supermodel* is on the rise

“Talking Heads were all art school kids, nobody would care about what they were doing. They would play shows, and they would wear just whatever clothes they're wearing that day, they were like: ‘we need to get people to care so we can make money, but we don't know how to do that, so maybe we'll just, like, do nothing’. Slowly over time they started to introduce stuff. I thought that was really interesting, and because of how quickly everything happened with the music, it started picking up and people in the industry started paying attention a bunch. I was really nervous about taking really big swings out of the gate and putting myself in a box immediately. I instead tried to do, I guess, less.”

For the 24-year-old Beanie, this methodology quickly became a big inspiration, and a rite of passage for the blossoming musician better known as supermodel*. As meticulous as you might think, down to the minute detail, he promises that so much of his iconographic persona, “initially, was so instinct based”. His moniker was plucked from the ether, “I have this weird obsession with asterisks for some reason," he explains. His single covers are plain coloured, artless. His accidental outfit of choice: black Adidas track jacket, blue jeans, striped sneakers; stuck to the skin for promo shoots, live performances, and Mid90s-inspired music videos shot on film.

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“I wore the jacket in a meeting one time, and the person that I was in the meeting with kept comparing me to Jamiroquai,” he says from his LA apartment, with little to no furnishings. Stripped bare, almost, as if a replica of his minimalist brand identity and artistic world building. "I was like, ‘oh, this clearly had an effect, so maybe I'll just do this’. Now as we're getting to the end of this cycle, of the EP, I'm like, ‘cool, I think I'm gonna stop wearing this track jacket all the time’. I think if I don't stop soon, then I'll have to wear it forever.”

Scratching the surface of distinction, the ethos of Beanie's solo project happens to be one of total disregard, a rejection of pretence: “I find it really easy to get sucked into this, like, Pinterest hole of ‘let’s find all the references’, let’s make all these mood boards’, labels love that shit. I've been so obsessed with music and film and pop culture my whole life, if I don't have good taste, I should probably go do something else, go work at an office. I'm just gonna stop trying to over intellectualise, ‘why am I making this thing?’ or ‘why is this cool?’ I'm just gonna, like, make shit.”

The rules of supermodel* are as follows:

1. don't try and be “cool
2. steal everything
3. all lowercase always
4. don’t overthink shit
5. always talk about “fight club”

Essentially, it’s all about trust of taste and opinion for Beanie, with himself and the people around him. For his photoshoot for this interview, he “didn’t have any references. I just told Ashlan [Grey], my photographer and videographer, I was like ‘hey, just come to my apartment, we’ll shoot some stuff and we’ll figure it out.’”

Beanie likes to drip feed his audience, for now, it’s an aesthetic choice that complements his self-titled EP debut. “I'll try and not overly commit to anything super hard so that way, at some point, I will want to commit to something, and I'll feel more confident about it”.

So far, it’s worked a treat with gig-goers – both at LA’s Gold-Diggers, his first live show, and London’s Sebright Arms, where I managed to catch him in action. The supermodel* ep may only be six tracks in length, but the playful pop star rising has already mastered the command of the tiniest of stages, before capping off with a confident dance break to his first, unforgettable release “i used to live in england”.

You’d think he’d stick out like a sore thumb, given his Americana roots, but with face tats and a #2 guard buzzcut, Beanie's appearance would not go amiss amid the experimental art noise of band aplenty in Northern England. Leaving behind the East Coast punk bands of his teen years, Beanie made the leap to Liverpool at 18. It’s where he studied, and where he immersed himself in the UK’s indie and dance culture, through his short-lived band POLICE CAR COLLECTIVE.

“After my band broke up, I felt like, ‘okay, I've sort of outgrown [Liverpool]’," he tells me. “I love Liverpool, but if I'm going to really do this music shit now on my own, I need to try and kind of test it, I guess, and go to the place’. Obviously growing up in Virginia, LA is the place, you romanticise it and everything.”

Moving to LA was tough for Beanie, who, admittedly, spent a year “super fucking broke”. “I was sitting in my apartment alone on New Year's Eve, and I was just like, ‘this fucking sucks. I played Reading Festival two years ago. I know that I have the capability to do this at the level that I have done before, and hopefully at a higher level’. On January 1st, my New Year's resolution, I was, like, ‘I'm gonna start a new thing, I'm gonna try’.

His apartment turned out to be an ideal environment for creating, as was the house of producer friend Zakary Heimlich, who helped him come up with the idea for his solo project: “Last year, I got fired from my job, I was unemployed for like, four months, and I used to just go to his house, and we would make music until 4am.” On how he would best describe the sound of supermodel*? “I don't know, good, I hope.”

Beanie's music strikes playful experimentation, the track “your house” is emotional ferocity as emo-tinged nostalgia. Through a love of hip-hop, “no future” packs a 90s punch. Frankie's scratch vocals speak of political anxiety, to an extent: “Obviously we had kind of a weird vibe in America with the whole ‘us letting Trump run the country again’,“ he explains. “When I wrote that song , I was working at Barnes & Noble making minimum wage, barely being able to pay rent. I think it was just the combination of all of that anxiety about my personal life, but then also anxiety about the world and what's happening that went into that song. Then we made a video where we made the floor move.”

“i used to live in england” embraces a flow state reminiscent of freestyle rap: “Beastie Boys are my favourite band of all time,” Beanie says. Layered with wry, relatable lyrics nodding to UK culture (Spoons, Skepta) it’s the most honest song he’s ever written: “Everything in it is real, I mean, the sentiment of all of it. I made the beat at, like, two o'clock in the morning, and then woke up the next morning, and I had the idea of writing a song about being in England and all these really specific things that I know a ton about. None of my friends here have any idea what a Tesco meal deal is, and I just thought that was really funny. Literally, for, like, an hour, I was just freestyling, verse by verse.”

Made as industry bait, simply to get people to pay attention to him, Beanie's first ever single as supermodel* spoke his cries into existence. “I sent it to my friend, I was like, ‘this is either dumb as fuck or really good’, and he was like, ‘I think both’. It worked.” Reference-rich, the 16mm music video sees Frankie in a Fatboy Slim “Weapon of Choice” homage. “You either watch that video and you go like, ‘oh, I like this guy’, or you're like, ‘fuck this, I don't want any part of this’,“ he says. “Trying to keep that sentiment as much as I can, the more that stuff starts to come up, that's what I'm focused on. I have a screenshot of a text from my dad, he was like, 'I don't get this', which now I think is really funny, based off of how my life has been going. Now he acts like he always liked it, he's like ‘I think it's great’, and I'm like, ‘I have evidence.’"

When creating supermodel*, if not in the company of Zakary, Beanie would confine himself to a room, left to his own devices, of his own accord. “A lot of that was out of necessity, I make all the artwork myself, I edit all the videos. It was less about me wanting to be the sole person making it, and more I just didn't know anyone was making cool shit.”

With a new mixtape called cupid! on the horizon, Beanie is excited to put as much music as he can next year – on his terms and his terms only. “As soon as people start to come in and the industry starts to look at you, and they go ‘well, what is this?’ and 'what lane does this sit in?’, I've been down that road before, and I didn't love where I ended up. This time around, I was like, ‘cool, I'm actually just gonna not make any decision about what this is yet, and then it'll naturally become a thing over time, which I feel like is happening, and I think will continue to happen.”