Du Blonde Does It All

Beth Jeans Houghton, better known as Du Blonde, was ready to hang up her guitar three years ago when she wrote and self-released her third album Homecoming. That project was a lightning-flash of an LP, clocking in at just 25 minutes but making a searing impression in that short amount of time thanks to her crunchy electric guitar, chameleonic vocals and tantalizingly catchy melodies. And while Homecoming may have marked the end of Houghton’s time working with traditional labels, it also rang in a glorious new era, one in which she enjoys more creative control than ever before and can indulge in unabashed playfulness, especially on her latest album, Sniff More Gritty, out via her label Daemon T.V. on November 15.

“[Homecoming] ended up being joyous, but the approach to it was really sad, because I just wanted to make one thing I was proud of before I gave it up,” Houghton tells me from her childhood bedroom in Newcastle, in the northeast of England. (She originally moved back in with her mother during the pandemic, but then two weeks stretched into years, and she’s not mad about it. Far from it, actually: “I love it. It’s amazing,” she says of living at home.)

Houghton has been releasing music since she was just 15, when she would produce her own songs on Pro Tools, burn the tracks onto CDs and hawk them at her shows. Between the ages of 18 and 21, she started signing publishing and record deals. She was so conscientious, doing everything artists are meant to in order to protect themselves—hired a lawyer, pored over contracts—but ultimately found traditional labels to be exploitative.

“I don’t want to say that I have any regrets in life, because there’s a lot of things about my life now that in a sort of butterfly effect way I know wouldn’t have happened if I’d gone back and taken a different journey,” Houghton says, “But I do wish that I had never, ever signed a record deal, and I’m really grateful that I’m now in a position to release music on my own terms. I’m glad that being with record labels didn’t crush me so hard that I just stopped making music, which it almost did.” 

Creative control was always a central focus for Houghton, but having that included in her contracts didn’t mean she was covered. Like with everything in our capitalist hellscape, it’s ultimately those with the most money who wield power: “You’re up against a company who is very wealthy, and if they say, ‘Do this with your record or we won’t release it,’ then it’s a loophole.” She’s critical of conventional record labels’ current model, which is based on the crazy notion back in the ‘70s and ‘80s that people would actually buy music. However, we live in 2024, and the reality is that ever since streaming and downloading became the primary modes of listening to music, artists—notoriously a group that don’t tend to earn much money to begin with unless they’re one of the precious few who “make it”—have been the first on the chopping block when it comes to financial vulnerability. Houghton, unfortunately, knows this firsthand. 

“The landscape has completely changed, and yet you still have labels, in my case, pumping in hundreds of thousands of pounds into a record and into an artist who was never going to be mainstream,” she explains. Houghton also experienced sexual harassment while working at one label, but the people at the company either didn’t care, or were too afraid of losing their livelihoods to step in. She’s incredibly empathetic when recounting this experience, saying, “However much you would like to think that people would just stand up for what’s right, I also understand that it’s a privilege sometimes to be able to do that without losing everything that you need to protect the people that you love.”

These tumultuous chapters of her life inform “Next Big Thing” (featuring Skunk Anansie’s Skin), a track on Sniff More Gritty that zig zags between a heavenly chorus proclaiming that you must “Give yourself to God” and a demonic growl demanding, “What do you want from me?” Houghton’s blasé delivery of “What you want me to do? He only touched you a few times / So why does it bother you?” recalls the cruel apathy of some record execs, and the sleazy suggestion that she should wear “some latex / You should give it a spin / Oh Honey trust me they’ll love it / Then you could be the Next Big Thing” is all-too-familiar for femme-presenting people in the music industry. Now that she has Daemon T.V., though, Houghton has the chance not just to stick it to these hypocrites, but to also help emerging artists release their own records on the label while maintaining ownership of their music and avoiding debt. Free from her previous confines, Houghton’s created music that is playful, biting and utterly her own—both literally and figuratively, since she produced, wrote and engineered the whole affair.

Sniff More Gritty gets its name from a production note on album standout “TV Star,” which Houghton considers one of the best songs she’s ever written (and I can’t help but agree). The track—underpinned by steady, grunge-inflected guitar on the verses before everything bursts into righteous fury on the chorus—mourns a friend of hers who was the “most genuine, lovely, one of the nicest people I’d ever met,” but turned rotten once they became famous. And like in any good story about fame, there’s a line about coke (pun intended): “Mom and Dad think that you’re all alone / But they don’t see all the cocaine you’ve blown.” That last word is backed by an exaggerated sniff—not the first or last time Houghton goes for a satisfyingly in-your-face production choice—and after the song was mixed she said she wanted the “sniff more gritty.” And there you have it: An hilarious, outwardly nonsensical album title was born.

Houghton’s carefree, off-kilter sense of humor elevates Sniff More Gritty from a great pop record to a must-listen. The second track, “Dollar Coffee,” includes Valley Girl interjections (“I’m just saying it’s a long way down from the top so like, why even try?”) and was almost named Kwik-E-Mart after The Simpsons’ convenience store—we even get the jaunty jingling of a bell, like the kind perched over a corner shop door, at the start of the track. “I didn’t know how to get hold of anyone at the Simpsons to be like, ‘Will you sue me?’,” Houghton says. “I could have probably gotten away with it, but I also, if I hadn’t, I don’t have any money. I don’t want to owe someone else.” For a short while, the song was called “Period Gush” (a reference to lyrics about “monthly bleeding” and a “shark attack at the bottom of a hot tub”), but “Dollar Coffee” ended up sticking as the title. It’s another one of Houghton’s favorites on the album because it’s a sonic sampler of the music she loves. “There’s a Kate Bush bit, there’s some Meatloaf and also Shania Twain, but also Frank Zappa in the Valley Girl parts,” she says. 

Beyond the silliness, Houghton embraces introspection, whether by retreading difficult paths or sharing unexpected sides of her personality. Deep, driving bass and crackling guitar set the scene for “ICU,” which recounts the time Houghton was sent home from the hospital with sepsis because the staff thought she just had anxiety. “Death is coming for me in forms that I don’t understand / I could have used, I could have used a little empathy this time,” she sings, half dejected, half sarcastic. 

“Solitary Individual,” meanwhile, is an unofficial introverts’ anthem. Bright with rage, Houghton’s voice is joined by that of Laura Jane Grace from Against Me!, and the shimmering harmonies on the chorus are one of the album’s most infectious moments.  Houghton says that she kept hearing Grace’s voice when writing the song—much like what happened with the Ezra Furman feature on Homecoming’s “I’m Glad That We Broke Up”—so her manager reached out, and the rest was history. “I was just really happy, because before her vocals were on it, it just didn’t sound as rage-y as I wanted it to be,” she says. The song was inspired by an old housemate of Houghton’s in London who was concerned that she wasn’t going out to raves and partying all the time. “I spend an awful lot of time alone, and I love it. Since I was a kid, I’ve been more than happy just to like fiddle and creative crap that I’m doing,” she explains. Her brother’s the same way (“He spends pretty much all day in a studio on his own, making leather armor and doing astrology birth charts… He’s fucking great.”), and “Solitary Individual” is a sunny yet defiant proclamation for any person who is content with their own company. 

And then there’s “One in a Million,” a lovelorn breakup ballad that’s actually about missing marijuana. “I used to smoke weed every day, and then I had this awful experience where I accidentally smoked weed mixed with ketamine, and then I set my head on fire at a party, and then I ended up having a nervous breakdown six months later,” Houghton says of her decision to stop ingesting cannabis. “And then recently, my friends were all in this cafe, and they were talking about how they love when they get high and they just get the giggles. And I was like, oh, fuck, I miss that so much. And so I went and wrote a love song about it.”

Bratty yet mature, fun-loving yet vulnerable, clear-eyed yet dreamy, Sniff More Gritty is an album that’s delightfully impossible to define, much like Houghton. She wears a plethora of masks on this record—some colorful, some grotesque, but all of them spellbinding. 

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s associate music editor. Go harass her on Twitter @theclaremartin.