An Astronaut in a Dead Hollywood

Olivia Devine picked her stage name because there was already a porn actress using her real one. That detail alone tells you something about L Devine—the way collision and inconvenience get absorbed without self-pity and turned into material.

She’s from Whitley Bay, a quiet seaside town outside Newcastle that doesn’t figure much in pop mythology. She left, lost herself somewhere in Los Angeles, and made a mixtape called Peer Pressure about the whole experience—navigating existential crises and poisoned relationships while simultaneously being a young person who goes to parties, falls in love, and makes music. The companion short film has her in an astronaut suit wandering a deserted Hollywood, fantasizing about killing her peers and feeling like an outcast from another planet. She described it as picking up where Growing Pains left off, and the imagery—isolation, alien displacement, the spacesuit as costume—does what words about being twenty-one and lost usually can’t.

The music lands between Dua Lipa’s directness and Clairo’s bedroom intimacy: melodic, personal, future-pop without the cold gloss. Nervous and Peer Pressure work because she sounds like she actually means it, not because someone coached her into seeming relatable. Zane Lowe picked her up early on Beats 1, BBC Radio 1 followed. The machinery is already turning, and for once that feels entirely deserved.

What keeps drawing me back is the combination—the poise of someone built for stages and the rawness of someone still figuring out what she wants from them. You know leaving home won’t fix anything. You go anyway. That’s the whole record.