CLEO

Chatham, South Side Chicago · b. 1997 · FARA Records

CLEO (Cleo Harding, b. 23 September 1997, Chatham, South Side Chicago) grew up on the same six blocks as three generations of her family — a grandmother who could name every house on the street and who it used to belong to. Chicago is where house music was invented and everybody there knows it, which produces a very particular kind of local pride: not loud, just completely settled. She grew up on her mother's step records, her father's gospel, and the specific fact that the dance music the rest of the world imported was made about four miles from her kitchen. She found her way in through choir, then a decade of singing on other people's records around Chicago — house, gospel sessions, an R&B project that never came out, two years of backing vocals on a touring band. She's twenty-eight and has more road behind her than most people on a debut, which is the entire reason she sounds the way she does on this song.

A full, warm, gospel-trained voice used with real restraint. She can go up and does not, most of the time — her instinct is to hold a line steady and let the production rise underneath her, which is why she works so well on a record whose whole architecture is a lift. When she does open up in the final chorus it lands because she's spent three minutes not doing it. Almost no melisma. Perfect intonation that she's slightly bored of being complimented on. Her influences run the Chicago house vocal tradition first and foremost — the big-voiced records made in her own city that the rest of the world spent forty years reinterpreting — plus the church side of her upbringing and a real fondness for British vocal dance music, which she says gets the emotion right and the groove slightly wrong.

Completely at ease and entirely unimpressed by the machinery — she's been in enough rooms to know which ones matter, she's generous with younger artists, and she doesn't perform enthusiasm she doesn't have. On stage she barely moves and the room comes to her. A decade of session and backing work came before her name went on anything, which she counts as training rather than the wait. She holds the pre-chorus back on purpose and only opens up in the last thirty seconds; producers have asked her to go earlier and she's said no every time. She can name about half the houses on her grandmother's old street, correctly. Grounded, funny, unhurried.