There is a version of this story in which North West is simply a celebrity child doing celebrity child things, her every move a footnote in her parents’ larger narrative. The North West debut EP, N0rth4evr, released in May, makes that reading very difficult to sustain.
She is 13 years old. She has blue twin tails styled after the Japanese virtual pop idol Hatsune Miku. She wears Rick Owens Geobaskets and facial piercing stickers that catch studio light like jewellery. She dropped a six-track record that samples Meg & Dia and the Vocaloid composer Kikuo, stitches rage rap against hyperpop against emo against alt-metal, and does so with the conviction of someone who has been thinking about this for longer than most people assume. When asked what the worst piece of advice she has ever received was, she does not hesitate: ‘To start my career later. It’s like, nah, this is my hobby, this is what I like to do, this is what I wanna do with my life.’
From Vultures to N0rth4evr: A Track Record Before the Debut
What the EP’s arrival in May obscures slightly is how much ground North had already covered. According to Apple Music, she contributed a verse in Japanese to ¥$’s album Vultures 2, a detail that reframes the Japanese tag ‘ノースちゃん (North-chan)’ stamped across N0rth4evr‘s productions from a stylistic flourish into something more like a sustained commitment. She also appeared on FKA twigs’ 2025 album EUSEXUA, a record that attracted its own considerable critical attention, placing North in a lineage of artists working at the stranger, more texturally ambitious end of contemporary pop. And before the EP landed, she released her first solo studio single, ‘PIERCING ON MY HAND’, in February, as Dazed noted in its own coverage of the record. The EP, in other words, was not a debut from nowhere; it was the consolidation of a body of work assembled, quietly, over years.
N0rth4evr itself is maximalist by design. Buzzing synthesisers, jolts of electric guitar, and thumping club beats run through the six tracks. The titles (‘H0w Sh0uld ! f33l’, ‘D!e’, ‘Th!s t!m3’) read like relics of a Myspace bio, which is partly the point: the leetspeak orthography is both an aesthetic choice and a kind of cultural archaeology, an adolescent reaching back to an internet era she did not inhabit. The EP samples Kikuo’s ‘Love Me, Love Me, Love Me’, a song that became a cult object through its dissonance between saccharine melody and unsettling lyrical content. North knows what she is sampling, and why.
The North West Debut EP in Her Own Words
The interview for Dazed‘s autumn 2026 issue, available internationally from 10 September, takes place at a studio in Calabasas. Gus Van Sant, whose credits include My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting, is the photographer. Kim Kardashian is present throughout, protective and discreet. North arrives in a Miku bathrobe, sweeps through final touch-ups, and then, once on set, requests Babyxsosa on the speakers. She lists Bktherula, Baby Osama and Babyxsosa as the female artists she is most into, and says that hearing Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape was the catalyst for the North West debut EP: ‘When I heard that, I was like, “Wow, this is life-changing.” I told him that Pink Tape changed my life.’
The record’s emotional register is, perhaps unexpectedly, candid. ‘Everywhere I go, feelin’ like the wrong way / I can’t even act my age,’ she raps on the title track, before adding that ‘I ain’t trustin’ no one, they all shady.’ These are not unusual sentiments for a teenager to hold, but the circumstances that produce them in North’s case are unusually compressed: she has been photographed continuously since before she was born, attended the Met Gala in utero, and stole a moment at Paris Fashion Week at six years old with a line about clothes that became, briefly, the most quoted thing on the internet. On ‘W0ah’ she notes that she was ‘signin’ autographs in elementary’. The lyric is not boast so much as plain description.
She made a surprise appearance on stage with Molly Santana in May, and performed her first ever solo festival set at Summer Smash in June. She prays before shows. She rehearses every day, having previously gone on stage to ‘just see what happens’. The artist she was starstruck by most recently? Lil Uzi Vert, at their Summer Smash set. ‘I cannot believe it even happened; I’m still starstruck,’ she says. Her karaoke song of choice is Katy Perry’s ‘Last Friday Night’. Her holy grail fashion item is a Michael Jackson jacket, gifted by her mother, and her Rick Owens Geobaskets. She wants to work at Starbucks next year, when she turns 14, for the experience of a regular job. She paints sunsets in oil paint, though the pigment gets on her hands and won’t come off easily.
The autumn 2026 issue of Dazed is on sale internationally from 10 September.
