Cathy Jain contemplates real versus fake lives on slow-burning jam "artificial"

Ask any artist what they aspire to be, and they’ll likely tell you it’s authentic. More than just a buzzword to 17-year-old Cathy Jain though, it’s a word to live by; as she, much like the rest of Gen Z, fight the endless onslaught of Facetune, Love Island, and cancel culture via an adolescence lived online.

Quickly defining herself a fresh, defining pop voice, Jain doubles down on zeitgeist whilst encompassing retro bedroom production aesthetics. As a writer, straight out of her bedroom-turned-studio, she uses points of nostalgia in her storytelling that is embedded within the discovery and exploration of identity.

On “artificial” her words rise above brooding guitars, hazy lulling vocals and a sweeping production, with a chorus as quotable as ever. Middling between teenagerhood and adulthood, she meditates on blurred lines as she sings “I press the alarm / It’s the same every day / Looking in the mirror / But it’s the same anyway / I don’t think that things will change.”

""artificial" is about those times when you feel like life lacks authenticity and you're not really sure how much of the ‘real you’ people see,” Jain tells Best Fit.

“I imagine someone sitting in a cafe lost in their own thoughts and there's a bit of almost jazzy background piano to help create an image of that moment. The music has this hazy, dream-like feeling and the lyrics have a kind of opaque meaning that I think reflects the theme of what is real and what's fake, and how we tell the difference between the two."

“In a word, my "artificial EP" is about authenticity,” she continues. “Together, the four tracks take a look at how we define what is really "real" when we spend so much of our time either in our own heads or in a virtual world online.”

“With each song on the EP, I've tried to create a snapshot of a few moments in someone's life where they are thinking about this. I think that people (especially those my age) stress a lot about their image and how their life and feelings match up to what other people expect of them, but these songs have a more light-hearted, observational, and kind of reassuring style."