It's not often the term 'overnight success' means exactly that, but for Wisp, it very much does. Wisp – also known as Natalie Lu – recorded her first song 'Your face' in April 2023, a fuzzy shoegaze track with an opening riff as easily recognisable as anything from 'Loveless', plus the heaviness of early Deftones and featherlight vocals, barely audible through the walls of distorted guitars. It played right into the hands of the TikTok algorithm and its users' current obsession with the 90s genre and became an instant hit after she posted it on the platform.

"It's been a lot to process, but everything has been so fun," says Natalie. "These are all new experiences to me. I went on my first headline tour in North America this April to May, and that was one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life. It was awesome being on the road and getting to interact with my fans and meet them in person in every single city."

She's calling from Los Angeles, where she moved to in January from San Fransisco, and at the time of our chat, is preparing to take on North America again, this time supporting shoegaze heroes Slowdive on tour, just in case you need any insight into how fast things have been moving.

While shoegaze has been making its way onto For You pages across the internet, Natalie's interest in the genre far predates TikTok. Initially forging an interest in it in her early teen years via the heavier, Americanised, almost emo version of the genre that sprung up in the 2010s, her favourite band, Whirr, takes the place of her own artist name in her Instagram handle, but it isn't where her journey with the genre started.

"I got into shoegaze from this band called Ovlov. I was about 13 or 14 years old, I think, when I discovered them, and I hadn't known what shoegaze was at the time, but I was just listening to a bunch of it, so it was something I grew up on, and then kind of got more into when I was around 18 years old. During the time I made 'Your face', I was listening to a lot of Whirr, and so their music, and specifically 'Feels Like You', my favourite album from them, played a big part in deciding to make shoegaze.

The Wisp brand of shoegaze has completely reinvigorated the genre for Gen Z. On her debut EP 'Pandora', Natalie mostly took the bedroom pop approach of singing over instrumentals found on Beatstars ('Your face', 'See you soon' and 'Enough for you' are all credited to the producer grayskies), while the lyrics she's added pull from the melodrama of mid-2000s emo, and the vocal delivery feels more akin to the sweetness of Grimes or Pinkpantheress than the drawl of dream pop pioneers like Cocteau Twins.

On various occasions, she's been pegged as 'Deftones daughter', a connection clearly made out of sonic similarities, but could easily allude to both Natalie and Chino Moreno's refusal to be pigeonholed.

"I would say I definitely listen to other genres more than I listen to shoegaze, and that's just because I feel like if I listen to too much shoegaze, I won't have that experimental mindset that I want to go into the studio with. My plan for the album and all the music that I'm writing in the future is to be more unique and incorporate new elements into modern shoegaze because I feel like it's so different from what people were writing in the 90s. So because of that, I really like listening to electronic music, jazz music, I'm also really into hardcore as well, and I'll take all of my favourite parts of those genres and put it into my own sound.

Working on other 'Pandora' tracks, the titular one and 'Mimi', was Max Epstein, a producer whose recent collaborators are as varied as Wisp's reference book, and include Militarie Gun, julie and daine. He's working on Wisp's upcoming debut album, alongside ex-hyperpopper Aldn, but there's little else to say about it yet.

"It's still in the very early stages of writing and making it just sound cohesive and as perfect as I can make it. It's something I definitely want to take a lot of time on, just because I want to be happy with it. You only get a first album once, so I don't want to mess it up."

Still only 20, Natalie dropped out of her computer science degree at San Francisco State University in her second year as the opportunity to pursue music full-time arose. As soon as 'Your face' blew up, she hit the ground running and within a year was touring globally.

The immediacy with which she's had to go out and perform has meant a lot of the set has developed on the road. She's never formally learned guitar (although that hardly matters in shoegaze) and has only recently started playing with pedals, so adds extra layers of distortion through electronic backing tracks; not to be frowned upon, it's a progression over a puritanical shoegaze approach. "There's so many elements that you can incorporate into your live set that can make it sound so much fuller than just playing out of amps, which is a really fun thing to experiment with," she says.

All of that to say, a lack of pedals means she spends less time on stage actually gazing at her shoes, and instead, it allows her to build a connection with her audience. Plus, it sounds like stepping into the spotlight came naturally.

"I grew up doing professional ballet, so I was really used to doing recitals and competitions. So I would say that I am a person that doesn't necessarily get stage fright, just because I grew up being on stage and performing in front of a big amount of people, but there are times where, you know, I still get anxiety, and I still get a bit frightened to perform, and I think that's totally normal. A lot of the artists that I know have also said that throughout their decades of performing, they still get nervous. I think it's a very vulnerable and real thing to feel as an artist."

Her first-ever UK show came this summer, landing in a teatime slot on a Mitski-headlined Sunday at All Points East. Much like that of the rest of that day's billing – which included acts like Ethel Cain and Beabadoobee – Wisp's fanbase already seems devoted; it's not hard to imagine them waiting obscene hours front row at a barricade for her gigs in the near future.

"I was really nervous that day too, just because the crowd from the stage seemed so, so big, so I kind of psyched myself out. I was backstage watching Sir Chloe because she performed before me, and I saw that their set was just gigantic. It was like the whole tent was filled. I don't know, seeing that really scared me, in a way, but I still had a lot of fun."

Wisp's been pegged as the face of 'zoomergaze' at remarkable speed, but it's clear why she's the revival's front-runner. Combining elements of internet-popular genres of the past in a way only Gen Z can, she's pushing shoegaze into new territories while maintaining the experimental core that made it so captivating decades ago.

"It's cool. I like that people coined a new term for it because, yeah, it is different from shoegaze, so it totally makes sense, but I'm glad I get to represent the scene in some kind of way, this resurgence of shoegaze. It's very endearing to me, and I'm very grateful that people see me in that way."