MEET BONZAI.

Her real name is Cassia O’Reilly, a 20-year-old singer from Wicklow – currently based in London – who’s just released a video for her latest single I Feel Alright.

And it’s banging

So much so that it’s creating waves across the Atlantic as well as closer to home.

And when the New Yorker released their “Summer Listening Music Recommendations” on Thursday, Bonzai’s single was right at the top.

It’s high praise:

It starts playfully, with a beat that could have been composed using a trunkful of toys, and with Bonzai in the middle of a daydream: “Look out my window, out my window / Lust for another life.” The momentum increases, building not to a grand statement but to the opposite of one. “I feel alright,” Bonzai declares, using one of those gratifyingly blank pop phrases that have been worn smooth by dozens or hundreds of songs, leaving only some familiar syllables and a faint hint of a feeling.

They go on to say that I Feel Alright is Bonzai’s first big statement, and they’re expecting big things to come:

Bonzai has released a handful of solo tracks online, but “I Feel Alright” is, in a sense, her début: the first single from a solo album that she is recording for Columbia Records, and a hint that Bonzai might be plotting a path out of the underground.

They’re not the only ones.

She’s making “boundary-blurring R&B”, according to Dazed

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She speaks about growing up in Wicklow, or as the question states: “living in a small town that existed in the shadow of a big city – Dublin”:

I have an appreciation of the countryside. A lot of the time when I write, I’ll try and go to the countryside. That’s when I really started writing, with my friend who lived in Wicklow – but she lived in the nice part, where all the famous people go. But I don’t know, I am a city girl. Actually, maybe you are onto something – when I’m in London I don’t write as well.

She’s “laughing off the hype” according to Daze, but NME called I Feel Alright a “serious summer banger” only last month

So it might very well be justified.

Onwards and upwards.

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