I’ve been dreaming about the circus recently. The hanging red velvet curtains, the hazily lit stage, the swinging limbs enrobed in lace and silk—a crashing spectacle into the eroded day-to-day routine, colorful and brash.

Around this time last year, I watched Snow Wife at the circus on her debut EP, QUEEN DEGENERATE. In the solo performance video of her single “AMERICAN HORROR SHOW,” Snow’s performance is dynamic, going from shy and timid, to hysteric and desperate, to angry and confident in a single take. It’s this range that makes Snow’s music so addicting; her voice is smooth and silky, delivering the pop-y hook before thrusting the viewer into a growling confession that boomerangs into a high-pitched and teasing falsetto.

Snow Wife, born Emily Snow, grew up in Houston, Texas. The artist has danced for over half of her life, (despite only being 22 at the time of interviewing), teaching dance classes and performing competitively before heading to Pace University in New York to study commercial dance. “Private school tuition...” she groans. She moved to Los Angeles after completing a year, with the hopes of working as a touring dancer.

It’s the aforementioned single, “AMERICAN HORROR SHOW”—the second one she had released with independent publishing company, Prescription Songs, and label counterpart, Amigo Records—that first alerted public attention to the young artist, racking up millions of streams and a growing audience. Snow’s oeuvre since then has encompassed and bent every genre from pop to R&B to rock. Her lyrics work to provide a backbone for the rhythm to stick to, synthesizing vodka-Red Bull’s and getting freaky by the pool into creative fuel.

“Once I started making music, I started romanticizing life and making these characters,” Snow explains. The artist’s world lives in the fantasy of your wildest night out, in the rush of your most blush-worthy hook-up, in the glow of the infatuating flame of a new love. It’s explicit, it’s queer, it’s nasty (in kind of a sweet way.) “[I’ll] take a moment when I’m at the club and hyper-focus on her, making her this person that’s not really me,” Snow shares on the cultivating of this unique identity. “Maybe she’s super obsessed with nightlife and she feels she’s on top of the world. Or a moment I was really addicted to drugs. I’ll ask myself, ‘How deep and dark and twisted can we get?’”

Currently living in a Los Angeles house with her dance troupe, Snow cites her favorite styles of dance as jazz-funk or contemporary. “I started dancing when I was ten because my mom passed away. Dance was all that I knew. Whenever that happens to you, you don’t really know anything. When I started dancing, it became the focal point of my life for ten years.”

This community-building within dance is something that you can feel within her music videos with dancers gracefully knotting and tangling over each other in a synchronous act that can only be achieved when you work intimately and know each other within a space. In her videos for “ALL NIGHT,” “HIT IT,” and most recently, “WET DREAM,” the troupe works seamlessly with Snow’s choreography to deliver a performance that holds an element of freedom, unapologetically queer and just plain fun. “I came out as queer when I was 15,” Snow shares. “I’ve only ever studied pop culture and queer culture. If I’m writing, ‘HIT IT,’ I’m naturally including everyone on the gender spectrum in my lyrics. It’s not something that I necessarily have to think about.”

Now, nearly a year out from her debut EP, Snow Wife is more grounded than ever in the future of her path. “I made Snow Wife off of the phrase: You are who you’ve always wanted to be." She concludes, “When you’re at the lowest point in your life—you’ll hear [this idea] so many times, ‘Envision your best self,’ right? I think it’s all about delusionally manifesting a mindset and a feeling into your body until you become her because you are her. You’ll always be her. Then, even whenever you’re her, you’ll always be the person that you were at your low point at the same time. It’s a decision to live in that feeling all the time.” 

Photographed by Kate Biel

Styled by Britton Litow

Written by Julia Smith

Hair: Dylan Michael

Makeup: Marla Vazquez at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Annika Chavez

DP: Jonathan Ho

Styling Assistant: Alexa Armendiz