American singer-songwriter Eli is an unapologetic “put on a show kind of girl”, to quote pop icon Britney Spears. Her love of performance is so great that she penned her canny 2025 album ‘Stage Girl’, which NME named one of the best debuts of last year, about the highly meta experience of pursuing pop fame, come hell or high water. And in the year since the record’s release, amid the praise that has followed, it’s become clear that the 25-year-old thoroughly excels at the whole popstar thing.
Eli has garnered widespread acclaim for her theatrical and utterly head-bopping Y2K-coded pop songs, using deeply confessional lyrics to exhume the pain of past relationships (‘Marianne’) or interrogate the dysphoria and performance of gender as a trans woman (‘Somebody I’m Not’). This combination of raw and modern has earned her an ever-growing fanbase, which already includes Troye Sivan, Doechii and Zara Larsson. But this isn’t her first brush with fame, thanks to a brief and fleeting era of internet notoriety as an adolescent Vine star.
Eli on The Cover of NME. Credit: Emma Drew Berson for NME
Hailing from small town Massachusetts, Eli was a typical theatre kid, inspired by big-time vocalists like Mariah Carey and the world of reality competition shows. Her bedroom was the ultimate practice ground for many of these nascent musical dreams, including a spate of precocious singles released in her teens. After a brief stint studying Recorded Music at NYU, Eli would eventually head west, unable to resist the allure of Hollywood. There, she was discovered by Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records imprint, putting in motion a chain of events that would allow her to finally enact her wildest dreams.
There are plenty of positives to everything you’ve worked toward starting to fall into place, but breakout stars today also have to deal with a healthy dose of strife. The Los Angeles-based singer has been writing a lot to try and make sense of the mental and physical rollercoaster she’s found herself riding of late. “Breaking out and achieving a level of fame you wanted or affirmation from people you admire, getting commercials, I really did look at these things as a genuine escape from capitalism and having to work,” Eli tells NME over Zoom one sunny September morning, a sudden look of dismay creeping across her face before she continues.
Credit: Emma Drew Berson for NME
“I thought that to be Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez that I’d suddenly be hella happy, I could come out as trans and be the baddest bitch, give all the fortune back to other people and keep a little bit for a nice house, a wife and a dog,” she muses. “But I’ve just realised that there’s bigger fish to fry, and bigger conversations to have.”
Eli has definitely tried to have those conversations: on her recent Strange Girl tour in North America, she twisted the last leg of shows into a darker and more paranoid ensemble altogether, a commentary on the capitalist ills so inherent in the music industry. In August, she was one of a handful of acts invited to play at Olivia Rodrigo’s inaugural Daisy Chain Fields fundraiser in California, joining the ranks of boundary-pushing feminist artists such as Mitski, Santigold and Stevie Nicks. And it was there that she “realigned with why I wanted to become an artist”, as someone who wants to be a force of revolution and healing in the world.
In the spirit of all things countercultural, Eli opened her standout set with a speech written during the car ride to the festival, calling for harmony, freedom and the eating of the rich as she brushed colourful clip-in extensions from her face in the late summer heat. The audience was rapt, cheering and applauding each point. However, when videos of the speech began circulating online, detractors were quick to take Eli’s calls for revolution as hollow champagne socialism, some citing her dad’s former role as Chief Operating Officer at investment firm Geode Capital as evidence of her hypocrisy.
Credit: Emma Drew Berson for NME
“There’s layers to it,” begins the singer of the wave of death threats and transphobia which followed. While not her first experience with internet trolls (Eli also ruffled feathers with an open letter to Taylor Swift in the same vein as her speech just weeks prior), this round of vitriol would lead her to deactivate her X account entirely. The experience has been a sharp reminder of the price Eli can expect to pay for both her success and outspokenness. “I’m learning now that there are better ways to get my message across than how I thought. Your intention can be really like: ‘Fuck yeah, we’re gonna heal, and we’re all gonna be good,’ and it can not be taken that way.
“It’s a big learning experience for me to accept that I cannot control misunderstandings, and I cannot control anything but my own alignment with myself,” she continues. “It really can put you in a state of disillusionment or hopelessness – but I’m learning to get creative.”
“The purest part of being an artist is being a channel for something else, and that’s what’s really special and magical”
Eli believes the messages at the heart of her work will always shine through, and on ‘Stage Girl (Not A Dream Anymore)’, the deluxe version of her debut record, it’s relayed under the guise of unfiltered self-acceptance. The project, framed as a record made by a winner of an American Idol-esque talent show from a parallel universe who is allowed to sing about masturbating (‘iTouch Da Da’) and lesbian situationships (‘Marianne’), has taken many forms over its two-year rollout: from one-woman theatre shows and a web series to two releases and a soon-to-be world tour.
The singer even admits that she may have lost herself in the sauce somewhere along the way, unsure where this meta-iteration of ‘Stage Girl’ ends and her real life takes over. “Before the album, I didn’t really see the benefit of separating personal and private Eli,” she says. “As I’ve reached more people, I’ve realised that some of my most vulnerable moments can be protected within my craft, within songwriting, and there can be an extension of that – which is a character.”
Credit: Emma Drew Berson for NME
Eli credits finding the work of David Bowie and long-time friend and drag queen Olive Ugly in her teen years as the foundation for her elaborate world-building, in addition to the hours spent honing her ears on a trifecta of pop innovators: Janet Jackson, Britney Spears and SOPHIE. Tinges of their presence can be felt all over the record, from the various artwork created for the album (one features the singer in a jaunty feather boa and sequin fedora) to full-throttle productions that hark back to the golden era of late ’90s pop-R&B.
As a project so indebted to her musical coming of age, Eli’s collage-inspired approach to storytelling feels keenly rooted in the past, but as the singer explains, she never set out to make a nostalgic album. “I was in art school writing papers that were like ‘Fuck nostalgia!’, and feeling very discouraged by the late-stage capitalism world of recreating the past,” she continues. “Then somehow, by the hands of God, I’ve become part of the problem.”
Credit: Emma Drew Berson for NME
The singer doesn’t look at the album as a cosplay of any one thing – not Vanessa Hudgens’ infamous ‘Sneakernight’ video, nor the amateur dramatics of Camp Rock – but an exploration of memories from her childhood that toy with the idea of what becoming a pop star might have meant to “a young freak”. “What I really believe is that none of us have ownership over these ideas, whether we are recreating something or working off a reference,” she says. “The purest part of being an artist is being a channel for something else, and that’s what’s really special and magical to me.”
With so much more to say about her life in the fast lane, it would only be fitting for Eli to bring a different dimension to the ‘Stage Girl’ era with her latest single, ‘The Comeback’. “It’s one of those songs that’s just too good not to exist on a conglomerate’s Spotify pages,” she says with a wink. Eli spins a tale of stolen innocence with whispered vocals and stripped-down guitars, a far cry from much of her prior embrace of maximalist pop. It pares back her rich interior world to process some of the pain lurking underneath – an approach that Eli intends to take forward with her enigmatic stage show, which will take over theatres across Europe for the very first time next year.
“There’s just so much possibility [in the world I’ve built around ‘Stage Girl’], and possibility is cool”
“I want to take it back to its earlier form of the one-woman show, that scrappy girl in her bedroom, going fucking crazy because she wants to be a pop star that’ll save the world, before she knew that maybe it’s more complicated than that,” she says. “The last tour was really fun, but so dark in a way. We’re trying to circle back to love and light energy.” For all we know, this transition phase may even spell the end of the ‘Stage Girl’ era as we know it. “Maybe ‘Stage Girl’ is dead,” she jokes, “maybe she’ll never be.”
Either way, Eli doesn’t seem to be writing herself into the wings just yet, tossing around ideas for a movie, a stint on Broadway or, at the very least, a highly artistic one-night-only concert film. “That’s the cool thing about the world [I’ve built],” she says. “I’m seeing more how there’s just so much possibility, and possibility is cool.”
Eli’s ‘Stage Girl (Not A Dream Anymore)’ is out now via Zelig/RCA Records. She will bring her ‘Stage Girl’ tour to the UK and Europe in 2027.
Listen to Eli’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Bailey Slater
Photography: Emma Drew Berson
Hair: Clayton Hawkins
Glam: Vittorio Masecchia
Styling: Eli
Label: Zelig/RCA Records
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