the men who treated me that way.”

The politics running through "Blood" trace back further, to a girlhood shaped early by riot grrrl. It was a time that allowed Fatale to develop a confrontational voice. At a strict Catholic school she and a small group of friends discovered the music together at fourteen and, as she reflects proudly, “followed those songs like they were the Bible.”

"We started standing up for ourselves, walking out of lessons, printing off little posters and putting them up around the school,” Fatale recalls. She made zines at home and sold them around school, ensuring that the riot grrrl messaging had reach one way or another. "I called it Girls Bite Back. It gave me a lot of confidence to be who I wanted to be, because I got bullied for being different, and it gives you that strength to say, fuck you to them, basically.”

Drawing on this philosophy, Fatale describes the energy behind “Blood” as a different kind of exposure to "Is Love Real" — loud, guitar-driven, defiant. "It's not vulnerable the way ‘Is Love Real’ is. It's in that riot grrrl world of vulnerable, difficult feelings, but guarded with guitars and drums and a fuck-you attitude," she says. "It feels empowering when all the girls are shouting the lyrics back at me. Now it's not just me." By contrast, "Let's Get Married" and "An Apple In My Eye" are, in her words, "just fun love songs," while "It Could Be Better" began as a poem at sixteen, later reworked after a boyfriend cheated on her.

That same level of nurtured defiance persists into how Fatale's music is received. "The more that people attack you online for hyperfemininity, the more I dig my heels in the sand. I'm not changing, and this is fine," she explains. This continues to be sharpened as she moves through her day-to-day life, notably within her job at a local charity shop by conversations with her boss at Fatale acknowledges her as "a super strong woman, very feminist”, who poses the right, challenging questions.

"She asked once, ‘Do you think people underestimate you because of the way you put yourself forward?’ And I was like, yeah," Fatale recalls. "The attitude that the more feminine a woman is, the less respected she's going to be — I think it's ridiculous, even when it comes from other women. It's internalised misogyny, and I feel like I experience it myself." Asked what womanhood means to her: "Strength and resilience. There's so much strength in being a woman, inherently — what we experience, and the things our bodies go through. It does not get more hardcore than that.”

Beyond these thoughtful conversations with her boss, the charity shop provides more objective source material for Fatale to distill into her music. "I end up having long conversations with little old ladies, or women who only have a pound to spend, because that's all they've got. They're so inspiring," she says. It's part of why she pushes back against any “mysterious” artist label. "I am a normal girl in Hull. I work in a charity shop. I'm not out of reach, and what I do isn't out of reach," she says, admitting she'd initially tried the opposite. "I wanted to be mysterious. And then I realised I'm not, in real life. I’d be replying to people on TikTok and talking to them like they're my friend." This carries beyond the social world and into her live presence, as Fatale recalls a moment in which a fan cried in her arms after a recent London show — a moment that she notes makes it feel worth it. "She said she'd resonated with something I'd written, and I feel like it’s so powerful to give young girls that kind of space.”

Honouring where she comes from, Hull exists within the threads of the work for Fatale, middling within the tension between loyalty and claustrophobia that runs through the EP. She addresses the city's misjudged reputation, shining a light on a dismissed music scene, and an assumption that nothing serious happens north of Leeds or Manchester. But she's plain about what holds its scene together without real infrastructure. "There are no proper studios, maybe two rehearsal buildings. But there's a real DIY attitude. You make do with what you have, and figure out how to make it work on no budget," she tells me.

Most of Hull's scene, she notes, is post-punk or R&B, leaving her one of relatively few solo female artists doing something different within DIY spaces. Regardless, she has no plans to leave. "It's nice to still have that sense of community. Sometimes when I go to London it's a bit dog-eat-dog. And I’m sure it isn't once you're in it, but as an outsider coming in, you're just like, oh my god.”

Speaking more openly about where she’s from, connecting with audiences near and far, and candidly unravelling her own formative experiences of transitioning from girlhood to womanhood, Fatale’s story of A Modern Girl isn't finished. A deluxe edition follows with two songs that didn't fit anywhere else, but deserve to be heard just as much as the others. "Is Love Real” will finally get a proper release after years as Fatale’s stage safety net, and "Summertime Ain't Easy", originally written for her second EP, found a more fitting space on the deluxe EP rather than falling through the cracks.

"I kind of felt like it hadn't had enough time to shine, basically," she says of the decision to revisit A Modern Woman. “'Is Love Real’ was still there like in the back of my mind,” she says, relieved that song’s inclusion also closes a loop that has been open since she was sixteen. "If we hadn't put ‘Is Love Real’ on the deluxe, then it probably would never have come out because it's an old song and I want to write new material going forward. The passing of an era, I suppose.”

Looking ahead, the next original EP will take Fatale further into the punkier, garage-rock side of her influences, while October will see her take A Modern Girl on the road for her first headline tour. The stage design is already being planned around the EP's world — old working men's clubs, vintage cameras and TVs — although getting it all across the country is another matter. "Trying to transport that around the country in a tiny van with just five of us, this is gonna be interesting," she laughs, though with flittering glimmers of excitement versus true logistical concern. "We'll see what happens!”

For Fatale, though, the direction now seems clearer than it did when she first started. She is still figuring out how all of her influences, experiences and identities fit together, but no longer seems interested in sanding down the parts that don't fit neatly. Instead, she is finding ways for contradictions to coexist: punk and pop, femininity and defiance are just a few different facets of her world that can all sit together.

“I still struggle a lot with asserting myself, but what I've learned over time is that it's valid,” Fatale says, reflecting on what it means to lean into the friction and embody everything that she wants to as an artist. “Everything I want to say is valid. And even if someone disagrees with me, it doesn't mean that I'm wrong.”