Sad and Bored Is the Last Thing She Is

Megan Bülow was eleven years old and already busking on London streets—this before the family moved again, as they always did. Eight years in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, and several cities in between), six in England, two in Texas, two in Holland, then Toronto as a base. That kind of itinerant childhood does something to a person. Either you end up unmoored, or you learn to carry yourself rather than a place, and Bülow seems very clearly to have learned the latter.

Not A Love Song broke in the fall of 2017 while she was still in high school, the track landing online and spreading fast—the kind of thing that happens when a song is sharp enough and its creator is young enough to feel like a genuine discovery. She hadn’t finished school yet. She’d already outlasted most of her peers in a genre that eats newcomers before they’ve had time to figure out what they’re actually saying.

What she’s saying, at her best, is something specific and unforgiving. You & Jennifer is a breakup song structured as an indictment—not really of the ex but of the replacement, rendered with the kind of lightly worn cruelty only pop hooks get away with. Sad and Bored does something trickier: it’s ironic without being winking, the title describing a state she clearly never inhabits, featuring DUCKWRTH in a verse that understands exactly what the song is doing. Sweet Little Lies is the most interesting of the three—the song is bright but has dark undertones, she said. I wanted to show the contrast of the mind. Imagination is so incredibly powerful—it can give you the best feelings, but quickly become your worst enemy. That’s not a bad thesis for the whole catalog.

Her reference points sit somewhere in the vicinity of Sigrid, Zara Larsson, early Dua Lipa—pop that learned to be emotional without being melodramatic, confessional without losing its spine. The nomadic childhood that made everything harder also gave her more to write about than most people twice her age.