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Nat Puff makes music like a flower gives off scent: as the natural, seemingly endless byproduct of her personal growth, her artistic unfurling, her creative beauty. She started writing original songs in grade school, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. In 2018 alone, the 24-year old singer-songwriter behind Seattle-based Left at London released two albums, The Purple Heart and Transgender Street Legend Vol. 1, both of which showcase her one-of-a-kind voice as it ricochets effortlessly from full-throated R&B ecstasy to plastic-elastic 90’s punk-pop, to a sound that’s all her own, like honey dripping down the walls of an electronic beat. “I feel like a very scattered artist, she confesses, “but in like a good way.”
Puff’s latest release, Transgender Street Legend Vol. 2, has been on her mind for a while. “I wanted it to be a series,” she says, “and then the success of the first cd really encouraged me to start working on the second one.” With this album, Puff largely shrugs off the tongue-in-cheek lyrical style of her previous work. Despite the fact that some of her earliest moments of widespread recognition came as the result of her viral parody videos, she clarifies that “comedy hasn’t really influenced this project in any real sense,” mostly because at this moment in history, as she says quoting Twitter, “Ain’t shit funny.”
Rather than make light of the world around her, Puff smolders from within on this album, accessing deep political outrage and personal pain as fuel for her various musical fires. The opening song, “Do You See Us?” functions as a diss track aimed at the mayor of Seattle, Puff’s hometown. “I fucking despise her,” Puff says in no uncertain terms. “She gassed her own citizens on Pride.”
Puff isn’t shy about speaking her truth, and her latest album is marked by an unapologetically confessional understanding of self, as she sings candidly and with confidence about bad breakups, lingering trauma, and mental health. In the closing number, “My Friends Are Kinda Strange,” she proposes and then celebrates a long-awaited coming-together of her inner and outer lives. “I have OSDD, so I have some people up in this brain that I didn’t know a couple years ago,” she jokes. “I thought it was cute to refer to them as my friends, and the more I wrote the chorus, the more I was like, this also applies to my IRL trans friends, because people sort of see us as strange and…they’re both important parts of my life.” Transgender Street Legend Vol. 2 brings together a number of other friends and collaborators who helped shape the album’s final sound, including Seattle hip-hop artist Nobi, and electronic music producers Chuck Sutton and Dylan Brady.
In composing her new album, Puff reached backwards in time through her own archives, poaching beats, repurposing loops, taking verses from one unreleased song and placing them within the context of another. “‘T-shirt’ is a really interesting track,” she explains, “because the latter half of the chorus I actually came up with in high school.” She rattles off a number of other artists and songs that influenced the sound she was after (“Blue Ocean Floor” by Justin Timberlake, “Strawberry Swing” by Coldplay, “Biking” by Frank Ocean), and then explains that “…those songs are on a playlist on my phone called Auriem, which is a made-up word to describe this dreamlike feeling that I used to get…where there’s this intense feeling of beauty, like beautiful melancholy, and I really wanted ‘T-shirt’ to capture that feeling.”
To say that Left at London’s music captures intense feelings of melancholic beauty is the understatement of the century. But her artistic genius isn’t purely introspective or downbeat. It’s joyous, angry, proud, defiant, unwavering, and endlessly danceable. Unstoppable force of creative energy that she is, Puff is weathering the pandemic playing concerts via live stream. In her new track “Safety First,” Puff repeats the phrase, “I don’t have energy anymore,” but if her prolific output is any indication, she’s got the strength to keep making music for a long time to come.
“[A] magical talent.” – Dazed Digital
“Left at London has perfected the art of going viral.” – Vice
“A fixture of internet culture.” – Forbes
“Personal…[Puff] croons over a funky guitar riff that the world is getting better.” – Billboard
“Upbeat political pop.” – KEXP
