Evann McIntosh recently released her new single, “WIYULD,” it’s the first from the singer/songwriter, since signing to Mom+Pop Music (Courtney Barnett, Beach Bunny). Along with the track, Lil Mop, Evann has shared an animated video which was directed by Janice Chun (Cartoon Network) . Evann recorded the single in her bedroom on GarageBand and notes, “WIYULD was my response to grown women being intimidated by a young, confident feminine energy. It’s mocking their idea of who I must be.”

Growing up, Evann’s parents kept the sounds of ’90s hip-hop and R&B, as well as the rock music of the 1970s, in the air but McIntosh counts Prince as her biggest influence. “I discovered Prince in sixth grade, the year that he passed, which was tough. It totally changed my creative process. He’s my idol.” Released last year, McIntosh’s debut LP, MOJO, was practically in the works since she was nine years old when she picked up a guitar. At that time she was also starting to put the ideas in her head to paper, spending hours recording rough drafts of songs through a USB Yeti microphone in the living room after her family had gone to bed. But it wasn’t until she met producer and now-frequent collaborator Jesty Beatz through Instagram that she figured out how to take her music out of the family room and to the rest of the world: “From there I had somewhere to record the music and take it to the internet,” she states. “I had no idea how to do that stuff coming out of eighth grade.” After the pair collaborated on a string of heat-seeking singles, they moved on to making MOJO a reality, with initial recording taking place during the last three months of the school year and the project wrapped just before its release late last year. In McIntosh’s words, MOJO is a fully realized expression of youthful perspective that breaks the mold of modern pop: “The whole album has feminine pronouns being used in the place of a love interest. I wanted to write those songs for the younger audiences to hear, because I think it should be normalized in the pop music you hear today. It makes you want to dance, even when it’s just me and an acoustic guitar. It slaps.”