This idea of Finister – the woman with the spectral coo – as little more than a ghost isn't just fancy. But Finister is effecting some kind of apotheosis with her exquisite blown beats, ethereal production, and a series of evanescent whispers that only vaguely fall under the rubric 'singing': it's not full-bodied but empty, drained less a voice than a void. Cassie, of course, was moving in this direction a few years ago. In her hands, it stands for 'ravished and blue'. The background: Like SZA, Jhené Aiko and Kid A, Phlo Finister is remaking R&B, divesting it of its aerobic thrust and projected passion. “It would be so cliche for me to look how I sound,” says Phlo “Elijah” Finister, the self-dubbed “Youthquaker”-inspired artist fast gaining traction for her compelling hybrid of Voguette mod and noir urban aesthetics.Hometown: Oakland, California. Growing up on the rougher side of L.A., Finister sought solace and hope in music, falling in love with particularly visual strands of Sixties music at an early age.

She found Bob Dylan, then Edie Sedwick, then lost herself in the Swinging London-era fantasy of “Youthquakers,” a sharply stylish and modern collective of young women emblematic of all the things she loved and aspired to be. Models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, as well as Diana Vreeland – the powerful Vogue editrix who christened those intrepid ingenues as definers of their generation – became her heroines, and provided both a departure from her bleak circumstance and a creative compass for her own future. “When I found mod, I found myself,” she says. “I wasn’t rebelling, I just suddenly knew I was destined for the stage.”įinister’s own “avant-garde R&B” music marries the creeping cinematics of a classic torch song with the psychological discomfort of macabre Nineties radio. On her debut EP, Crown Gold, Finister slyly converts Garbage’s doom-pop anthem “#1 Crush” into “Hail Mary,” a slinky, slow-crawling bit of nocturne that rides on the beat of 2 Pac’s classic of the same name. It’s a marvel of modern fusion, a fever dream of a death ode, delivered by a singer dressed like a long-lost member of the Shangri-Las.

That’s the dreamy, disturbed route Finister is paving for us: pairing two integral hits from 1997 against each other, feeding them through a 1966 Polaroid Swinger, and re-imagining a future past to come. We’ll see how she evolves that promising formula on Youthquaker, her soon-to-be-released debut album.įor now, as London Fashion Week draws to a close, we bring you the premiere of her final video from Crown Gold, “Wrong #.” Watch it below as Rolling Stone chats with Finister about her Anglo obsession, her style and why pain is the ultimate unifier. I started listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and developed an interest in Edie Sedgwick. She was like the anti-model: beautiful, but with a lot of psychological disturbances. She was the raw form of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. So many problems and tragedy you could see the sadness in her eyes. Then I discovered she was loosely tied to the whole Youthquaker fashion movement, which started in London, and loved what it represented to that generation. What do you see as music’s role in that movement? It became this exciting whole new world for me, one I could live in, and I decided I wanted to revitalize it for today. I found the fashion through the music I wanted to see what the people who were making this music and listening to it wore at the time. All this groundbreaking work at once – from hippie music to Andy Warhol to the mod movement – was happening in the Sixties and played into how we perceived sexuality and identity. Is that a retro sensibility or actually quite modern? That’s what I’m trying to do with my work, too: challenge perceptions of gender role and how females present themselves. Space-age chic, for example, is really futuristic, and we keep revisiting that look for a reason I still think it’s relevant to bring Sixties’ ideas about dressing into a modern context.

Phlo finister shades