Dot

Ware, Hertfordshire · based in San Diego · b. 2004 · FARA Records

Dot (Dorothea Pryor, b. 3 March 2004, Ware, Hertfordshire) is a dry, watchful kid from a small, unremarkable commuter town — the kind of place that teaches you to find the comedy in the mundane and deliver it with a straight face. Bookish and deadpan, she narrated her own life like a wry voiceover. In her late teens she moved to San Diego, swapping grey English drizzle for relentless California sun; she says the funniest place to be English is in the sun.

She found music talk-singing over minimal beats in her bedroom — discovering she could take trivial domestic disasters (a lost phone, a bad day, an argument with the dog) and deliver them in a deep, deadpan, philosophical register. Her sound sits in the spoken-word art-pop lineage of Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg and Self Esteem, with the dry wit of British post-punk and a literary, conversational songwriting tradition underneath.

On stage she's composed, dry and very funny without ever cracking a smile — deadpan voiceovers between songs, a slow-burning wit, magnetic in her stillness. She underplays everything and lets the audience do the laughing. “Dot” is short for Dorothea; she chose it because a dot is also a full stop — the flat little period at the end of a sentence, which is roughly how she delivers everything. She refuses to use a hook in the traditional sense and treats every spoken-word passage like a load-bearing wall. Dry, deadpan, deceptively warm.