The 19-year-old Londoner talks her new EP ‘Ache In My Tooth’, having a song featured in the third season of ‘Heartstopper’, and why she’s in her self-love era “I love love, for real,” says Flowerovlove , earnestly laying down her heartfelt manifesto for NME . “I believe greatly that just because something is going to hurt you, [it] doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put your all into it, and you shouldn’t feel it to its fullest extent.” Hearing the 19-year-old singer’s sugary sweet pop songs for the first time does feel a bit like being struck by Cupid’s arrow.
Flowerovlove (real name Joyce Cisse) knows those feelings of woozy butterflies and dizzying infatuations well. She bottles them up in “crush anthems” like ‘Breaking News’ and ‘a girl like me’, her frolicking pop melodies and kittenish vocals capable of leaving even love’s greatest cynics blushing and kicking their feet. After all, writing about big feelings has always always come naturally to Cisse.
Born in London and raised at home in Essex speaking Mandingo, the language of her parents’ native Ivory Coast, Cisse first started making music aged 13 around the same time her older brother Wilfred taught himself how to produce. The first song they made together was a rap track that she’s already decided will soundtrack her Album Of The Year win at the Grammys one day. “I realised: ‘damn, I really do love writing’,” she recalls.
In her teens she was scouted as a model and featu.