Laura Bettinson’s multifaceted career has found the Midlands-hailing artist leaping seamlessly from the technicolor avant-garde pop of FEMME and the cerebral intensity of Ultraísta to the fresh, wonky electronica of lau.ra. On the heels of a slew of new singles, we ask what initiated her new direction, and discover how lockdown has fuelled a new studio approach

“I really should have been here five years ago, producing my own music,” states Laura Bettinson, the 33 year-old Rugby-born artist whose marked successes in the guises of FEMME and as one third of Ultraísta, haven’t stopped her from deviating her focus on becoming a completely selfsufficient composer, producer and performer.

Laura’s infectious debut as FEMME, Educated, was the first of many stunningly off-kilter pop bangers, while her side-project Ultraísta, alongside Radiohead’s mighty producer Nigel Godrich and REM/Beck player Joey Waronker, serves as an ongoing experimental musical vehicle, and yielded a second record right on the cusp of lockdown last year.

Now adopting the new moniker of lau.ra – and dropping some sublime new releases at a rapid rate (such as the irresistible Don’t Waste My Time and the hypnotic I’ll Wait), Bettinson explains to us how she’s taken complete control of every stage of the musicmaking process.

cm: Hi Laura, taking it right back to the beginning, when did you first discover your affinity for music, and how did that lead you to starting your career?

LB: “Well, I trained my voice by imitating other pop stars when I was growing up. I grew up in a small town in the Midlands and there wasn’t that much music coming through there, but I was exposed to a lot of mainstream pop. So I learned to sing from copying people that I saw. I started writing my own music from about the age of 16. At that stage it was all just piano and voice.

“It wasn’t until I moved to London at age 18 that I discovered live electronic music, and realised that I didn’t have to take a piano to gigs. I could just get everything into a suitcase and start messing around with loop stations and samplers. I began compiling loads of loops from free sample websites and putting them into this little loop station, so at that stage I’d build my tracks over them.

“A couple of years into that I met Nigel Godrich. He’d heard about my solo show and was very intrigued by it. So we became friends, and then the band Ultraísta started with him and Joey. I then launched myself as FEMME, which I think was an antidote to Ultraísta in some ways. I’d never grown up with a desire to be in bands; Ultraísta is amazing, but it’s very collaborative. There is a lot of compromise from everybody to get to where we need to be creatively. Off the back of that I decided to go full throttle with pop.