ELLIS

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire · b. 2001 · FARA Records

ELLIS (Ellis Hartnell, b. 15 November 2001, Cambridge) is from the parts of the city that don't appear on a postcard — one of two entirely separate populations living on the same streets, and not the one passing through for three years. Growing up surrounded by the most confident people in England without feeling like one of them is audible in every line he sings, and it's exactly why he's right for a verse about standing still while something burns. He found his way in through piano from six, because his mother made him and he never stopped, then production at fifteen because it was the only way to get the things in his head out of them. He didn't sing on anything until he was twenty-one, and only then because nobody else was available.

Close, plain and unforced, with a slight catch in it that he cannot get rid of and has stopped trying to. He does not belt and would not be good at it. What he can do is deliver a difficult line without decorating it, which is exactly what a sparse verse over a piano needs — the vulnerability in the writing lands because nothing in the performance is competing with it. He also plays the piano parts himself, which on a record that opens with sixteen bars of solo piano is not a footnote. His influences run the song-led end of progressive house, where a record is a piece of writing before it's a drop; film score, for the way a piano can carry an entire opening; and, from a long way outside dance music, the plainspoken singer-songwriter tradition his mother played in the car.

Genuinely reluctant, which reads as humility and is mostly nerves he's learned to work with — he's far more comfortable behind a piano than in front of a microphone, and the live show is built around that. He defers to ORLA constantly in interviews and she's stopped letting him. He still describes himself as a producer who sings rather than as a singer, and corrects people who put it the other way round. He plays the sixteen bars of solo piano that open the record — it's the part of it he'll actually talk about. Careful, quiet, unconvinced.