Get To Know: LYVIA

LYVIA isn’t just another artist trying to survive the constant churn of online content. She’s one of the few who has built an entire world from something simple: a street corner, a microphone, and a mug of tea that somehow became part of her identity. While everyone else is busy reinventing themselves every week, she’s doubled down on authenticity.

It didn’t begin on TikTok. It began outside, on cold pavements across Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, and London, singing through early mornings and freezing winds.

Before that came a small recording studio she used to skip school to attend, a community space where rappers and poets sharpened her confidence long before the internet discovered her. That room shaped her. It made her pay attention to language. It made her see writing as something you feel first before you perfect it.

LYVIA's latest mixtape Honey, I’m Home! reflects that evolution. Instead of dropping everything at once, she released it in three parts. Not for strategy but for clarity. In a landscape where listeners skim more than they sit with anything, she slowed the pace and gave each section room to breathe. Mini-worlds. Mini-moments. Enough space for listeners to sit with what she was saying.

One afternoon, she found the time to chat to New Wave Magazine about the mixtape, her beginnings and more excitingly, where she is going.

At the centre of LYVIA’s artistry is her writing. Long before she felt comfortable singing, she was rapping, scribbling poems, and going back-to-back with people who treated language like a sport. You hear that evidenced in her rhyme patterns, the fast phrasing, the internal rhymes that catch listeners off guard. Other writers sometimes ask her to simplify her hooks, but the way she plays with words is hers. It’s why songs like 'Trippin' land the way they do.

Growing up in Nottingham with people who were "obsessed" with words, she reveals that for her, "It was never 'songs' at the beginning. It was poems, spoken word pieces, going back-to-back with rappers.

"It’s always been words first for me. I started out as a spoken word artist. I never really thought I’d be a singer. I was way too shy. Anytime someone asked me to sing, I’d be so nervous. I still get nervous now."

"The only time I’d sing in the studio at first was when they needed a hook. There weren’t many singers, everyone was a rapper and they knew I could sing a bit, so they’d be like, 'Liv, can you lay a hook?' One of the guys was like, 'You should actually do this. You should write a song." That’s how it started.

Her songs feel instinctive, not engineered. Her mindset is just as sharp as her pen. She doesn’t romanticise the grind or pretend the numbers don’t affect her, but she doesn’t let them run the show either.

At one point, she put it simply: “This is what I’m going to do. There’s no plan. There’s never going to be, ‘I’ll just do

something else.’ I’m either going to do it or die trying.” It sounds dramatic on paper, but in her voice it lands like a quiet decision she made a long time ago and never revisited.

Her accompanying visuals to her music add something new. Hyper-feminine, playful, 70s-inspired shots filmed in her auntie’s house during renovation. They weren’t curated for a trend or algorithm. They were simply another version of her. Some days she feels most herself in tracksuits with her hair back. Other days she wants heels, glam, softness, colour. The imagery was a way to show that duality without needing to explain it.

And that authenticity was demonstrated once again, during her UK tour, LYVIA decided to create her own mini vlog-style clips that turned into her tour diary. A personal touch for fans to enjoy, and a way to create intimacy despite it reaching millions of eyes.

Speaking about it, LYVIA said: "The whole 'tour diary' thing started when I went on tour with Tinashe at the beginning of the year. We decided to film everything because I wanted a document of it. Those went down really well, and I loved watching them back, so I carried that into my own tour."

She also explains how the tour diary fits into her music approach. "I want the music to feel intimate. I don’t really sugarcoat my stories; everything I write is from first-hand experience. So it makes sense for the videos to match that.

She added: "Singing directly into the camera is the easiest, most honest way for me to present the songs. Because they’re so personal, it doesn’t always make sense to blow them up into some huge, detached visual concept. That one-to-one feeling is important. At shows, the songs can feel bigger and more 'pop', but at the core it’s still about people hearing the words."

Her connection to listeners is where everything comes together. She jokes about writing for “the girls who like girls and the ones that don’t know it yet,” but her music reaches way beyond that. Boys, queer kids, people untangling who they are, people who feel everything all at once. When she sings on camera, it feels like she’s looking directly at you. Even with millions watching, the tone stays intimate, almost private, like she’s carving out a small space for you to sit in.

That intimacy extends to how she treats her community. The group chat she started has grown into friendships, meet-ups, pre-show hangouts, and sound-checks where she plays unreleased tracks and takes questions. They aren’t passive supporters. They’re part of the process. They’re the reason songs like 'Thesis' exist at all. She wasn’t planning to release it.

But they wouldn’t let it go, and she listened. She’s fully aware of the role they play. “Fangirls are the future,” she says at one point, matter-of-fact. “They’re the ones buying tickets, putting their friends on, using your songs in their videos. They’re basically acting like a label without the label cut.” It’s not a soundbite.

It’s how she operates. The community isn’t an accessory to her career. It is the career. Family sits quietly at the centre of her story. Her mum blasting her music through Alexa. Her dad playing in a band. Her siblings turning home into a reset button. She speaks about them without needing to decorate anything. They keep her grounded. They remind her of the version of herself before numbers, before comments, before pressure.

Looking ahead, her plans stretch in every direction: more festivals, more collaborations, writing camps by the water, more time with the people who believed early. But the pace won’t change. She isn’t chasing virality. She’s building something that grows at the speed it’s meant to. Slowly, steadily, and with care.

Honey, I’m Home! might be the project, but the real story is the person behind it. An artist who listens just as much as she creates. Someone who doesn’t hide the rough edges.

Someone who refuses to over-polish the parts of her that people connected with in the first place. Someone who has somehow mastered the art of making thousands of people feel like she’s singing directly to them. She knows who she’s singing for. She knows why she’s doing it. Everything else will unfold naturally around that.

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