googly eyes

Deza, burnout, and a name nobody had taken

The artist who records as googly eyes — she shortens it to googs — came up in Houston singing in church, and was raised Christian until she was 22. Her training is formal: a year studying opera, two years at Belmont University in Nashville, then a further stretch of schooling in Norway. She has said her parents gave her a DAW when she was 18, which is where the production half of the job started.

Before this project there was another one. She ran an act called Deza for several years, and by her own account it left her burnt out and unsupported, with the feeling of raging against the machine in a way that was doing her no good. Her description of what went wrong is less about commercial failure than about the relationship itself: she needed to reset her connection to music, because music, like any creative art, is a relationship.

The reset was deliberately unserious. In a June 2026 interview she described the project's origin as a Spotify burner account — she was high with a friend in Los Angeles and decided she needed a weird name that nobody had claimed. That is the whole premise: no expectations attached, nothing riding on it, so the material could be as strange as it wanted to be. Everything on the early releases was written, recorded and produced by her alone.

The open call, and Starlet

In 2023 she was selected through an artist-development open call run by Tove Lo and Flume. What she sent them was not a tidy pitch — she submitted songs in bulk, a pile of demos rather than a curated three-track package, and that volume is what got her through.

The result was announced in August 2024: googly eyes became the first outside artist signed to Pretty Swede Records, the independent label Tove Lo founded in 2022, in partnership with Neon Gold, the imprint behind early releases from Charli XCX and Marina & The Diamonds. Tove Lo's line on signing her was short — an incredible artist, writer and producer, with an EP full of gold.

That EP, Starlet, arrived on 27 September 2024, with 'Bareback on the Motherfucking Plains', 'Internet Star' and 'Mid-Leap' leading it. The writing on it is specific rather than aspirational: 'Starlet Sellout, Pageant Princess' takes Sylvia Plath's fig-tree passage as its frame and applies it to the isolation of her own career and what she gave up for it, while 'Brand New Bitch' sits closer to self-acceptance than to confidence. She has described the method as standing at the edge of the uncharted landscape of her feelings, in the hope that it gives other people a map through their own.

A side credit raised her profile further: 'Jesus and John Wayne', her 2025 collaboration with Joy Oladokun and August Ponthier, was included in NPR's 125 songs of 2025.

Two weeks in a room with Tove Lo and Flume

paint me like one of your fav american girls, released on 13 March 2026 through Pretty Swede, Neon Gold and Virgin, is five songs: 'I Don't Go Out', 'Feel Like I Died', 'Made Of', 'Bruises on the Peach' and 'E V E R Y W H E R E'. Tove Lo and Flume co-wrote across the whole tracklist and Flume co-produced, which makes it the first thing she has not done by herself.

She spent two weeks in the studio with both of them and has been blunt about what that meant structurally — a three-way compromise, with each of the three influences still audible in the finished mix rather than blended out. Her own favourite is 'E V E R Y W H E R E', the one she wrote alone, a straight love song.

'Bruises on the Peach' was the lead single and sets out the record's argument. Her gloss on it: to be known and loved deeply means handing over all your fears and insecurities and pain points, which is to say love requires giving the person who loves you the best weapons against you. Reviewers picked up the gap the EP works in — large sonic moments next to small lyrical ones, synth-pop production carrying material that stays awkward and personal underneath it.

Where she stands in October 2026

2026 has been spent almost entirely in the opening slot, which is how most people have encountered her. She supported Ashnikko's Smoochies tour through the spring: the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles on 20 March, alongside Princess Nokia, then a run of theatre and ballroom dates in May that took in The Fillmore in Charlotte on the 8th, Stage AE in Pittsburgh on the 12th, The Fillmore Philadelphia on the 13th, Hammerstein Ballroom in New York on the 15th and History in Toronto on the 19th.

Her largest stage so far came on 27 September 2026, at All Things Go in Washington DC, held at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. In a September 2026 interview she was still framing the career in terms of the sheer quantity of songs she had sent Tove Lo and Flume to get here.

She is currently out as support on EMEI's Night at the Opera Tour, which reached the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis on 10 October 2026, Thalia Hall in Chicago on the 11th and The Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 13 October. Beyond that, the next block is already booked: she opens Chelsea Cutler's IS THIS THE END? tour across February and March 2027, with dates at The Salt Shed in Chicago on 19 February, The Fillmore Minneapolis on the 23rd, South Side Ballroom in Dallas on the 25th, The Van Buren in Phoenix on 3 March, The Bellwether in Los Angeles on the 4th, The Observatory North Park in San Diego on the 5th and the Knitting Factory in Boise on the 10th.

What has not happened yet is a headline tour of her own, or a full-length album. Three support runs inside twelve months, across three different headliners' audiences, is the stage she is at.

The twenty-minute problem, solved

A support slot on a hyperpop bill is an unforgiving format, and the approach she has settled on is to treat the EP as the spine and bracket it with the older, rougher material. In Charlotte on 8 May she opened with 'Bareback on the Motherfucking Plains', ran straight through 'I Don't Go Out', 'Feel Like I Died', 'Made Of', 'Bruises on the Peach' and 'E V E R Y W H E R E', and closed on 'Brand New Bitch' — seven songs, the 2026 EP in sequence between two from Starlet.

The reviews from the Ashnikko run have been unusually warm for an opener. A Los Angeles write-up of the Shrine show described her arriving in a floor-length skirt and a loose sparkling top and moving like a faerie across the stage, and reached for Florence Welch and Stevie Nicks in their early days as the comparison — a large claim for a 20-minute set, but a consistent one with what the Pittsburgh coverage found, where the same long skirt made her appear to float and the distorted vocal over alt-pop production was described as a sugar rush in audio form. Pittsburgh also recorded the kind of detail that only happens live: her bracelet came apart and scattered across the stage mid-song.

The repeated note across the spring reviews is surprise — audiences arriving for the headliner and not expecting the opener to be the thing they talk about afterwards. The classical training is the mechanism: it is a voice built for a room, placed on top of production that is doing something much weirder.