A Los Angeles-based vocalist, songwriter, and studio craftsman who studied jazz at the university level, Genevieve Artadi shapes intricate, genre-blending pop songs that move fluidly through contrasting emotional registers. She first drew listeners as frontwoman of Pollyn, the independent electronic group whose sound merged trip-hop, disco, and new wave textures, before launching the duo KNOWER alongside Louis Cole in 2009; the pair quickly attracted wide online notice through their unconventional renditions of mainstream singles and their high-energy, meticulously captured live clips. Additional partnerships followed with Snarky Puppy, Jacob Collier, and Thundercat, while her own releases granted unrestricted artistic scope. The 2020 album Dizzy Strange Summer fuses vocal jazz, dream pop, and dance rhythms in a playful yet introspective manner; its 2023 successor, Forever Forever, retains those ingredients yet delivers them in a more compact, intricate, and polished package.
Both of Artadi’s parents performed pop music, and she trained on classical piano before earning a bachelor’s degree in Jazz Studies. Within Pollyn she handled vocals, bass, and keyboards alongside electronic musician Adam Weissman and guitarist Anthony Cava; the band’s first release was the 2003 EP Songs for Sale, followed by three full-length records that began with 2009’s This Little Night, an effort incorporating Afro-beat, synth pop, and trip-hop. After meeting multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Louis Cole, she co-founded KNOWER in 2009; early internet traction came from their reinterpretations of material by Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, leading to the duo’s debut album, Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi, issued in October 2010. Later projects such as 2013’s Let Go expanded on the home-recorded blend of pop, jazz, funk, and drum’n’bass by adding denser, more luminous arrangements and folding in dubstep and EDM elements to produce an expansive strain of maximalist pop.
Between band commitments Artadi assembled standalone pieces, resulting in the self-produced collection of vignettes Genevieve Lalala that surfaced in 2015. KNOWER’s fourth album, Life, arrived in 2016, with the pair continuing to appear both as a duo and with an expanded ensemble. Guest spots appeared on recordings by guitarist Allen Hinds, bassist Sam Wilkes, vocalist Jacob Collier, and additional artists; she also contributed to the track “When You’re Ugly” on Cole’s 2018 Brainfeeder release Time. Once Artadi finished her second solo project she planned an independent release, yet Cole presented the recordings to the label, which promptly scheduled them. Produced by Artadi and featuring contributions from Cole, Wilkes, and saxophonist David Binney, Dizzy Strange Summer reached Brainfeeder in July 2020. The follow-up, Forever Forever, was tracked at El Desierto Studio in Mexico with Cole, keyboardist/vocalist Chiquita Magic, and guitarist/vocalist Pedro Martins among the musicians and appeared on Brainfeeder in 2023.
