T
he doors of the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles felt like a vortex last Friday: Fans walked in wearing Hawaiian shirts, leis, and tropical flower clip-ins, ready to be transported into the Elvis Presley Blue Hawaii world of Remy Bond. A burlesque dancer opened the show, and for her set, Bond popped out of a giant cake, backed by a pair of dancers (and her sister Olivia) dressed like Fifties diner waitresses.
At one point, Bond sang from inside a martini glass; at another, she marries a fan and shares a kiss with him onstage. Her giant blonde hair bounces over her tiny shoulders as she serenades the crowd with her oldies-inspired sound. In the middle of the fever dream, Bond pulls out a bedazzled vape from her dress, offering a puff to each of her dancers before taking one herself. Bond’s music lives in this fuzzy, decade-blending, kitschy utopia. It doesn’t feel real — and it isn’t supposed to. Since her first single in 2023, Bond has built a cult-like audience around this vintage fantasy, and her sound offers nostalgia and a breath of fresh air at the same time.
“It’s a diamond sadness and a washed-up glittery sound that works for me,” she tells me over a greek salad at a diner, where we meet for lunch. We sit in the back corner of the tiny joint called Cindy’s, surrounded mostly by seniors, as Bond goes off on tangents about her adventures making music. Today, there’s no wig, but she’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt-inspired blouse, and a fake Sailor Jerry tattoo is fading off her arm. The workers here are dressed like Bond’s dancers during the show, and Bond can decipher the Sixties songs that are playing in the background. Even as she preps for her first big tour, Bond is already thinking about a new era of music.
“Every shroom trip, we got a new source of inspiration. We wrote ‘Movie Star’ on shrooms. We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, if we take shrooms, we can write so many bangers.’ So we would just go into album mode every time we would do it,” she says of a recent trip with her go-to producer Jules Apolinaire.
“Wait, we should do shrooms together. Why not do shrooms right now?”
Despite being early in her career, Bond is already carving a distinct sonic and visual lane for her music, which pairs her old-school inspiration with a sharply Gen Z perspective. She listens to both Kanye West and the Ronettes, although “Kanye is not the bad bitch he once was,” she says. It’s not the real-life Sixties and Seventies that inspire Bond, but the fantasy worlds imagined by Hollywood — it’s no surprise that Elvis’ campy world is high on the inspo list. “Elvis’ guitar-shaped car is for sale… I should have bought that instead of the Chelsea Hotel sign,” Bond says, confessing: “I spent all my money on it. I can’t even afford furniture.”
That dreamy, retro longing in Bond’s music? It probably started at home. Bond’s parents often threw dinner parties and played music that she quickly fell in love with: She’d play Cat Stevens, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Mamma Mia! Soundtrack on repeat. The Bond sisters (they also have a younger brother) weren’t allowed phones until eighth grade, so Remy listened to whatever CDs were lying around. (Supertramp’s Breakfast in America comes up more than once in our conversation.)
Her dad, she says, is a cinephile and would play classic movies all the time. She’d also watch shows like Downton Abbey constantly. “I was Lady Branson for Halloween for three years,” she says. “I consumed everything my parents were really into. I guess they had good taste.” Oh, and she grew up next door to Sean Ono Lennon. “My first exposure to nudity was him shooting [something] in the backyard,” says Bond. “Dude, this guy literally never left this house.”
Before music became her full passion, Remy and her sister Olivia made history as the first sibling duo to compete on MasterChef Junior. Culinary art was like her first love, thanks to her mom. In some adorable YouTube videos from 2018, you can see a tiny Bond strutting around the kitchen in a giant bow, bossing the other kids around. The hair accessories — now it’s usually a tropical flower — are part of the vibe today, too.“I still am into cooking. I make macaroons and shit,” she says. “It was something I was into, but it just didn’t mean anything to me.”
She traded the spatula for a microphone once she hit high school. “I was studying music but wasn’t writing it, until I got an Omnichord — that’s when I started writing songs,” she says. (You can thank David Bowie for the instrument choice.) “I was trained classically in Italian, but when I realized I could write my own songs and create the music I wanted to hear, I became fixated.”
Bond started releasing music in 2023 with “End of the World,” where she posed the paradoxical question, “Why am I so nostalgic for the now?” — a lyric that still defines much of her music. The next summer, she dropped “Summer Song,” which introduced her to many of the fans she has today, thanks in part to its virality on TikTok.
“Summer Song,” her breakthrough hit, was born from an impromptu trip to Paris after watching The Virgin Suicides. She and her sister Olivia had just seen the iconic film for the first time when Liv decided to DM Air — the duo behind the film’s dreamy soundtrack — to ask if they’d want to collaborate. “[Jean-Benoît Dunckel] actually responded. I totally lied. I was like, ‘I’m going to be in Paris next week, let’s get a coffee,’” Bond recounts. “And he was like, ‘Sure.’ So I flew to Paris for a coffee. I didn’t want to seem like a stalker, so I looked at their tour dates… and we made ‘Summer Song’ there.”
Early listeners of Bond were drawn in by the cinematic quality of her music, with some comparing her sound to that of a young Lana Del Rey. Her use of old-Americana nostalgia has sparked conversations about parallels with Del Rey, including with the visual for “Summer Song,” which calls to mind “National Anthem.” But Bond, who first got into Lana during the Covid pandemic, doesn’t mind the comparisons. “People can say what they want. I think it’s a compliment,” she says. (She’s a fan of Del Rey’s unreleased music.)
It’s the whimsical energy of the music that really sets her apart. Bond’s song “San Francisco” takes inspiration from the Summer of Love. “My muse was Jenny from Forrest Gump,” she says. She wrote last year’s “Red, White, and Blue” during what she describes as a time of “a lot of political tension” around the 2024 election, and shortly after cutting ties with a friend who wanted to vote for RFK “because of his views on food,” she explains. “I was worried people would perceive it as an ‘I love America’ song. I think it is a little bit perceived that way, but it’s not.” And “Star-Shaped Baby,” it’s about “a girl who’s shaped by the industry to be a star.” Is that you? “I don’t know,” she says. “I think I’m a star.”
The artwork for February’s “Simple Girl” features a Stepford Wives-like Bond mowing a lawn, mirroring the irony of the song’s opening line: “I’m a simple girl, I like gardening ‘n drugs.” She pulled the lyric from something she overheard at a café in L.A. “I was like, ‘I relate to that.’ I have a garden, and I hide my vape in my garden to avoid hitting it,” she says with a laugh. None of Bond’s lyrics take things too seriously.
Bond’s latest single “Movie Star” trades the Fifties-Sixties fantasies for Seventies Europop. Remy takes a jab at an unworthy lover withthe silly line: “You say you love the music / But you vape, you vape, you vape.” “That line modernizes the song a bit,” Bond explains. “I didn’t want it to be totally a throwback; I wanted it to feel a little kitschy, a little funny.” Then she giggles: “The bridge is just about the guy I lost my virginity to…” She leans in and whispers his name in my ear. “It’s about some spawn of a Spice Girl,” she clarifies on the record, eyeing my phone recording.
The vape talk suddenly reminds Bond of something. She pauses, checks her phone, and looks at me: “I actually ordered a vape here. Do you mind if I use your ID?” she asks. “I don’t have my fake.” Yeah, I’m down! (I pull out my wallet.) “Fuck. It said the delivery guy was here 20 minutes ago,” she says. “It’s not good for my lungs, anyway. I just like the flavor.”
Mid-interview, a call comes in from “Cheese,” the nickname for Bond’s sister Olivia. “She’s editing the ‘Moviestar’ video as we speak,” Bond tells me, before answering one of her sisters’ questions about the visual over the phone. (A close-up of some bedazzled vapes open the video meant to be set in the Seventies. “No one let us film the vape on set. So we rehired a film crew to just get a shot of us twinkling our vapes,” she says.)
Olivia is an integral part of Remy Bond, The Artist. During the tour, Olivia acts as a co-star. For “Moviestar,” which Olivia wrote on and sings on, she grabs a mic and duets with Remy, frolicking with her onstage. During “San Francisco,” she appears in a peace sign-shaped dress inspired by what Marina Abramović wore at Glastonbury last year. Olivia also directs and stars in most of Bond’s videos — and when Bond’s opener dropped out at a recent show, she filled in, performing some of Remy’s unreleased songs.
“We just keep each other in check,” says Bond. “We are the same person, but also completely opposites. She has a really good perspective on things. I don’t. I’m better with melodies because I’m not as quick at putting things into words. She’s better with words, but not as sonic.”
“Same with our faces,” she adds. “The top half of her eyes are better than mine, and my mouth is better than hers. So if we combined ourselves, we’d be perfect.”
After the Bonds wrap her tour this month, they’ll be going full-throttle on Remy’s debut album. Bond says she’s headed to Austria with Jules Apolinaire, her and Suki Waterhouse’s go-to producer, to make more songs for the album. Expect more ABBA, more Seventies sparkle, more Europop flair. She’s actually deep in “research” mode. On a recent trip to Sweden — which included a shroom-fueled escape from the music of a modern male pop singer she won’t name (“I don’t want to diss anyone, but I was literally in hell,” she says) — she somehow ended up on a date with one of Björn Ulvaeus’ grandkids. “We just went for a walk. He didn’t really speak any English,” she says with a giggle. “In LA, I couldn’t do that. But when I’m in Sweden, I’m free of all social norms, so I can be weird.” Also, she’s single, and into English guys. “I don’t really date LA guys. They’re all gay to me,” she says.
After finishing her salad, I give Bond a ride to the studio — with a quick vape stop on the way, of course. She comes out holding a pink, strawberry mango-flavored one she’s had before. She takes a few puffs before we get to the studio, where Apolinaire matches Bond’s endearingly chaotic energy, greeting us in fuzzy red-and-pink-heart pajamas at the door.
“Today’s a very special day,” he says in his French accent. “Therefore, Rem-ee close your eyes.” The producer goes into another room to pull out a massive, Dolly Punkton, if you will, wig covered in plastic: “Happy two years of friendship and music.” (Today marks two years since their first session.)
Bond lets out a squeal as she opens her eyes: “Where did you even get this?” asks Bond, plopping the head of hair on her head. “It’s so Agnetha.” The wig fits perfectly.
“That’s the most Abba I’ve ever seen you,” responds Apolinaire. She’s yet to use the wig onstage, but it won’t take long before she does. She later sends me a photo of her gift to Apolinaire: a tin of caviar and a Bluey plushie.
Weeks later, Bond sends me a text, with me an amendment for this story: “Can u include in ur article that my wig got checked for drugs at TSA?” she wrote. “#formative moment. Hairspray’s a drug.”
In Remy Bond’s world, it really is.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Styling by OMID ANTHONY DIBAEI. Styling Assistant MICAELLA LANDERS.
