Class Of 2025 Class Of 2025: Luvcat

Simultaneously whimsical and visceral, Luvcat frames danger and desire as two sides of the same red-blooded coin. However in practice, this translates to an affinity for a type of man she calls (only half-jokingly) “tall, dark and loathsome”. “I just love a hellraiser,” she shrugs, grinning. “I wanna feel on the edge of my seat. I gravitate towards hyper-creative [people], minds that are constantly turning. I wanna be questioned and I want someone to pull things out of me rather than just coast along.”

As conversation turns to her mum – “a total glamour puss” who is “just really brave and bold” – and her “cool as fuck” dad, whose record collection shaped her music taste, it’s clear that lukewarm affections and beige niceties have never really been part of Luvcat’s emotional vocabulary. “Obviously it’s so nice to have [someone] sweet,” she continues, “I’m not saying I just want someone to turn my life upside down. But right now, when I’m young, I’m not seeking anything other than crazy passion. My parents are madly in love, and have been for about 35 years; my grandparents were madly in love for 64 years. So I’ve had incredible, mad love around me as a kid. Maybe I’m just a bit loopy, but I really think it’s there if you just look for it – that kind of magic in the everyday.”

Luvcat might be looking for magic, but when it comes to her career, there’s been a hefty dose of making her own luck, too. Having written “quite serious, folky” music as a teenager, she cut her teeth busking before being picked up to support The Waterboys on their 2017 tour when one of the band’s members heard her covering ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ in the street. A stint in Manchester and various musical pursuits followed, until she officially assembled the Luvcat band late last year and began peddling her wares around London’s grassroots gig circuit.

“It definitely makes you stronger,” she says now of those years spent orbiting the industry. “It’s not my first rodeo, essentially. Obviously, I believe I’m very privileged and blessed to be where I am right now, but I feel like I’ve grafted and worked my arse off. I never stopped kicking the door down, basically, and I just carried on evolving when it didn’t work.”

Far from the 10-second hook purveyors of your typical viral hit, Luvcat instead taps into a contemporary yearning for mystique and escapism via older, vaudeville aesthetics and Lana-esque Hollywood glamour. So cohesive is the vision, there’s almost a sense that she intentionally waited until every element was just-so before raising the curtain on ‘Matador’. “That’s totally not true at all,” she says, shaking her head with a smile. “It was all [a series of] accidental little things. Everyone now associates leopard print with Luvcat, and the video that went viral of me wearing leopard print [performing a pre-release ‘Matador’ live back in April] was the first time I’d ever worn it in my life! It was just because my mum was like, ‘Oh, here’s a nice dress’. She shrugs: “There was never any plan, but I’ve just kind of ran with it. The aesthetic of the videos and stuff is just who I am – that’s just what I’ve always been into.”

Keeping The Cure – specifically, the ‘Lullaby’ video – as her artistic North Star (they did inspire the project’s moniker, after all), Luvcat always knew that her visual world would be an essential piece of the puzzle. Faced with delivering music videos “on the cheap” without ever compromising on vision, she and her “best mate of 10 years” have devised the creative direction for every single so far themselves. “There were literally three people who made the last two videos; there was no big team,” she confirms. “And I’m proud of that – nothing got diluted that way. Retaining my independence and keeping it feeling DIY and real is important ‘cause it makes me feel a bit nauseous, the thought of having a big operation right now.” She pauses, clearly reluctant to get too carried away. “Maybe one day, we could have that Hollywood [production]. But right now, we’re playing in pubs!”

Much as she’s enjoying the madness, she does admit that the sudden surge of attention has been, at times, “overwhelming”. “As in,” she clarifies, “it’s hard to process – I’ve been making music and busking on the street for a long time, so [going from] being pretty much unnoticed, to suddenly having music connect and people knowing every lyric on a tour where we’re just opening the bill… I don’t really know how I’m supposed to comprehend that.”

Looking at other artists whose walk has taken a similarly sharp incline, it now seems par for the course that, at some point, particular corners of the internet will take issue with her success, positing origin story conspiracy theories or claiming that actually, it’s all been an inside job. “I mean, I’m very sensitive, so god help me if they all turn on me…” she replies. “I’m just gonna keep my head down, keep making tunes, keep playing shows. If you just keep writing cool songs and making art; if you care about all aspects of your art, and just keep making the shows bigger and bolder… I think I’ll be fine.”

Because ultimately, in the face of online noise – be it good or bad – it’s still the in-person moments of connection that truly matter to Luvcat. “The shows are what make it real,” she nods. “We were having a drink in this random fucking bar on tour somewhere – in a town we’d stopped over in, not even a town we were playing – and a girl came over and asked, ‘Are you Luvcat?’. I just thought, ‘Wow, the power of posting little shitty videos of you in the pub singing – that’s incredible’.

“Every time I’m about to play a show,” she continues, “I think, ‘Why have I chosen this life?’, because I have terrible stage fright and feel so ill. But as soon as I’m onstage it goes away, and it’s just pure euphoria. There’s nothing quite like when the sound’s good and you’re all sinking into the tune and there’s some sort of strange magic on stage. It comes along once in a blue moon, and that’s what keeps you going.”

Like an addict who can’t quite shake the habit – or, indeed, two lovers drawn repeatedly back together – Luvcat’s relationship with performing is just as seductively potent as the characters she portrays in the songs themselves. “It feels intoxicating; it’s totally consuming,” she sighs. She can’t help herself – and neither, it seems, can anyone else.

Tags: Features, Interviews, Class of 2025, Class of…, December 2024 / January 2025, From The Magazine, Luvcat