ugly ozo is tired of pretending everything’s fine

---

---

When Jessica Baker launched ugly ozo in 2019, the plan was to *not* sing. In fact, the idea of opening her mouth and letting any noise out, on purpose, was terrifying. So she started where many musicians begin: alone in a bedroom, layering reverb like a sonic security blanket. “I had a real fear of singing,” she tells us. “I initially just wanted to make faceless instrumental music for fun.” Fast forward to now, and you’ll find her mouthing off on stage and spilling her guts across a fast-rising catalogue of searing, self-reflective indie bangers.

A lot’s happened in a short space of time. It wasn’t until early last year that she started to take ugly ozo seriously. A chance meeting with producer Macks Faulkron, now close collaborator and head of new label REX RECS, pushed things into sixth gear. “Since then, I’ve just been in 6th gear and I’ve got my eyes set on the prize,” she says. The pair quickly began carving out the tracks that would form her debut EP, ‘stargirl’, set for release this autumn via REX RECS.

“I initially just wanted to make faceless instrumental music for fun”

‘stargirl’ is, by Baker’s own admission, a bit of an overshare. “Each song is like a different day of the week, and I think ‘sink or swim’ feels like Wednesday,” she laughs. “You’re a bit beaten down and knackered, trying to stay afloat until the weekend.” If that sounds a bit bleak, well, it is. “The entry requirement to being one of my songs is just to be at least mildly depressing,” she says. “The glass is definitely half empty!”

New single ‘sink or swim’ is the third track lifted from the EP, and it’s a high-speed, breathless plunge into the deep end of insecurity. Completed in a day with Faulkron at REX Studio, it thrums with tightly-coiled emotion, chasing the tail of jealousy, imposter syndrome and a burning desire to be good enough. “It came about very abruptly and easily. I think it’s because it comes from a very vulnerable place,” Baker explains. “I put my everything into the things I love, and it’s often really tough to feel like I’ve fallen short of my expectations, especially when I’ve based those expectations off other people’s successes.”

That sort of emotional transparency runs right through ugly ozo’s growing discography. Earlier single ‘onto a winner’ took a scalpel to social media-fuelled perfectionism, laying bare the warped ideals women are sold online. “It’s about being in a constant pursuit of perfection… The glamorisation of 90s thinness and TikTok proclaimed ‘heroin chic’… it was really starting to play into how I felt about myself,” she revealed.

Then there’s ‘madonna’, a grungey, raw-edged love letter to her younger sister. “It’s written from the perspective of an older sister looking out for her younger sibling,” she says. “It’s both deeply personal and widely resonant; a bittersweet feeling of watching someone you love grow into themselves, with an overbearing sense of aching protectiveness.”

“It was fun growing up and making silly songs with my friends”

Family, it seems, is a throughline for Baker, both creatively and personally. Her sister, Boo, plays bass in the band. The pair are inseparable, even if they’re no longer living under the same roof. “We live apart now, but we probably spend about 3 hours a day on FaceTime,” she says. When she’s not writing songs, she’s probably cooking (badly). “I’m quite creative with how many ways I can serve tofu. Someone recently told me the food I made them was the most flavourless thing they’d ever eaten, though, so I could be wrong.”

Growing up on the Isle of Wight, there wasn’t loads else to do but be creative. “There was always a big music scene on the island,” she recalls. “It was fun growing up and making silly songs with my friends, and being able to play them to other friends.” And yes, she’s a “biiiig Wet Leg fan”, obviously.

Despite the increasingly frantic pace of her music career, with tour supports, studio sessions and ferry crossings aplenty, she still makes time to process the emotional weight that fuels her writing. A recent visit to her childhood home just before it was sold stirred up something new. “It definitely made me feel really retrospective and got me thinking about the different chapters of our lives, and how different things can become in a short space of time,” she says. “It was really depressing to be honest, but it did get me thinking differently, and I guess it did inspire me.”

What’s next? “I want to sell out Alexandra Palace and get a DM from Kim Deal saying she loves my music,” she grins. Modest ambitions, then. But given how far ugly ozo has come since those reverb-soaked bedroom recordings, nothing feels off the table.

ugly ozo’s debut EP ‘stargirl’ is out 24th October.