Tracez

York, UK / New York City · FARA Records

Tracez (Tracy Potter, 24) is a genuine dual national split between York, in the north of England, and New York City — a York-born mother, an American father, and a childhood spent shuttled across the Atlantic often enough that neither city ever fully won. She grew up with two accents that show up depending on which room she's in and which parent she's talking to, and spent years being told the same joke on both sides of the ocean: “Tracy from York,” “New York” — the same four syllables, said about two completely different places. She stopped fighting the collision and eventually just claimed it as the name. She found her way in as a hook singer and hype voice — the caller in call-and-response, the one who tells a room what to do rather than the one who sings about how she feels — and noticed early that a well-built electro-house command works exactly the same whichever of her two accents delivers it.

Big, direct and instructional — she doesn't confess, she commands, and the whole architecture of her writing is built around phrases a floor can shout straight back with no rehearsal. Second-person, present tense, physical: “don't you walk away,” “stay awhile.” No melisma, no vulnerability performed for its own sake — the emotional content lives entirely in the urgency of the command, not in any admission underneath it. Her influences run the hype-vocalist and hook-singer tradition in electro house and dance-pop, where the voice's job is to organise a room rather than to narrate a feeling, plus a genuine transatlantic ear — she writes toward whichever phrasing will translate cleanest in both her cities at once.

Enormous energy, completely genuine — she runs a room by talking straight at it and switches between her York and New York registers mid-sentence without noticing she's doing it, which people who've known her a long time still find funny. She got tired of “Tracy from York” and “New York” being the same joke on two continents and eventually just built a name out of the collision instead of correcting it one more time. She's never lived anywhere long enough to have just one home, and has made peace with dance music being the one language that doesn't need an accent either way. Big, warm, relentlessly direct.