She’s back! The United Kingdom’s sensual temptress, rapper, singer, and director best known for her feisty streak and self-confidence is pining for love. Building on the cult success of her first two EPs Cruel Practice (2018) and Alias (2020), Shygirl is taking her club anthem queendom into a new, intimate playing field, while staying true to her boisterous personality and her sexual freedom. Today, she releases the lead single Firefly, the first glimpse into her first full-length album Nymph, due to be released September 30 by Because Music, showcasing how she can both be romantic and hot-headed, and how she believes her mammoth presence leaves her “ sought after and overlooked at the same time,” as a girl who’s assumed wrongly to be more trouble than she’s worth, both a superstar and an outcast.
Born in the experimental and free environment of a house in Brighton, Nymph took its shape with the input of Shygirl’s close friends and previous collaborators Karma Kid, Mura Masa, Sega Bodega and Cosha, and was pushed to its polishing point in Los Angeles with producers Noah Goldstein, Danny L Harle, BloodPop, Vegyn and Kingdom, who refined the ore of her work into a sparkling gem. Tackling introspection, self-love, the melancholy side of love, and her own image, Shygirl has composed an album of declared love letters, shifting from ethereal noise into more assertive dominant sounds, balancing perfectly between 90s pop and R&B.

The Firefly music video, released today, suspends her in the anticipation of love from a one-sided crush as she pines for them. Openly calling herself a fool, the video flickers between hyper detailed shots of water dripping from a flower, glass beads in her hair which seem to resemble these beads of water, her eyes welling up, the hairs on an arm standing to attention, and a mirror smashing – perhaps the illusion of a relationship coming to an end. Surrounded by small balls of light in an upbeat, hopeful chorus and a beat-driven verse as she searches for a sign that her love is returned, we wonder if she too is a firefly, or if she is just looking for that light in the darkness.