Track of the Week: Luvcat’s vision has bite on ‘Vampire At The Beach’
What makes a star? What is that quality that makes a person stand out and rise to the top? Looking towards Luvcat, I’d argue it all comes down to vision.
Luvcat’s empire has grown fast. Only a few years ago, she was found on the stages of South London pubs. When she posted videos of her first performances of a scrappy early version of ‘Matador’, the world paid the same focused attention, everyone asking the same question – ‘who is this?’
There’s a sense of inevitability around Luvcat’s success as she rose from those sticky floor venues to now having two million monthly Spotify listeners and releasing one of the best debut albums of 2025.
Talking in interviews about her youth spent listening to The Cure, inspiring her name, and running away with the circus on her 16th birthday, inspiring her spirally, mythical and twisted lyricism, she just seems like one of those stars destined for something special, exactly because she’s crafted her life to be that way.
Across Vicious Delicious, she turned some of those occasions and affairs into poetry. Recounting tristes and romantic devastations, the loves of her life and the stories they’ve given her are an essential part of this vision. While a painstakingly trendy phrase for the act of living your life in search of inspiration, there’s always a sense of ‘doing it for the plot’ in the tales that fill her music.
But on her latest offering, ‘Vampire At The Beach’, there’s some confrontation of that. Inspired by a moody lover and a night spent watching a Fellini film, Luvcat had a realisation – she simply couldn’t even imagine him drenched in sunlight, happy and in love on the beach. Suddenly, she wondered, when she wanted to be tanned and eating juicy fruit on the sand, why was she here, playing in the shade?
However, her work is endlessly interested in infectiousness and entrapment. On her debut, that came in the form of sticking around loser band boys and going all in on a crush. But as she announces Lovebites, Luvcat’s vision is being concentrated on the gothic tales that have always influenced her, as she promises a full EP of murder ballads.
‘Vampire At The Beach’ becomes a darker thing then. “Swear it was the second I saw you, I knew that you would fuck me up forever,” she sings, waiting for the vampire to bite, bored but unable to get herself away from him before it’s too late.
Led, as always, by Luvcat’s characterful voice acrobating through the story, backed up by a band who understand the importance of adding that perfect theatrical, vaudeville flair to an indie tune, ‘Vampire At The Beach’ feels like the strongest display yet of the vision that made certain of her stardom.
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