Snow Wife talks her sexy & 'inherently progressive' pop bangers

Jump into the pool with Snow Wife.

The pop star is new on the scene, with just over a year of songs under her belt, but her catchy bops are already gaining traction on social media. Earlier this year, her song "Wet Dream" went viral on X, and for good reason! Featuring a chorus reminiscent of our favorite recession era pop stars, Snow Wife sings about slut wars in a cowboy hat, all while hitting some killer choreography.

The 22-year-old broke out as a commercial dancer but has quickly found her own songwriting voice and is steadily developing her sound — she even performed at LA Pride this past June.

Out caught up with Snow Wife, just ahead of the release of her latest single "Pool," to discuss this inherent progressivism in pop music and paying homage to all of her influences.

Out: You grew up in Texas. How did you get started as a performer?

Snow Wife: So I started off dancing in Houston. I was doing studio dance and convention dance, traveling for conventions and just taking industry classes. As my growing up experience in Houston, I think that people from Houston are cool just because it's like such a melting pot of culture. But at the same time, I feel like you're exposed to everything. That's what's cool about living in Houston is exposes you to all walks of life. But then at the same time, like you're in Texas and you're also aware of like, you know, Trumpy culture. It made me very politically involved, but I still had a community that was progressive and diverse at the same time just living in the city and then with dancing. A lot of people that come out of Houston are just well-rounded individuals, in my opinion.

What brought you to LA?

I always knew that I was gonna move to New York City or LA for dance after high school. I was prepared to be a professional touring dancer for the rest of my life. I had no plans of becoming a musician 2.5 years ago. I moved to New York for a year on and off for Pace University and I was in their commercial dance program and then it was giving private school tuition so then I moved to LA. Can't pay for private school so we're just gonna take our chances doing like professional dance in LA. And then I moved here when I was 19 fully just to pursue commercial dance.

What got you into music?

It was definitely just as shocking for me as I feel like it was for everybody that knew me as a dancer.

Throughout my life, I had always been a writer. I always wrote poems and I loved writing narratives. I always thought at some point after my dance career, I would definitely write books or volumes of poetry and publish them. I was like, obviously proficient in language in general. And then obviously I was proficient in dancing, which is very much so musicality based and feeling based. When I moved here, I was naturally just going through a lot because I was moving to a completely new city where I knew nobody. The dance industry is extremely difficult and like, honestly toxic in its own ways. Pretty much as soon as I moved out to LA, I just started songwriting in my bedroom by myself. A lot of the time I would take poems that I had already written and turn them into melody or song structure.

Initially, my songwriting was very indie. I would just sing over tight beats on YouTube. All of the music I was making was, this is hard to believe now that Snow Life is my project, but the songs I was making at the time were actually very indie, like Florence and the Machine, James Blake. Very indie, electronic, nonstructured styling, songwriter, songwriting. But I had such a huge background in pop music because I was a commercial dancer. I think it just took me some time practicing songwriting and then immediately when I figured out that I knew how to write pop music, everything kind of clicked for me. I had my first real session in May of 2022. I just wrote a bunch of songs, started writing mostly primarily pop music, named my project Snow Wife, then I put out my first song in March of 2023, so a little bit over a year ago now. We're just getting started.

Your previous song "Wet Dream" went viral on X (formerly known as Twitter) earlier this year. The lyric "1 2 3 4, I declare a slut war," is poetry. Can you tell me about that song and when it went viral?

"Wet Dream" for me was the first song that I felt... Queen Degenerate was also super special to me, but I think that I was still figuring out my style of pop songwriting. I wasn't as good yet at creating narratives in songs. I think that I have really interesting lyrics that were fun and sexy, but I didn't necessarily know how to put them together with a storyline throughout the song yet. I think I was really good at melody-making. But then "Wet Dream" was really exciting for me because it felt like the first song where I was starting to master the art of building narratives in music and in singles rather than you know, just throwing a bunch of cool words at the wall and hoping that they stick to the melody.

It just felt like my first... not real song, obviously, but well-articulated storyline in a song. That's why the music video became so important to us, the aesthetic of the song as a single, because it was very much so giving me 2010 bubble gum pop like Cher Lloyd, Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen, like those very sweet, feminine figures that we had in that time. It's a little bit more of a risqué reiteration of those characters that I observed when I was younger.

I think that that's a lot of just my music in general and how I think about pop music and art in general. We're living in a period of time right now where everything has kind of been done before. So we're essentially just regurgitating and reforming what we've learned. And I think it's more about paying homage and paying respect and then making it something that's your own. That's what a lot of my art has to do with, what I've observed just in my life and what I took from everything, my reinterpretation of what was special about those sounds to me.

Jussy

I wanna talk about the bridge of that song. It cuts from something raunchy to something very vulnerable and soft.

When we were writing the song, I knew that I wanted the song to have a bridge. That was my immediate instinct. That bridge is such a special bridge just because you're kind of like lost in the "Wet Dream." "1234, I declare a slut war." It's fun and it's vibes then it's that moment at the party and you're surrounded by everybody that you love and the party is starting to wind down and you realize that, yeah, like you just had a bunch of fun, but you're really just in a room with a bunch of people that love you and care about you.

That moment where you realize that the moment that you're in right now is a moment that you're gonna remember forever is what that bridge feels like to me, when you're living in a really fun moment and then you stop for a second and you're like, 'Damn, when I'm 50 I'm gonna remember this moment right now,' you know?

What do you think about the renaissance of dance music happening in the pop world right now?

Music and culture have their cycles through time. But for me, I think what's made pop music so special is when this type of pop music is back in season, it really does create a resurgence in progressive culture. I think that pop music is inherently progressive. In this particular resurgence, all that we as new artists are wanting is to add on to a legacy that has already been built over time. All we can do is pay homage, respect, and then recreate how it affected us. So I think that that's what I like to see from new pop artists. You're just adding on to it essentially for whatever is going on right now because what was going on in 2012? What was shocking in 2012 in pop music is much different than what's going to be shocking right now.

I even think about what my music is primarily about and that's empowerment. It's interesting how the levels of empowerment change over time, specifically for women and queer people. I think that that's my duty as an aspiring commercial pop dance, female act. How am I going to add something new to the perspective of lifting up women, queer people, and people of color in a new way to where we need to be empowered today, you know, with what's going on right now.

I think it's sick and I think it's super important. I'm excited to be alive right now. I'm excited to be alive and making the type of music that I do in this resurgence that I also see forming just among society again for the next five years, maybe 10 years, maybe three. All we can do is say what we have to say when it's able to be received and consumed.

I love how you talk about pop music.

Moments like these, I feel like pop moments that we have remembered over time that have shaped how people grow up and who they become. Music and entertainment is the most important thing when it comes to being progressive.

"Wet Dream," "Pool," what do you have planned next?

For my release after ["Pool"], the music video will be insane. I didn't feel as inspired to necessarily go all in and make a music video for "Pool" is because [it's] more of a feeling than it is a story. The lyrics are super direct, but if you like read into like my intention of the song, it really is to just make, and this sounds so stupid, people feel young and genuinely excited to live in the moment of this summer. I keep saying on my socials, 'It's a 2016 summer, who the fuck is ready to get fucking shit faced?' But it's on the realest level possible. I think that young people have such a hard time living in the moment right now, myself included growing up in the generation that I did grow up in. And I think that "Pool," alongside all of my music, is not only to bring me back into the moment, but to bring anybody that hears it into the moment that they are in at the moment that they are consuming the song.

I want you to listen to "Pool" when you are driving to the beach this summer with your friends and really take a moment to realize where you are, who is with you, how much you love them, how much they love you, and how you will never be in this moment ever again.

What can you say anything about the upcoming project?

In the next 6 to 8 months, I am working on my first real body of music right now and it's really challenging me and it's challenging what my beliefs are, challenging what I think about consumerism, and challenging where I think the world is right now and what they're able to consume on a commercial level. It's gonna be honest, regardless, to me. The new music towards the end of this year will be more so leading into what will indefinitely be my first real representation of myself in an album.

We have no words yet to describe what the sound of it is. I've tried to put my finger on it multiple times in a way that language can describe. I usually don't have a lack of words.

What's the inspiration behind your name?

My last name is Snow, but I've been called Snow like my whole life. I was just at a party one day and my producer, who does primarily all of my projects with me, he actually came up with "Wife" after we were in a group full of haters and everyone hated it initially when they heard it. It like was like, 'What about Snow Wife?' And everyone in the circle was like, 'No, fuck that. That's so stupid, that's gimmicky, there's already a Snow White, that's like a Disney character, that's stupid, that sucks.' So we were like, that's the name. That's when we knew, like, 'Hey, I got a reaction.'