“It feels like it’s building to something,” says 24-year-old singer-songwriter Avery Cochrane, sitting in the high-ceilinged studio at Artist House, a publishing and recording studio in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Producer Benzi Edelson (who has worked with Noah Kahan, John Legend, and more) is fiddling with a drum rack, twisting the nobs on his setup while the instrumental they scaffolded together on a Leslie baby-grand piano plays on a loop. Cochrane wants a “big pop cinema sound.”
It’s the first time meeting for the singer and the producer, and Cochrane's first time in a New York City studio, and they are using her preferred method, which she calls “individually cooking.” Cochrane, casual in black leggings with her ballet flats half kicked off, types into the Notes App on her MacBook. Her blondish-reddish dyed hair recalls an early Lana Del Rey. She stops occasionally to hum a melody line into her iPhone. Benzi offers options: Does she want a synth bass or a regular bass? (Synth, of course.) What about the octave? Let’s take it down a half step. No, a full. At the one-and-a-half hour mark, she’s got a hook. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, she’s got the chorus and overarching theme. Slowly, it all starts to congeal into something resembling a pop song.
At the end of the four-hour session, they have a soon-to-be shimmering disco-pop chorus, inspired by Cochrane’s recent breakup—a potential anthem for ending a relationship and realizing you’re alright, actually. “I could cry on cue/but it’d just be a lie,” she sings, swinging up into the notes with a vocal flare that feels reminiscent of MUNA or Chappell Roan.
Cochrane is a Seattle-born pop star on the rise. She already has a couple viral TikTok hits and CAA backing, signed to the independent label S-Curve Records (perhaps best known for its string of early 2000s hits, including Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” and Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom”).
Six months ago, Cochrane left the same golf course job where she’d been working since she was 14 and moved to Los Angeles on the back of the success of her biggest hit to date, the euphoric “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night,” which has over 3.8 million plays on Spotify. The comments sections on her videos are filled with things like “here before it blows up,” and “the people aren’t here yet… but they will be,” and “this is my proof i was here before the stadium tours.” Her second EP, Male Validation and Other Drugs, dropped March 27, and in seven smartly written, well-crafted songs, it communicates something clear: This is an artist who can hold her own in an exciting class of pop upstarts who are on the rise after the Sabrina/Chappell breakout wave.
All of this is not the beginning of her story, but it is a beginning. As she embarks on her first full-length album, which she’s already written a few songs for, Avery Cochrane is on the cusp of something that could become either a hill to climb or a cliff to spring off of, breathless and suspended in the air.
“I keep referring to it as summer vacation, but being anxious, like when you were a kid, counting down the days; having this internal timer in the back of your head like, Oh, summer vacation's about to end,” Cochrane says over lunch after the studio session. “I'm anxious about that. I don't want to have to go back to school. I don't want to have to go back to the real world. I'm like, When is this all going to get taken away from me?”
Cochrane grew up as the baby of the family with an older brother. Her mom helps rich people organize their belongings before a move. (A plus: They often want to discard designer clothes, leaving Cochrane with a sizable collection.) Her dad works at a small health care publishing company in Seattle and is a baseball coach. They were not a musical family, but she stumbled into it anyway. She journaled obsessively and wrote songs in secret so as not to seem “weird” at the age when you just want to be cool. In high school, she played softball, sang in jazz choir, and dabbled in theater. She was Troy Bolton, she jokes, except she was just in the ensemble of Hairspray.
Cochrane left Seattle to study journalism at San Diego State University in 2019, then ditched the journalism major once the pandemic hit and moved back in with her parents, realizing she didn’t know what she wanted to do yet. During those 2020 months, she wrote songs and began recording them. She didn’t re-enroll at SDSU, and instead took some production and music-theory classes at a local community college, while working customer service jobs and writing more songs. But in spring 2022, she went back to SDSU; she finished her degree in 2024, this time in political science.
Some of those experiences have made their way into her music. In “Griever,” off the EP, she drops a line, “I even got fired as the restaurant singer”—which is partly true. One of her jobs (in addition to golf course caddy, server, and more) was as a cover singer in a seafood restaurant.
“It was like a soft firing. I was a good singer, but I wasn't that confident,” Cochrane recalls. “But it was for the money, and the money was really good. They just stopped putting me on the schedule, which I was like, ‘What the f*ck? I make an extra thousand bucks a month with this job.’” After repeated calls to try to understand why, she got an answer: “[Apparently,] the restaurant wants somebody more professional in the cover-singing world,” she says with a laugh. She had been reading the lyrics from her iPad while the other singers knew the songs by heart. “But still, you should let a girl know.”
“Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night” changed everything. Though it musically feels descended from “Pink Pony Club” now, the track actually began as a singer-songwriter ballad, more reflective of the early songs Cochrane was making. She paid homage to this origin with the “Alone in My Bedroom” version, which draws attention to her lyrics about reckoning with the idealized images we make up of people, the ways we contort ourselves to fit into other people’s projections of who we should be.
Cochrane had an instinct that “Shapeshifting” would resonate with people. (It didn’t hurt that she wrote it while working through The Artist’s Way, which encourages you to explore and embrace your inner creative voice.) “I would listen on the way to my job and be like, I just feel like there's something here,” she says. “I sent it to my girlfriend at the time, and she called me at work and was like, ‘This is it. This is your hit. This is it.’”
But the song didn’t actually come out until a year-and-a-half later, after it had been recorded three different times. “If my label hadn't found me and I hadn't met them or decided to work with them, it would have been released as a singer-songwriter, low-budget production,” she says, “which, love low-budget production, but now that I know what it can be, I'm so glad we went the pop route with it.”
Cochrane is still getting used to the trappings that come with having a label. In the studio with Benzi, she says she feels a certain amount of pressure. It’s different than writing songs alone in your room. Later, she explains, that pressure is multifaceted: It’s understandably weird to go into a studio with one or two people you don’t really know and “bare your soul to strangers.” It can be challenging to articulate exactly what you want, if something sounds bad or good to your ear, if it fits with the idea of the song in your head. And even in the best possible label-and-producer situation, there’s an innate pressure that comes with limits on time and resources; in the case of today's session, “there's the pressure to come up with something in four hours.” Benzi and Cochrane discuss this in the studio, talking about how wild it is when artists bang out complete songs start to finish in a day.
“I feel like I remember seeing an interview with Phoebe Bridgers and she said that she knew within the first 20 minutes of a session whether or not she was going to like the song or enjoy the session or if she wanted to go home,” Cochrane says. “Fortunately and unfortunately, I do too. But I feel too much of a people pleaser to be like, ‘I don't like this direction.’”
There is also a pressure that's specific to being at this stage of your career, when anticipation and potential are so high. There’s the pressure of her TikTok virality, which nabbed her a record deal but can also become a trap for musicians—you can become obsessed with the validation of watchers who see only 30 seconds of a song. If she’s not careful, Cochrane says, “I find myself asking, ‘Okay, what's the most viral-able part of the song?’” She has to go back to herself to shake that mindset. But the stakes are high.
“Right now, especially, because I feel like I do have traction moments, and I don't want to fumble,” Cochrane says. “I don't want to drop the ball. And I've made a lot of bad art before.”
Fortunately, she seems to like what she and Benzi came up with a few hours ago. We’re in the car after lunch on the way to her first of two shows, this one at Nightclub 101 in the East Village. Cochrane is reflecting on her busy morning, and how she’d describe the reason for that instinctual feeling that the session went well. “I think it's because we did collaborate on the chords,” she says, recalling how they sat at the piano. “Sometimes, honestly, it is just an interpersonal thing."
She says further, "Today I thought Benzi was super friendly and funny and chill, but especially in LA, sometimes you're in a session with somebody where it's like, I don't think I would hang out with you outside of work, or even [that] I would want to work with you…. I just feel like you want to work with humans that you would invite to your birthday party.”
Cochrane is in a speed-dating era as she continues to develop her sound, which currently draws on a lot of ’70s and ’80s pop. (Her new EP has six lead producers across seven songs.) She does see the appeal of working with just one or two producers, a la Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff, or Chappell Roan and Dan Nigro, especially when diving into really emotional, personal material.
The breakup, for example, is on her mind as she works on this next record. “Losing Streak” captures some of the falling apart between Cochrane and her ex-girlfriend, who she calls her "first serious queer relationship.” (Cochrane uses bisexual or pansexual for herself, but isn’t too pressed about labels.) That four-year relationship shaped many of the ideas on Male Validation and Other Drugs that she could see coming to some kind of resolution on the full-length album.
“I think after historically mostly being with men, there was a lot I had to learn and go through and unlearn,” Cochrane says. “That's why I was motivated to make my project about the male gaze, because that continued to seep into my actions and thoughts and behaviors, even in a sapphic relationship.”
As Cochrane figures out the sounds to go along with her lyrics, she’s developing her pop star aesthetic and performance style, which, she says, has felt overwhelming in the past. “I never really had an idea of what I wanted to be visually,” she shares. With a team behind her now, including a creative director for her music videos, it’s easier. She’s learning what she likes and doesn’t. “I want it to be campy. I want it to have queer themes, but not super overt,” she says. “I want it to be feminine, but I'm open to it changing and expanding. I want to look good.”
She already has a theatricality to her approach: At Nightclub 101, she wears a big black faux-fur coat and sunglasses as she wades through the crowd to get to the stage, phones flashing in her face, conjuring the image of a beleaguered celebrity as she begins singing “Griever.”
Cochrane drops the coat to reveal a shiny silver bodysuit, flips her hair, winks at the audience. Suddenly, she is not Avery, a regular 24-year-old in leggings and flats, hunched over a laptop. She is a Pop Star. She wins over the crowd, cracking jokes and introducing new fans to bits of lore, including a nonsense word—"intricities” instead of “intricacies”—she recorded for her song “Losing Streak.” Onstage, she has a fan flip a coin to decide which word she’ll sing live in the performance.
Earlier in the car, Cochrane said she was journaling about the show this morning, working through the anxieties of knowing there would be a lot of industry people in the audience. “I need to keep in mind that I'm not performing for anybody,” she noted. “I just have the opportunity to express myself onstage. When it starts to feel like a performance, then I know I'm doing something wrong.”
Later, when the show is done, the stage lights gone dark, she’s barefoot on the club floor surrounded by friends and well-wishers. She’s not quite the Avery I met that morning, and not quite the glittering Pop Star who just left the stage. Something in between. Something still being formed. It’s all building to something. She puts on the prop coat, heads out into the night, on her way to sing “Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night” to a cheering crowd of girls and gays at the Williamsburg queer bar Oberon on a Tuesday.
“All I ever wanted was to not work at this golf course anymore, not work at this restaurant anymore, not sing cover songs anymore,” Cochrane says. “Maybe now I can dream a little bit bigger.”
