merican singer-songwriter Eli is an unapologetic “put on a show kind of girl”, to quote pop icon Britney Spears. Her love of performance is so great that she penned her canny 2025 album ‘Stage Girl’, which named one of the best debuts of last year, about the highly meta experience of pursuing pop fame, come hell or high water. And in the year since the record’s release, amid the praise that has followed, it’s become clear that the 25-year-old thoroughly excels at the whole popstar thing.

Eli has garnered widespread acclaim for her theatrical and utterly head-bopping Y2K-coded pop songs, using deeply confessional lyrics to exhume the pain of past relationships (‘Marianne’) or interrogate the dysphoria and performance of gender as a trans woman (‘Somebody I’m Not’). This combination of raw and modern has earned her an ever-growing fanbase, which already includes Troye Sivan, Doechii and Zara Larsson. But this isn’t her first brush with fame, thanks to a brief and fleeting era of internet notoriety as an adolescent Vine star.

Hailing from small town Massachusetts, Eli was a typical theatre kid, inspired by big-time vocalists like Mariah Carey and the world of reality competition shows. Her bedroom was the ultimate practice ground for many of these nascent musical dreams, including a spate of precocious singles released in her teens. After a brief stint studying Recorded Music at NYU, Eli would eventually head west, unable to resist the allure of Hollywood. There, she was discovered by Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records imprint, putting in motion a chain of events that would allow her to finally enact her wildest dreams.