Date Signed: September 2024
Label: AWAL
Genre: Alternative Pop, Rock
Management: Ben Carey, Fred Lane Fox - Gum Music Management
Booking: Ben Coles, Carly James, Ben Buchannan - CAA
Legal: Paul Lennon - SGD
Publicity: Toast, AWAL
A&R: Will Hunt
Web: luvcat.co.uk
Remember the name Luvcat. Soak it in, marinade in it, file it in the mental lockbox. Rarely are we presented with a new artist who seems so ready-made, so completely built, for success. Liverpool-born artist Luvcat, born Sophie Morgan Howarth, has a sound that is absolutely and undeniably her own, while also being instantly relatable and radio-friendly. Her aesthetic is fabulous, she’s talented and super-fucking-badass—Luvcat is the real deal.
She’s worked hard to get here, mind you. Luvcat honed her sound in the pubs, clubs, and streets of Northern England. “I was singing before I could speak,” she says. “I started learning piano when I was a very young child, and reading poetry, and then writing my own rhymes. I wrote my first song when I was nine or 10, and then I started singing in the pubs and clubs when I was 14. I was just doing that and busking. Life changed drastically about a year and a half ago when I played my first Luvcat show in Paris, and then came back to London and played the pubs in London. Videos of us in those little shows went mad on the internet, and that's where it all began.”
Luvcat says that she grew up with her dad’s and granddad's record collection, which included the standards such as Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, West End musical soundtracks, Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, but also The Smiths, The Cure, the Velvet Underground and Nick Cave. She discovered Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits when she hit her 20s. She cites Waits as her biggest influence, which makes sense when diving into her boozy, smokey pop-vaudeville tunes. Though it was a classic Cure song that inspired her name.
It's been a year since Luvcat signed with AWAL, joining a roster packed with talent like Little Simz, CMAT and The Beaches. A&R man Will Hunt saw an early video and then caught a show in Brighton. The deal got done, and Luvcat says that she feels privileged to be on such an amazing roster of independent-minded musicians.
Her debut album, Vicious Delicious, is out on Halloween and it’s a contender for album of the year. “It's like a swinging pendulum between two extremes,” she says. “Like innocence and eroticism, love and kink or life and death. It had a bit of both of those things, and never too much. It's tongue in cheek in places, and it's sometimes sincere.”
