Even if you haven’t heard Mette’s music yet, she may look a little familiar. The head-spinningly multitalented artist has had a number of past creative lives: There was her star turn as the lead dancer in N.E.R.D. and Rihanna’s 2017 video for “Lemon,” which saw her sit to have her head shaved by none other than RiRi herself. Or perhaps you remember her as the dancer Justice opposite Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona in Hustlers, or her brief but memorable appearance as the decommissioned “Video Girl Barbie” in Greta Gerwig’s recent box office smash. It feels like, for the past six years or so, Mette’s star has been steadily on the rise—but now, with the impending release of her first EP, Mettenarrative, on September 22, she finally feels fully prepared to step into the spotlight.
“Music has always been my first love,” she says over Zoom from London; she divides her time between there and Los Angeles. “Anything that I’ve done artistically has always been to get closer and closer and more devoted to that love. I really wanted to be an artist growing up, but dance was where I felt most confident in my abilities.” So much so, Mette explains, that she has spent much of her life and career feeling almost reluctant to call herself a musician. “Before, I would always just say, ‘Yeah, I’m a dancer,’” she says. “Even when I started making this EP back in 2019, I didn’t tell most of the people I knew, my friends and collaborators. It just still felt so far away. Now, I feel like I can truly claim that for myself.”
In May, Mette released the arresting music video for “Mama’s Eyes,” directed by Camille Summers-Valli. (“I’ve never felt that kind of trust with someone behind the camera before,” she says of her relationship with Summers-Valli, who has become a close collaborator.) The visual—which showcases Mette’s dizzying dance skills, alongside intercut footage of everything from nature documentaries to archival nightclub footage—served as a powerful reintroduction to Mette, the artist.
Its follow-up, “Van Gogh,” arrived today—and while it may have the same infectious, foot-tapping beats as its predecessor, and come accompanied by a similarly eye-popping video, the song is a different beast entirely, displaying Mette’s lighter, more humorous side. (“I could be Van Gogh, shawty, if you’ll be my muse,” she sings with a wink, before offering the highest of compliments to her mysterious subject: “You got your edges laid down like queen Janet Jackson!”)
“I was in the studio with my collaborator on the song, Jonny Latimer, and I felt like I had no inspiration that day and nothing to write about, so I said, I need a muse,” Mette remembers. “So the song was written almost as a kind of message in a bottle to a future muse. What would I say to this person?” It was when she and Summers-Valli began discussing how to bring it to life visually, however, that the song took on a deeper meaning. “I realized that when I was writing the song, I was actually talking about the muse within, and how I could inspire myself,” she says. “So we wanted to explore that in the video—and the plurality of identity.”
With zero bells and whistles—just a backdrop and Mette’s hypnotic dance moves—the video is a testament to her abilities as a performer. Shuffling through a series of increasingly outré looks, styled by Flora Huddart, Mette spins, dips, and twirls in everything from an archival Jean Paul Gaultier corset teamed with a Vivienne Westwood tee from her own wardrobe, to some bedraggled Jackie O. cosplay, with bouffant hair and a deconstructed tweed suit by designer Arthur Siéger, and an Alexander McQueen men’s suit for an American Psycho moment—complete with bloodied nose and teeth. (Mette herself has become something of a McQueen muse recently, walking the runway in a number of their recent shows and also appearing in its spring 2023 campaign.)
“I think what’s always interesting to me is multiplicity,” Mette says of the chameleonic array of identities she inhabits throughout the video. “And a part of that is making something heartfelt, but also being inspired by camp. Those might be seen as polar opposites, but they’re really not—they’re existing on the same plane.” She also notes that this shapeshifting quality—which she traces all the way back to being a dancer in L.A., driving from auditions to rehearsals with every kind of wardrobe in the back of her car to change into—is something she’s learned to appreciate. “I can slot myself into these different identities, or spend the day as a different archetype—I’ve done that so many times in my life,” she adds. “But I realized that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not being true to myself. It’s very liberating to come to terms with the idea that no human being is one-dimensional.”
The journey to reach this sense of self-assurance has been a long one. It began, of course, in childhood, growing up in Minnesota, where Mette “was in band choir, I went to musical theater camp, all of that.” After moving to Los Angeles, she auditioned to become one of Pharrell’s backing dancers, and spent over five years on the road with him, absorbing everything she could. “I actually got to watch them work in the studio, and it was because I could see the process in real time that I realized I could identify with musicians,” Mette says. “Before, I would write poetry for songs, and make voice memos, but I didn’t know how the collaborative process in the studio worked, so that was a huge influence for me. Seeing how whole worlds of inspiration could flow through an artist, vocally, and lyrically, and it can become real.”
It was this same sense of freedom that she tried to channel when she first entered the studio in 2019 to write her own music, not long after she decided to retire from dancing professionally. “I was literally just chucking everything at the wall,” she says. “I’ve always wanted the studio to feel like a place where anything was possible.” Still, given the extraordinary rigor it took for her to reach the heady heights of her career as a dancer, it’s not difficult to imagine that her approach to music is driven by a similarly fierce dedication. “I take it very seriously,” she confirms. “I have a set of habits, and I make sure to stay disciplined. But you also have to find the freedom and the risk within it all, because that s what makes things interesting. If I want to be creative, I also have to be unbounded. Discipline can’t get too in the way—it has to be a balancing act.”
With “Mama’s Eyes” and “Van Gogh,” the fruits of that balancing act are finally coming to light. (When we speak on the day before the release of the latter, Mette is all but ecstatic about finally being able to share this long-gestating project with the world.) Today, it was also announced that she’s been signed to RCA in both the U.S. and the U.K., and the unveiling of her tour dates in the fall is imminent. “There’s nothing like being on stage and being witnessed in that moment,” says Mette. “I can’t wait to be back on stage and have that feeling again.”
Now, all of the moving parts of her varied career—the dancing, the acting, the songwriting, the performing—are coming into laser focus. “I have nothing to prove,” she adds, smiling from ear to ear. “Only to share.”
