Suki Waterhouse channels Edith Piaf in the video for “OMG,” her shimmery new single.
The singer, model, and Daisy Jones & the Six actress had teased the new song on social media for days, finally releasing it. “It’s really, really the best way to start my year,” she tells Rolling Stone, on a call from Los Angeles. “I’ve been holding onto it for a while.”
The track, co-written with Natalie Findlay and Jules Apollinaire, is a synthy, sleazy rocker with the kind of anthemic chorus that will be in your head for days. It’s a chorus that did not come easily, by the way. “We started half the song and then put it to the side,” she says. “We were like, ‘It’s not working.’ And then two months went by and we were back in the studio, and suddenly this chorus came out with this energy around it.
“It’s such an anxious state when I’m trying to put together a song, because you always feel like you are on the edge of something,” she adds. “It’s really about going against the intellect and into the instinct of the song. That’s what I find so fascinating about writing. It’s really the most tedious, delicate process, so dependent on whether you can get out of your own way that day.”
The video, shot in Panavision and directed by Émilie Richard-Froozan, features Waterhouse in a greenhouse, wearing a vibrant red dress and drawn-on eyebrows à la Piaf. Check it out below.
Waterhouse also revealed the greenhouse belongs to Diplo. “My god,” she says. “Doesn’t he have the most stunning greenhouse you’ve ever seen? We knew we wanted to do this Piaf women-in-distress look. Indie budgets are really hard, and shooting in L.A. is really, really difficult to do at the moment, so we had to get very quite crafty with the location. I heard he had a greenhouse, and I DM’d him. He was very sweet to lend us.” She adds that her pregnancy made it a bit tricky. “It was fairly limited by the fact that I’m getting a lot larger,” she says with a laugh.
“OMG” is a track off Waterhouse’s upcoming album, due on SubPop later this year (she declines to share the title). It marks her second record, after her 2022 debut, I Can’t Let Go. “I started coming up with a concept that I think is like a metamorphosis,” she says. “There’s basically something to do with this disco ball spider, and that’s all I’ll say for now.”
She names Arctic Monkeys as an influence on the new album, and that she’s currently on a “deep dive” into their catalog. Other current listens include Lucinda Williams (specifically “Fruits of My Labor”), Doja Cat (“A lot of ‘Paint the Town Red’ in the car,” she notes), Kelis (“This song ‘Floyd’ is so beautiful. There’s so much Kelis music I feel like has been really slept on”), as well as Marianne Faithfull, the Association, Angie Stone, William Bell, and Oasis.
“I end up listening to the same couple of songs over and over again, to be honest,” she says. “People make fun of me, but I have this playlist palette that keeps me in the world that I want to be in.”