Though she is no bedroom-pop purist, she has maintained a minimalist DIY setup, built for composing as the feeling takes her. Sometimes she chops up a sample and sets it to a beat that a co-producer—often Chris “Kurisu” Thomas—will help transmute into vaporous R&B. Sometimes she writes a guitar figure and adds her own dreamy embellishments to fill its universe. On a song like “Care,” a lament of grief-induced depression, she writes a guitar figure and that is all; her voice and words are the universe.
Perched on a bench opposite the truck, swaddled in a black jumper and furry-hooded green jacket, Dexter wears her livewire energy lightly, ad libbing with herself or dancing in her seat as she invokes one or another of her songs, silver hoop earrings jiggling. She is five years down a path of snowballing attention that began with a charming, homespun EP called I Do Love a Good Sandwich. Her interest in DIY music followed her tween indoctrination into the Rex Orange County fandom. “That’s where the turn really came in,” she recalls of her brief rebellion against pure-pop tastes. “I jumped on that whole wave: Clairo, Brockhampton, Tyler, the Creator, Kali Uchis, Mac DeMarco.” Having found her calling—“I was like, Mum, I’m not gonna lie, I need a guitar”—she started self-producing lugubrious covers of faraway artists like Joji and Beabadoobee, illustrating the uploads with romantic photos she took of local tenements or candid public-transport scenes. “When I think back to being a teenager, I’m nostalgic about it, but I also relished being sad,” she admits, “taking photos of buildings at night and singing moody songs.”
Photograph by Tom Schwimmbeck / Courtesy of the artist
For reasons she herself finds bewildering, she hid the enterprise from her family. “I used to sit on the staircase and scream-sing,” she says, but behind her bedroom door was a clandestine operation. “I was just embarrassed. I make up all these rules in my head: My mum can’t know, my sister can’t know.” When Annie Mac, then a primetime BBC Radio 1 DJ, aired her early single “Blue Skies,” Dexter sat them down and came clean. “My sister started crying. She was like, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell us this!’”
This mix of privacy and voluble energy is a theme. She earned a scholarship to a mostly white high school in London, where she was not shy butting heads with fellow students, particularly amid Black Lives Matter. On a song from the Sandwich EP, “I Like Me,” she reckoned with another sticking point: the pressure to look the part at ununiformed school events. “I used to dress quite masculine and tomboyish, so there was this angst of being around people who looked more traditionally feminine,” she says of the track. “Getting into music, I wasn’t really seeing anyone that dressed like I did. It was a lot of teenage angst that I needed to get out.”
