Caroline Polachek, the art-pop maximalist pop’s biggest stars keep inviting in

Caroline Polachek

Photo: Papipacify / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 20, 1985 New York City
Occupation	Songwriter

When Harry Styles brings his stadium show to the arena outside Paris, the singer warming up the crowd will be Caroline Polachek, a woman whose records feature bagpipes, a children’s choir and a flamenco guitar borrowed from spaghetti-western scores. It is an odd fit, and it keeps happening. Beyoncé recorded a song she wrote. Dua Lipa took her across North America as an opening act, and Charli XCX has put her voice on record more than once. Her own albums, meanwhile, come out on a small imprint she controls, Perpetual Novice, and they sound like nobody else’s idea of a pop record. The career is built on that gap between the invitations and the music she makes when nobody is inviting her.

Caroline Elizabeth Polachek was born in Manhattan on June 20, 1985, and spent her first years far from it: the family moved to Tokyo when she was one, and she stayed until she was six. She has said the minor-key, pentatonic melodies of Japanese songs and anime themes stuck in her subconscious. Her father, James Polachek, was a historian of China and a trained classical musician. After the family settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, he gave her a Yamaha keyboard to keep her away from the piano, and she began singing in a school choir in third grade. As a teenager she took the train into New York for post-hardcore, punk and jazz shows, with Björk and Kate Bush above every other hero.

At the University of Colorado Boulder she met Aaron Pfenning and started Chairlift. The band moved to New York, where she studied art at New York University and Patrick Wimberly joined in 2007. Their debut, Does You Inspire You, carried Bruises, a sweet and slightly goofy song that Apple used in a 2008 iPod Nano advert. By Something, in 2012, Chairlift was a duo of Polachek and Wimberly working with the producers Dan Carey and Alan Moulder, and she was directing the videos herself. A third album, Moth, arrived in 2016. That December the band announced its split, played a farewell tour the following spring, and stopped.

The side doors she opened around Chairlift are where the craft got stranger. As Ramona Lisa she made Arcadia in 2014, an album begun during an artist’s residency at the Villa Medici in Rome and recorded entirely on a laptop, the vocals sung into its built-in microphone in hotel closets and quiet airport gates. As CEP she released Drawing the Target Around the Arrow in 2017, a wordless electronic record. In between she co-wrote and co-produced No Angel for Beyoncé’s 2013 surprise album, a credit that put her name on that record’s Album of the Year nomination at the Grammys.

The career under her own name began with Door in 2019, a long, winding single whose video she co-directed with the British artist Matt Copson, now her partner. Pang followed that October, made largely with Danny L Harle, the London producer who came out of the PC Music collective and has sat at the centre of her work ever since. She named it after the adrenal rushes that were keeping her awake at night. Its tour was cut short by the pandemic in March 2020, the same year her father died of COVID-19. One song outlived the interruption: So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, a co-write with Daniel Nigro and Teddy Geiger, found a second life online and was certified gold in the United States in 2024.

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, released on Valentine’s Day 2023, was written mostly in London during lockdown and finished in Barcelona with Harle and Sega Bodega. Polachek called it “a very maximalist album,” and it earns the phrase: bagpipes, children’s choirs, Spanish guitar on Sunset, trip-hop drums on Billions, a song she said took nineteen months to finish. Pitchfork had already named Bunny Is a Rider the best song of 2021. The album scored 94 on Metacritic, became her first to chart in several countries, the United Kingdom and the United States among them, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. She had spent much of 2022 opening for Dua Lipa; after the release came the Spiraling Tour and, in 2024, an Everasking Edition with Dang and a new Butterfly Net sung with Weyes Blood.

The labels that follow her fit badly. Because Harle came out of PC Music and she sings on Charli XCX records, she is often filed under hyperpop, although her albums lean closer to new age, Celtic folk and late-1990s trip-hop than to that scene’s sugar-rush distortion. The Guardian’s Shaad D’Souza described her as “something like Gen Z’s Kate Bush,” a comparison that points at the right lineage while skipping the awkward part: she is in her forties, her best-known song needed almost five years to go gold, and none of her albums has been a hit in the chart sense. She has also been willing to walk away from visibility. In late 2017 she pulled out of Moogfest after the festival promoted its women performers as a separate list while its line-up stayed mostly male, writing that festivals “have a responsibility to position inclusivity as normal.”

Since Desire, most of her new music has arrived inside other people’s projects. In 2024 she wrote Starburned and Unkissed, a grunge song, for the A24 film I Saw the TV Glow, and joined Charli XCX’s remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat on Everything is romantic. In 2025 Hideo Kojima commissioned On the Beach for the video game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and the London band caroline brought her onto Tell me I never knew that, from caroline 2. In February 2026 Harle finally released his own debut album, Cerulean, with Polachek on Azimuth and On & On.

The latest of those guest turns came on September 29, 2026, when the Belgian singer Angèle released Love Triangle, produced by SebastiAn, with Polachek switching between English and French. The two met backstage at Madison Square Garden in 2022, the night Dua Lipa brought Angèle out to sing Fever during a show Polachek had opened. The song leads into Angèle’s third album, Instinct, due on October 16, 2026.

The calendar ahead is already filling. Roskilde Festival announced her in its first wave for 2027, with the festival running from June 26 to July 3, and she is booked as special guest for Harry Styles at Plenitude Arena, the former Paris La Défense Arena in Nanterre, on July 16, 17, 23 and 24, 2027. The record that matters most has no date yet. In June 2024 she said she was in London “beginning to dig for seeds of a new album” with Harle, and her fifth album, still untitled, is the one place where nobody else’s invitation sets the terms.

Tags: singers, art pop, Caroline Polachek, Bunny Is a Rider, Chairlift, Danny L Harle