Du Blonde Does It All
Beth Jeans Houghton's carefree, off-kilter sense of humor elevates 'Sniff More Gritty' from a great pop record to a must-listen.
Photo courtesy of the artist
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.”