Vagabon Is an Indie Rock Game Changer

After finding community in New York’s underground rock scene, Lætitia Tamko wants to set a welcoming example for weird black girls just like her.
Image may contain Face Human Person Hair and Rug

Rising: Vagabon Is an Indie Rock Game Changer

Photo by: Photos by Ebru Yildiz

This week, we’re celebrating the past, present, and future of Pitchfork’s Rising series, which has offered profiles of exciting new artists for the last eight years.

Vagabon: “Fear & Force” (via SoundCloud)

In high school, Lætitia Tamko begged her parents for a guitar after hitting a wall trying to write songs without one. She learned how to to play using an instructional DVD. Early Taylor Swift songs seemed manageable, and she taught herself their simple chords, pleased at her ability to capture what she heard on the radio. She could never be on the radio herself, she thought, but it was fun to play. She put the guitar down, took up engineering and computer code, graduated college, and found a professional home for her circuit-board expertise.

But before she graduated, and with the encouragement of a friend, she wrote down and recorded some of the songs she had in her head. After posting them on Bandcamp, she was invited to perform at NYC underground mecca Silent Barn, where a new universe opened up for her. Most of the artists she played alongside, like Frankie Cosmos and Told Slant, weren’t perfect. But still they got onstage and soaked up applause from loving audiences. To Tamko, musicians either fiddled at home or played the Super Bowl halftime show; instead of feeling so far away from the artists she admired, she began to find new inspiration and influence on a smaller stage.

She warmed to her new peers’ wonky takes on rock and shaped Vagabon into a powerful band, with raw and loose electric guitar supporting her massive voice, a booming tenor writ small on her songs about regret and being short. Her forthcoming debut LP, Infinite Worlds, includes a number of re-recorded tracks from early on in her career. Some have new titles, too. “Sharks,” a song where Tamko describes herself as a “small fish,” was once tentative, ambling. Redubbed “The Embers,” it’s now a soft-to-loud statement of purpose.

“I don’t feel like a small fish all the time anymore,” says Tamko, a petite, smiley young woman usually topped by a watch cap. “Now I feel more rooted in myself, so I can sing the song.” In the video, she dances in a pet store in front of aquariums. Whatever version of her felt tiny is nowhere to be found.

Being able to access the support to grow as an artist in the underground’s genial middle ground was a welcome surprise to Tamko, and in some ways—musically, socially—she has fit right in. But, when you talk to her about her everyday listening habits—basically Migos on infinite repeat—you get the sense she wouldn’t complain if that same scene was slightly less dweeby. Or a little more black. Indie rock stumbled onto Tamko as much as she stumbled onto it. She’s embraced the community but wishes there was a way for people like her—young black women—to know it existed, to benefit the same way she has, and perhaps provide some company.

Tamko was raised in Cameroon and moved to New York in her teens, first to Harlem then to suburban Yonkers. She did not fit in in either place. Students in Harlem teased her by asking if she was a boy or a girl because of her shaved head, a not-unusual style in Cameroon. In Yonkers, she was mostly ignored. That she’s finally found a shared sensibility in a DIY indie scene is a relief. But the scene caters to just some of her needs as a personable, quirky, thoughtful, funny musician. Her version of indie rock is also funky, catchy, punk, and her vocals elevate her songs above so many other charmingly off-key odes. Tamko’s voice is enormous but delicate, and she belts it with gusto throughout Infinite Worlds, spinning out little effortless arias amid songs Modest Mouse may have written in another life.

Tamko now has many musical friends steeped in the traditions of indie rock, and she relishes that this scene discovered her and expanded her purview. But she says there’s not a lot of people at shows and parties who look like her. How would it be different if there were? It’s a question that doesn’t leave her mind.

Pitchfork: Who are the girls you want to reach with your art?

Vagabon: Weird girls. Girls that are not celebrated, both in their communities and in the world. Obviously women of color, but specifically black women, because that’s who I represent. There are all these barriers in front of what you think you should do, and some of it involves not feeling like you have that knowledge: if you didn’t go to art school, or just feel like no one within your reach also identifies with what you’re doing. So for me, it’s more about—I don’t always feel comfortable being out here. If I hide, like I am naturally inclined to do, then I don’t further my desire to see more black girls making this kind of music, or just not being afraid to be here, because we’re outnumbered. If I can be one more number and have them see that, then they’ll be like, “I can do that” or, “I identify with this person, my skin color is dark, I’m not an ambiguous black girl.” This is for black women and this is for black men. This is for women of color and this is for girls. I want to be here and present, even if it’s uncomfortable, just so that I can get to the people that I would’ve loved to see when I was doubting in myself.

Can you ever not think about identity with Vagabon?

I can’t not think about it.

When is that good and when is that a burden?

It’s almost always good. It becomes a burden when it locks you into something. It’s especially important for me to reach beyond the community that I started playing music in. I love that community, but a lot of people who look like me aren’t in that community. I can’t reach them if they can’t see me, and that’s what I want to do. I almost don’t care about what a specific community thinks about me because I know what I want to reach, and I know that my being and my music and my shows can’t not be political. I can’t dilute it, and I don’t want to.

I just also don’t want to be put into a box: “Look at this black musician.” It’s like: I’m black. It is so clear. I do not deny it. I am doing this for all the black people like me who didn’t know that they could be in spaces like I am in. I have no crazy entry point. I had no friend who brought me in. I had no music school connection, and I want other people to feel like it’s OK to penetrate that scene. It’s cool.

Growing up, did you have that same relationship with an artist or piece of art that you want somebody else to have with you?

Man, not really. Not really. And that could be due to me not knowing. Because there’s so much that I don’t know. It could’ve been out here, and I know that it probably is, but I wasn’t privy to it. That’s why I always talk about “the bubble” and how to expand that bubble, because I just saw the people who were on the radio. And that seems so inaccessible.

You don’t have to do any work to hear what is on the radio.

Exactly. I know we have Beyoncé. I know we have the whole hip-hop game on lock. Black people are killing it in so many ways. But as someone who didn’t know what they were doing three years ago, it was like, Who can I see that also had no idea what they were doing? All of these people are fucking seasoned professionals, and it doesn’t seem like something you can do when you’re listening to them. So stumbling into people who are making independent music in their bedrooms—it was like, Holy shit, this is a game changer. I was so stoked on it.

What do you want to say that you didn’t get to hear?

That it’s uncomfortable to do this. Really. Everyone seems really put-together, and I understand why it’s important to seem to hold yourself together and be resilient. But that just gave me the impression that if something felt uncomfortable, then you just weren’t meant for it.

I know a lot more artists now than I did back then, but I know that, 99 percent of the time, all of them are uncomfortable in one way or the other. Maybe they’re freaking out that so many people are taking photos of you at your show at all these weird angles, and you’re tagged in them. Or it’s hard to get yourself to a show because you can’t get out of bed. It seems trivial, but that shit is real. And it doesn’t stop people from making music. My will to be present and successful in this—in the ways that I think of success, which is getting in front of all those people, constantly making better and better music—it doesn’t come without that discomfort.

But in this moment, I still feel really powerful about saying, “Yeah, I’m just fucking real. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes I don’t want to watch myself, sometimes I can’t even look at myself, and the world is shit.” There’s a lot of things that say people like me shouldn’t have confidence. Well here I am, even though it’s not all the way there. Even after years of working on this and hearing from other people about what they thought I should be, here I am. I may not be 100 percent sure of myself, but I’m sure enough to still be here.