Haute & Freddy

Two hired pens and a runaway circus

Michelle Buzz grew up in Houston and Lance Shipp in Detroit, and both ended up in Los Angeles doing the same unglamorous job: writing songs for other people. Buzz's credits include work for Katy Perry and Kylie Minogue; Shipp wrote and co-produced for Britney Spears, Calvin Harris and Rauw Alejandro. They met through industry circles, burnt out on the work, and spent about two years writing together at weekends with no commercial plan, bonding over theatrical music, The Phantom of the Opera and obscure avant-garde choral pieces.

What came out of that was not a conventional duo but a pair of characters. Haute and Freddy are presented as circus performers from several centuries ago who displeased their ringmaster and have been on the run since — a premise that licenses the tricorne hats, ruffled shirts, frilly collars and wigs, and a stage manner built on baroque and Renaissance costume rather than on current pop styling. The music underneath is mostly Eighties: synth-pop and new wave shapes with piano and keytar from Buzz and live drums and percussion from Shipp, with Pet Shop Boys, New Order, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Freddie Mercury and Lady Gaga all audible as reference points.

The project formally began in late 2024 with the singles "Scantily Clad" and "Anti-Superstar". The audience that assembled around it adopted a name — the Royal Court — and a habit of turning up in handmade costume, which has since become part of how the shows function.

Big Disgrace

Through 2025 the duo released "Fashion Over Function", "Shy Girl", "Sophie" and "Freaks", and played small rooms including the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the Bowery Ballroom in New York and the Slipper Room, alongside festival slots at Electric Forest, Austin City Limits, Treefort Music Fest and Portola. Spotify named them on its Artists To Watch list for 2026. Atlantic Records signed them in January 2026, the same month "Dance the Pain Away" appeared.

The debut album Big Disgrace followed on 13 March 2026. It reached number 92 on the UK sales chart and was included in Vogue's round-up of the best albums of 2026 so far. Reviewing it for OndaRock, Damiano Pandolfini scored it 7/10 and called it "one of the most fun debuts of the year", picking out "Fashion Over Function" for its Tubeway Army-style synth line, the heavily produced "Fields Of Versailles", the audience-pact anthem "I Like My People Weird" and "Sophie", which he traced back to Fleetwood Mac. His reservations were about craft showing through: the record's radio-readiness occasionally gives away the writers' day jobs, and he found the opener "Symphony For A Queen" slightly overblown.

"Touch Touch" arrived later in the year and has drawn roughly two million views on its video. Both it and "Dance the Pain Away" registered on the Estonian chart, at 62 and 67 respectively — a reminder that the streaming numbers and the ticket demand have been running well ahead of the chart positions.

The Carrie effect

The development that changed the duo's scale had nothing to do with a single. Mike Flanagan heard an unreleased demo of "Shy Girl" before Big Disgrace came out and rewrote the eighth and final episode of his Carrie adaptation, "AP Physics", around it. Speaking to Deadline in October 2026, he described the pair as having become the show's musical identity and the backbone of its score.

Carrie premiered on Prime Video on 7 October 2026. Close to the whole of Big Disgrace is threaded through the series; the lead character wears a Haute & Freddy t-shirt in the second and third episodes; and the duo recorded a new cover of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" that is used as prom music. A second original, "Do You Remember The Lilacs", was made as an Amazon Music Original for the show.

It is an unusual route into a mass audience — a horror showrunner reverse-engineering eight episodes from a demo — and it landed at the point where the touring had already outgrown the rooms that had been booked for it.

Where they stand now

The Big Disgrace Tour was announced on 5 March 2026, with an artist presale closing that night and general sale the following morning; Wasserman Music booked North America and Adele Slater booked Europe. The European opening leg ran from Bush Hall in London on 11 May through The Great Escape in Brighton on 14 May, London Calling in Amsterdam on 16 May and Le Zèbre de Belleville in Paris on 18 May. Twenty-four North American shows followed between 24 May and 3 October, ending at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis, after which the duo played the ZIG Festival in Rio de Janeiro on 9 October and São Paulo on 10 October.

The growth across those months is easy to measure. In March the duo were playing to rooms of around fifty people. By 2 June they had sold out two consecutive nights at the 1,100-capacity Warsaw in Brooklyn.

The current leg opened at Huxley's in Berlin on 4 November and runs through Le Botanique in Brussels on 6 November, the Stonewall Festival in The Hague on 7 November, Bürgerhaus Stollwerck in Cologne on 10 November, the Alhambra in Paris on 12 November, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow on 15 November, Academy 2 in Manchester on 17 November and Heaven in London on 18 November, with Galway and Dublin after that and two Mexico City shows in December. The London date is sold out and open to ages 14 and over.

On 23 October the duo released the single "Film Noir", written and produced by Buzz and Shipp with a video directed by Amalia Irons and the Gabriel cover as its B-side. Of the timing, they said they wanted the Halloween release to "feel as though the phantom himself created it", and that they "can always try to conjure as much drama and lust into 3:48 seconds". Australian headline dates were confirmed on 21 October: the Metro Theatre in Sydney on 2 March 2027, the Princess Theatre in Brisbane on 5 March and 170 Russell in Melbourne on 10 March, presented by Frontier Touring with Penny Drop and triple j, plus WOMADelaide and Golden Plains that month and Primavera Sound in Barcelona in June 2027.

Eighty minutes, two people and a clown troupe

The current show runs about 80 minutes and covers the whole of Big Disgrace plus the newest single. At the Wonder Ballroom in Portland on 12 September, reviewed for Spectrum Culture by Holly Hazelwood, it began with an animated prologue explaining the characters' circus origins, after which the pair emerged through a red velvet curtain dressed as a travelling circus train car. Buzz performed the opener in a papier-mâché rat mask made by a member of the audience, in Moulin Rouge-style costume with white-blonde curls and rouged cheeks; "Anti-Superstar", "Fashion Over Function", "Scantily Clad", "I Like My People Weird" and "Shy Girl" were among the songs played.

The staging escalates rather than holds. Two clown dancers join midway; in Portland the finale brought on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the Rubin Brothers with unicycles and trumpets, and Hazelwood wrote that "the stage succumbed to pure, gleeful chaos". The support slot that night went to a local clown duo, one of them playing sousaphone and upright bass while riding a unicycle. Buzz improvised birthday songs for two people in the crowd. Hazelwood's main criticism was structural rather than theatrical: with only vocals and drums carrying the live arrangements, she wondered what the band would sound like with a synth player, a guitarist or a bassist behind what she called an already formidable stage act, and found the cartoonish Transatlantic accent a fine line successfully walked.

The Brooklyn run in June, covered by NYS Music, worked the same way at larger scale, with vintage clowns, acrobats and stilt-walkers drawn from the New York troupe Fou Fou Ha!, mid-set sideshows, Elizabethan diction between songs and selected fans pulled up to play characters during "Scantily Clad". The Rubin Brothers opened. The reviewer noted how many of the Royal Court had spent hours hand-making their outfits for the night.