You Gotta Howl With It: Hot Press meets Chloe Howl

If you don’t mind, Chloe Howl is going to have a bit of a rant. “When I was first signed, everyone at my label was in their forties,” says British pop’s hot new talent. “They were literally the same age as my teachers at school. You had to deal with all these people who just would not take you seriously.”

Her youth was disadvantage enough. But it was her gender that really caused friction. “I was 16 and there were all these men who did not listen to what I was saying. I’d be in the studio and would try to very forcefully put my point across. And I’d get a response of ‘oh well, she’s just being emotional – she’ll get over it’. I had to explain that, actually, as a songwriter I know exactly what I want. Is that so hard to believe?”

None of this has served to impede Howl’s progress. Shortlisted for the BBC Sound Of poll, she is regarded as an arriving force in pop, a talented songwriter with a flair for straight-ahead anthems that sock you like a knee to the groin. That’s what her fans say, at any rate. There have been detractors too, who point out what they regard as a stylistic similarity to Lily Allen. She shrugs. Let the haters hate.

“I knew I’d be compared to Lily Allen because of the English accent thing. I was prepared for it. And I get Kate Nash too – again purely due to the accent. I don’t really mind. If the worst people can say about me is I sing in an English accent, which I do, then that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

She will probably roll her eyes at us for pointing it out, but the Lily Allen similarities go beyond vocal affect. As with Allen, Howl isn’t one for holding back, as her take on the Miley Cyrus controversy attests.

“I don’t think she is helping women in music,” says Howl of the uber-twerker. “I saw an interview in which she described herself as the world’s biggest feminist? Hello? How could you think that? You don’t wear any clothes on stage – that’s not feminism. It would be one thing if she wanted to look hot – if she turned around and said, 'Yeah I’ve got a great body and want to show it off. If a guy said he wanted to show off his pecs it would be perfectly acceptable. For whatever reason women aren’t allowed do that. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be desirable. I feel quite bad for Miley.”

She’s enjoying getting stuck in, but contrary to what you may have surmised from the text thus far, gender warfare is not her one and only subject of conversation. With work on her debut album ongoing and an Ellie Goulding support tour on the way (she’s just opened for the ‘Burn’ singer at The O2 in Dublin) it’s all happening for Howl. So much so that you wonder if she isn’t in danger of falling prey to the hoary institution that is the Great British Music Industry Hype Machine.

“It’s kind of difficult to assess from my side of the fence,” she says. “Have I been over-exposed? I don’t know. I’m sort of in the middle. Everything feels positive – it’s not as if my life has gone mental. I’m still working hard.”

As her estuary accent, at times verging on mockney, attests, Chloe grew up in Maidenhead, bang in the London commuter belt. Precocious as a teenager, she signed a record deal while in school. She has released a series of singles, middling-sized hits that have highlighted her knack for observational writing. Many singers seek to articulate the fragile emotional state of young people dealing with the trauma of early adulthood. Howl nails that particular sensibility – probably because she was a young person dealing with the traumas of early adulthood when she recorded them.

“I was writing about a period in your life when you’re trying to be a grown-up and are not too sure how to go about it. You are making a fool of yourself in many ways. You have your first fling, you start going out with your friends. A lot of my songs are all about that period.”

Still, she wasn’t quite fully formed and was set to work with a series of songwriters. The process wasn’t exactly the happiest of her life – writing is a very intimate experience for Howl and opening up to strangers struck her as unnatural. She did eventually come up a musical soulmate in the shape of Eg White, the producer and composer known for his work with Florence and the Machine, Joss Stone, Duffy and Will Young.

Howl seems a confident sort, not exactly riven with self-doubt. It’s taken her a while to get here, she confides. Starting out, she was a meek young thing, reluctant to raise her voice. She soon realised that playing the dormouse would get her precisely nowhere.

“I’ve had to become stronger and ballsier,” she says. “It’s a shame. I’ve had to grow into that because, as a young woman, there was no way people would pay attention to me otherwise. That depresses me slightly. People should pay attention because of what you have to say, not because you’re shouting from the roof-tops.”

Chloe Howl’s album will be released in June.