The Eternal Influence of Imogen Heap

For the past two decades, the British singer-songwriter has balanced machine wizardry with startling humanity in her electronic pop. The world has finally caught up.
Imogen Heap
Graphic by Marina Kozak

What was your first brush with Imogen Heap? Was it hearing the symphonic flutters of “Let Go” in Garden State, as Zach Braff’s character chases after the girl of his dreams? Or watching Marissa Cooper on The O.C. realize she shot someone, set to the vocoder harmonies of “Hide and Seek”? Maybe you encountered Heap’s otherworldly vocals through a Jason Derulo radio hit, the far reaches of SoundCloud, or aesthetic TikTok. There are a million points of possible contact with the singer-songwriter-producer, whose rococo electronic pop is full of wild imagination and digital idiosyncrasy. These days, even pouty infants are entranced by her music: Heap’s “The Happy Song” is purportedly the world’s first composition scientifically proven to cheer up babies. As one satisfied parent wrote in a New York Times endorsement, “From the point of view of sheer effectiveness… [it is] the greatest song ever recorded.”

A 6’2” British woman whose nest-like hair, parasols, and petticoats attracted interview questions like how kooky are you?, Heap helped define the popular soundtrack of the early 2000s. Her solo work and sole album as a part of the electronic duo Frou Frou have become touchstones for the millennials who grew up hearing Heap’s otherworldly, oft-modulated vocals on-screen. Now 44, the pop innovator continually resurfaces as a point of inspiration. Heap’s vocals have become go-to sample material for hip-hop artists, popping up in songs by A$AP Rocky, Mac Miller, Lil B, and more. Pop stars revere her for her ambitious songwriting and artistic autonomy: Taylor Swift described her as “one of the most interesting and unique artists”; Ariana Grande, “the woman who inspires my every move.” Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 country-disco opus, Golden Hour, purportedly began with the premise, “What would it sound like if Imogen Heap made a country album?” Heap’s music sounds like it could be released today, and not simply because the 2000s are trendy again.

Part of her longevity has to do with the vivid detailing in each song. “There are a lot of little things that you pick up the more you listen—something for everyone to take away,” says the producer Clams Casino, who has sampled Heap countless times, including in the cloud-rap classic “I’m God.” But it also owes to Heap’s openness to new media and technology, the varied detours her music might take. Thrilled by the idea of getting syncs in TV shows and movies, she has also liberally granted permission for other artists to interpret and recontextualize her work. “I love when people collaborate with my music,” she said in 2019. “I love that they have a life of their own.”

Raised in rural Essex, Heap spent many leisurely hours as a child improvising at the piano; to deceive her parents into believing she was practicing, she’d imitate Bach and Beethoven then whirl off in her own direction. As she recalled, “the more instruments I played, the more academic lessons I got called out of”—so she picked up the clarinet and cello. Her life took a turn at 12 when her parents separated and shipped her off to boarding school. Spatting with a teacher, Heap was banished to the music technology room and taught herself how to sample and sequence on an Atari console. She studied music at the prestigious BRIT School, was signed to a label by 18, and started her career as a throaty alt-rock singer in the late ’90s.

Heap’s most important creative partnership was put into motion when her manager sent her demo tape to British producer Guy Sigsworth, then the musical director for Björk. “It had her song ‘Come Here Boy,’ and I just love her voice so much,” Sigsworth tells me, with a slight swoon in his voice. Although they only wrote one song together for her nervy debut album, 1998’s I Megaphone, they became friends and started collaborating within Sigsworth’s experimental pop group, Acacia. When Heap was eventually dropped by her label, she and Sigsworth raced to make music together. They released their only album, 2002’s Details, as Frou Frou—a name plucked from a Rimbaud poem, French onomatopoeia for the swish of women’s skirts.

Both of them were delighted by the concept of sneaking complexity under a commercial surface, and so in addition to the downy sweetness of ’00s radio pop, Details has the slippery textures of electronic music, the sonorous opulence of classical, and the melancholia of trip-hop. “There was an ‘NSync song that sounded like Aphex Twin produced a boy band,” Sigsworth recalls. “I loved stuff like that, and it was a matter of how much we could get away with.” Nights of clubbing in East London, where drum’n’bass legends like Goldie and Aphrodite would play, seeped into their beats—like in the shuffling patter of “Let Go,” or the two-step skip of “Must Be Dreaming.”

“There is an unashamed intelligence in their music,” says the techno producer Jon Hopkins, who got his start playing keyboard for Heap during the I, Megaphone cycle. “There’s no question that Details was the most influential thing for me in my early 20s. I was just making crap versions of that.”

Heap and Sigsworth reveled in a kind of computational geekiness. Details got its title from the tiny blocks of sound they’d meticulously program and arrange in Pro Tools, which would sprawl into wild shapes. “I remember we worked so long on ‘Let Go,’ creating this kind of mosaic. Then one day, Immy says, ‘Have you noticed if you step back from the screen it spells ‘COCK’?” Sigsworth remembers, laughing. Proudly digital, the duo even inserted clicks into waveforms to create the illusion of audio files bumping into each other, inspired by experimentalists like German electronic trio Oval, who would slice CDs with knives to create glitches and skips. They were also compelled by remixes, and tried to recreate the uncanny feeling of a vocal melody floating above the instrumental; they’d wait to add beats until the very end of production, or write a melody so it’d never land on the home note of its key. “It was wanting to know that the vocal could go wherever it wanted,” Sigsworth said, “and it didn’t have to be dragged along by the music.”

All of this seems prescient, as Heap’s vocals did travel far beyond their original songs. Last year, Frou Frou received a new burst of attention after what was essentially a nightcored, drum’n’bass flip of their unreleased demo “A New Kind of Love” went viral, appearing in a famous Fortnite player’s stream and causing multiple versions of “A New Kind of Love” to spread on TikTok. (Frou Frou officially released the song this year.) In the song, Heap sings about a love that’s supercharged, so perfect as to feel “genetically altered.” Her voice cascades in the chorus in a way that feels like freefall: “Are you fa-ll-ing-in-love?” It is wispy and aerodynamic but also grounded, felt in the body like a sharp gasp. She rides syllables, leaping and plunging in a marvelous exploration of her range: EEE-oh-EEE-oh-Na-Na.

The dynamism of Details carried over into Heap’s solo work, like 2005’s Speak for Yourself, an album she mortgaged her flat to write, record, and engineer on her own. As if signaling a new technological dawn, the album opens with the beeps and whirrs of “Headlock,” like a city blinking itself awake. Speak for Yourself is frothy and accessible, but is distinguished by its many peculiar little elements: the cyborg gurgles and wiry guitars of “Daylight Robbery,” the rumble that interrupts the delicate chiming of “The Walk,” the argument with her boyfriend Heap embedded in the head-rushing piano ballad “The Moment I Said It.” The album’s most lasting song is, of course, “Hide and Seek”—the haunting a cappella aria that helped popularize the vocoder in contemporary pop music. Years after its placement in The O.C.—and the legendary SNL spoof of that scene—the song is still making its way into TV shows, still spawning memes.

Speak for Yourself was a foundational album for Nandi Rose, aka synth-pop artist Half Waif, who first heard it not long after securing her drivers license. “It was very formative for what I went on to do, hearing these songs dressed up in really wild and imaginative electronic arrangements,” she said. What stood out to her was the album’s emotional range—the balance between delicate, cinematic moments and more aggressive ones—as well as the angularity of Heap’s melodies and the myriad ways she deploys the voice. “I was in an a cappella group in college, and I thought it was cool that those types of arrangements could exist not just on a college stage,” Rose says. “It’s honoring the voice as an instrument—it can be lead vocal, it can be percussive, another texture and tone in the arrangement.” This month, Rose is headed to Heap’s studio outside of London to work on her upcoming record, where she hopes to channel her hero’s balance of technical control and whimsy. 

The R&B-pop innovator Dawn Richard, who developed her identity as a teen listening to alternative female musicians like Heap and Björk, was also refreshed by the British singer’s treatment of her vocals. “Imogen was the first person that wasn’t from my culture, that wasn’t Black, that used harmonies in a unique way,” she said. “I thought it was beautiful, because I was getting culturally what I needed from church.” Listening to Heap encouraged Richard to experiment with stretching and bending her voice, and affirmed that processing tools like Auto-Tune weren’t just for untrained singers to hide their mistakes. “For someone who does know how to sing,” Richard says, “it is lethal.”

You can hear Heap in the slippery, divine runs of the classically-trained art-pop virtuoso Caroline Polachek, who inflects so precisely that she sounds as if she’s using Auto-Tune when she’s not. Or in experimental musician Lyra Pramuk’s prodigious 2020 album Fountain, which she made solely with recordings of her own voice. A self-proclaimed “gadget queen” who finds the computer “freeing,” Heap is ultimately devoted to personal expression, and she preserves a sense of humanity within her electronic compositions. “I do try to keep the ‘air’ in the music,” she once said. She places everyday sounds—the drip of the kitchen sink, the sound of her slapping her own ass—alongside synthesizers and programmed drums.

Lyrically, many of her most well-known songs are about love, being mystified and exasperated by its rapture, and she often seems to be shaking someone into honesty, as if to say, who are we kidding here? Mundane events are flush with feeling. Is there a better description of the devastation of having a crush than on “Goodnight and Go”: “And then I’m left in bits, recovering tectonic tremblings/You get me every time”? “We have always connected with her music on an instinctual, visceral level,” says Naomi McPherson of the indie-pop trio MUNA, whose members initially bonded over a shared love of 2009’s Ellipse. “Her evocative, detailed, immersive lyricism coupled with incredible vocal melodies and a massive catalog of fantastically interesting production… She has continued to be by far the primary touchstone for us whilst making music.”

All the while, Heap has been trying to envision the future, developing a AI version of herself and becoming an early artist adopter of blockchain. The first woman to win a Grammy for engineering, she has always been ahead of technological curves: In the late 2000s, her willingness to engage fans directly on social media (and beyond) was apparently such a novelty that it was cited in Twitter for Dummies. Her close relationship to her audience led her to crowdsource 900 found-sound snippets for 2014’s Sparks, pairing the manipulated noise from a slinky, for example, with her niece’s heartbeat. Desiring more immersive concert experiences, she spent years developing Mi.Mu gloves that enable performers to control their software onstage without being hunched over a laptop. From these experiments to her music, her forward-thinking imagination is present in every dimension of her work.

I was late to catch up. For a long time, Imogen Heap was a fringe character in my mind, conjured up by seeing a stray “mmm whatcha say” online or listening to Taylor Swift’s “Clean.” Then one day she was everywhere: cited in a PinkPantheress interview, suggested by my TikTok For You page, celebrated on an acquaintance's Twitter feed. So home alone one evening, I sat on my couch with a glass of wine and listened. The lush pop ambiance, scampering digital beats, and atypical melodies felt so girlish and magical. When I play her music now, I still feel the same enchantment, the sense that I am slipping into another portal. “She was always going to get the admiration that she deserved,” says Hopkins, “because she’s like nobody else.”