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Mar 14, 2025 By Andy Von Pip Photography by Barnaby Fairely

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“There used to be poetry in everything, and now everything’s just so… I don’t know, clinical,” sighs Luvcat. The way she says it—softly, almost mournfully—carries the same wistful nostalgia that threads through her music. Her backstory has the improbable charm of a modern fairy tale. As a teenager, she was spotted busking in Liverpool, performing “The Whole of the Moon” by a member of The Waterboys—an encounter that led to her being invited to tour Europe, supporting the very band she had been covering.

Before this serendipitous breakthrough, Luvcat had lived a different kind of surreal life—, songwriter, marmalade entrepreneur and at one point joining the circus to perform as a magician’s assistant, the latter an unplanned detour inspired by childhood fantasies of Moulin Rouge-style glamor. But musically it was The Cure’s “Lullaby” that began to shape her artistic vision: “a dead marching band covered in cobwebs, and Robert Smith in candy stripe pajamas on a wrought iron bed”—imagery that, as she puts it, “has just informed my entire brain ever since.”

“I was always drawn to the dark side. When I was a kid, I thought Avril Lavigne was badass, then I got caught up in the Emo wave with My Chemical Romance and I was obsessed with vampires,” she continues. “I grew up with my dad feeding me Nick Cave and The Cure, which had a massive impact on me as a young girl.” Later she discovered classic songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen.

The road to Luvcat wasn’t without its challenges. She spent a number of years on the live music circuit as a solo artist, but over time, performing alone began to feel isolating and limiting: “For a long time I thought I was going to have to play on my own and accompany myself on a piano which can be so boring.” She needed a new challenge, a new way to present her music—and thus, Luvcat was born. The name, a nod to her passion for The Cure, emerged during a brainstorming and writing session with a friend. “I wanted to do something completely different, and I was thinking of a new name. At first, I wanted to call myself Eliza Day, after a Nick Cave murder ballad,” she explains, her eyes lighting up. “And then I said ‘Love Cat’ in my friend’s kitchen, and he was like, ‘that’s the one!’ As soon as we decided on the name, everything fell into place. It suddenly all made sense and felt like it summed up my personality perfectly.”

After relocating from Merseyside to London, and fresh off an exhilarating performance in Paris, she became determined to unlock Luvcat’s full potential. “I hammered the local South East of London pub scene, accidentally stumbled onto a really cool and supportive scene, met some great musicians and had a wild time. I put a band together with some old friends and acquaintances, and Luvcat started to gather a bit of momentum.”

Luvcat’s releases so far have been dark, bewitching earworms—songs that linger, both unsettling and irresistible. Her debut single, “Matador”, explores the chaos of destructive love, while her latest release, “Love & Money”, is described as “a love letter to a Pam-and-Tommy-style, all-consuming romance.” Meanwhile, “He’s My Man” unfolds as a gloriously twisted murder ballad about a bored housewife slowly poisoning her husband with arsenic. It features the darkly comic line, “I stay home and make his dinner / Even though somehow he keeps getting thinner,” and its accompanying video—infused with Tim Burton and Brothers Grimm-inspired imagery—is as playful as it is macabre.

But it’s more than just the music—there’s an entire world-building element at play. From the gothic flourishes of her visuals to a stage set adorned with wine bottles dripping in candle wax and candelabras casting flickering shadows, Luvcat crafts a universe that’s sumptuous yet slightly twisted. Right now, there’s nothing else quite like it. “Yeah, I guess the vaudeville kind of saloon bar piano thing has crept in a lot because that’s the instrument I started playing as a kid,” she reflects. “And the kind of smoky guitars from listening to a lot of Tom Waits. Indeed Luvcat once described her music as “Tom Waits in silk panties.” Whilst her sonorous vocals bear no resemblance to Waits’ bourbon-soaked sandpaper drawl, he’s certainly another artist who has massively influenced her musical journey.

“I mean, I sound nothing like him because I’m not an older gentleman with a drinking problem,” she laughs. “But it’s more the same nods, you know? I love how his darkness is infused with a certain wryness, and he’s just got a wit that I gravitate towards, rather than just uber-sincere songs one after another. I just think you need to break it up with a bit of a nod and a wink to the camera occasionally, you know?

For Luvcat storytelling is just as important as the music itself, and she embraces the idea of listeners piecing things together.

“It’s kind of how I grew up—always wanting to delve into the characters in songs, figure out who was who, and tie the threads together. Some of my characters reappear in my other songs, and I guess that’ll become clearer when I can put out a full body of work.”

Family stories have also inspired her songs. For example, “He’s My Man” took inspiration from a yarn her father had shared, that sounds like something from a Stephen King novel “It’s quite a harrowing tale,” says Luvcat. “When my dad was a kid, he’d play football in the street with his friends near a spooky old house. If the ball landed in the garden, the old woman inside would try to throw boiling water at them from her window when they knocked on her door to get it back. She was terrifying! Anyway, one day they decided to sneak into her house. They crept upstairs to the second floor where the door was ajar, and they could see her silhouetted in the window. She was pulling a piece of rope, and as they followed the rope, they saw it was tied to the bottom of a rocking chair. And she was rocking her husband in the chair. But the thing was … he’d been dead for months. But because she loved him so much, she couldn’t bear to part with him and bury him, and I thought that was weirdly quite sweet. And that’s why there’s a rocking chair with a skeleton in the video, because I thought it was an example of how that kind of all-consuming love can tip over and become unhinged.”

It’s these kinds of distinctive stories and imagery that have helped Luvcat connect with music lovers beyond traditional channels. There’s a lot of talk about artists blowing up on TikTok—while cynics argue that the platform is driven more by industry influence than organic discovery, for emerging artists, it can be a powerful tool for reaching new audiences and building a fanbase. For Luvcat, it was genuinely beneficial, as she explains:“I hate to say it, but I’d rejected TikTok for many years and thought it was a sin. But now, you know, it’s given someone like me—who didn’t have a showbiz family or any real connections outside of Liverpool—a chance to expose my tunes to an audience I would never have been able to reach without a big, swanky label behind me. I feel like I’ve earned the chance now because I built that audience myself.”

As Luvcat’s following grew across both TikTok and Spotify, she discovered that her digital success wasn’t just confined to online metrics, it was creating real-world momentum, as she explains, “I mean, I never thought it would translate to feet on the ground. I always thought it was a bit of an illusion. I was more used to begging 10 people to come and see me but when we sold out the first London gig in like four minutes it suddenly sunk in—oh my God, these are real humans. They exist. And they started popping up everywhere at little gigs I was playing, that’s when it suddenly felt real. I’ve worked towards this all my life and now it suddenly feels like some people care about the words I’m writing. It’s a dream and it’s very surreal. And I’m very aware of the fragility of it all, and nervous about losing it. It’s quite an adjustment after spending so long feeling totally unnoticed, just playing on the street in the cold.”

Luvcat certainly seems aware of striking a balance rather than being caught in the perpetual churn of social media’s insatiable appetite—and that perhaps there is something to be said for knowing less. “I mean, it’s the kind of thing I miss in modern music,” she explains. “I remember my dad telling me a story about an American band he loved in the ’80s. At the time, Pete Burns (of Dead Or Alive) worked at Probe Records in Liverpool, and they got talking about the band when Pete said, ‘The lead singer’s dead, you know.’

For years, my parents both believed their favorite artist was dead. Then, two years later, a single from the band’s new album came on the radio, and they were like, ‘Fuck! He’s alive!’ I love the mystery and mythology of stories like that.”

“Not that I want people wondering whether I’m dead or alive—no pun intended,” she laughs. “But I think you can fiercely protect your private life while still sharing it in a way that feels poetic. Because I think life is missing poetry.”

Another pivotal moment for Luvcat arrived when she was asked to support The Last Dinner Party in Paris.

“That was at the Olympia, and the audience was electric. And it felt like an ‘oh, fuck’ moment—I mean, we were playing in a pub last week, and now we’re here. So we thought, okay, maybe now we need to rehearse properly because, at that point, we couldn’t even afford to rehearse in a room for longer than two hours.”

There were also logistical challenges, as part of her band lived in the North West of England while the other half were in London. “We were a chaotic mess,” she laughs, “but the lads in the band are such an integral part of Luvcat. I’ve been playing with them for years, and I’m very close to them. I adore them and it’s a privilege to be on the road with them. It’s definitely not a faceless session player vibe.”

Another huge moment came when Luvcat toured with The Libertines a few weeks ago. “That was incredible,” she enthuses, “and during their set, Pete and Carl asked me to get up and sing a song with them. And when I looked across the stage and saw Peter, it was one of those moments that’s hard to comprehend. Y’know, I’m actually on stage with a band I grew up with, with their posters on my wall.”

Luvcat has a busy year ahead—she’s set to release new music, play numerous festivals, and take Luvcat to America for the first time, with gigs in New York and L.A. Tickets are flying out, and she can’t hide her excitement.

“You know what? It’s going to be totally mad for a Northern girl to suddenly be in Los Angeles. I’m just looking forward to the sheer bizarreness of it all and how alien it’s going to feel. Being on the road in America is a pipe dream for most English musicians. We’ve all seen the documentaries, like Dig!, where they’re all fighting in the van, and honestly, I can’t wait for a bit of American chaos.”

Follow Luvcat:

Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

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