With a debut EP that has sparked a landslide of listeners on Spotify and significant radio airtime, Issey Cross is not someone you can ignore, writes Rob Hakimian

“Do you ever get that thing when your ears are really blocked?” Issey Cross (@isseycross) asks in the middle of our Zoom chat. “I had my second vaccine a few weeks ago and ever since my ears have just been really blocked.”

It’s particularly bad timing, as we’re speaking just a few days before the 21-year-old’s first performance in four years, and first-ever live appearance as Issey Cross. “I’ve got to go and get them syringed,” she admits.

Cross seems fairly calm about the whole thing, perhaps since she is a seasoned performer, having played in public since her teens. She received her first guitar for her 13th birthday and quickly started writing her own songs, with the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift as her main inspirations. “Most of them were about fancying people at school,” she laughs. “Teenage girl kind of songs.”

It wasn’t long before she felt confident enough to perform in public and became a regular at open mic nights around Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks. She was driven around by her dad, with her mum and younger sister often joining for support, and performed under the name Issey C.

Interestingly, these performances were usually in pubs like Tunbridge Wells’s famous music bar The Grey Lady. “I was only 15 and they’d ask my dad how old I was before they’d ask me to play,” she remembers. “We’d lie and say I was 18, and I’d just wear loads of make-up so that it made me look older.”

It seemed to work, or perhaps they just liked her music enough to overlook it – either way, she was often asked by the venues how soon she could return.

Buoyed by this success, she was drawn to the bright lights of London and after finishing her GCSEs moved to the capital to attend music college. Loosed from her parental protection, Cross says she “grew up quite quickly” in her new surroundings.

“‘Why have you got a dagger on your arm? Out of anything? What does it mean?’”

— Issey Cross

This is when the first shades of the unignorable person who we now see as Issey Cross started to be revealed. Her parents, who are both hairdressers, had never allowed her to dye her hair before. “When I moved, I was like ‘I’m just doing it’,” she says. But their reaction was more positive than expected. “They actually liked it,” she says. “But my mum was like ‘I don’t know if it suits your skin tone’.”

It wasn’t long before she got her first tattoo – a little dagger – and her parents were less keen on that. “My mum started crying and was like ‘Why have you got a dagger on your arm? Out of anything? What does it mean?’.”

This didn’t perturb Cross, who is unsure how many she has now. “A lot of them are from tattoo artists I’ve been following who have a drawing that I really like.”

She also took control of her artistry while studying at music college. “In the first year I was doing a music performance course, but in the second year I decided to switch over to doing production,” she says. “I wanted to produce my own stuff and that was when I started meeting more people who do music.”

At the age of 18, having completed college, Cross met Adam Midgely, who is now her manager and runs Cult Behaviour, the label that releases her music. It was his suggestion that her voice would work well on more R&B-oriented sounds. “He put me in sessions with different people and different ideas and I really enjoyed it,” she recalls. “It just made me come out of my shell a bit more and say what I wanted to say in a song.”

It proved productive and Cross continued to work with several of the producers she met in these sessions. Ultimately, her work with the likes of Ebenezer (Ashnikko, Rejjie Snow, Stefflon Don), ADP (M.I.A) and P2J (Alicia Keys, Burna Boy) ended up on Mirrors Don’t Lie, her debut EP released in early 2021. Suffice to say, it was a far cry from the kinds of songs she would play on acoustic guitar or piano in her teens.

A provocatively bold first offering, the left-field character combined with mainstream accessibility saw Mirrors Don’t Lie immediately gain support from the likes of Dazed and bag airplay on Radio 1. Moody single Boys Make Promises has had some 350k plays on Spotify alone. And while she was delighted by the response, the ambitious Cross believes it could have been even greater. “A lot of the songs on the EP had swearing and I feel like if they didn’t then maybe they would’ve played it more,” she suggests.

Even though Mirrors Don’t Lie is less than a year old, the songs are much older, with the release having been delayed by the pandemic, and Cross already feels she’s beginning to outgrow them. “It was about my first year of being with my boyfriend and I would write songs out of the tiniest things that would go wrong,” she reflects. “It was a dramatised version of me, an alter-ego kind of thing – a bit extra.”

She’s already released two more singles since then, M40 and Tired Of Everybody, which show clear development both musically and emotionally. They were both written during lockdown and Cross admits they’re both “very personal”, with M40 being about the difficulties of being stuck in one place and Tired Of Everybody about “coming out of lockdown and not really feeling like you want to go out”.

She’s carrying this forward and has got much more in the works, hopefully for release early in the new year. She’s not giving too much away, but she’s producing the new songs herself and says they’re more guitar-based. She believes this new material is “a bit more me… a bit more honest”.

Given her first little taste has already sparked excitement around the country, we can only imagine how far the next step will take her.