Entering Rowans, the infamous bowling alley-cum-arcade-cum-karaoke bar – and location of much late-night chaos – in London’s Finsbury Park at 10:45am on a Tuesday conjures a severe sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s a place typically reserved for hazy Friday nights, so when seen through the lens of a new week, all is unfamiliar. The dancefloor doesn’t cling to each footstep with the residue of a thousand spilt frozen margs, and the bar is deserted. Maintaining a shred of its signature aura, though, the entire space is still bathed in a red neon light, impenetrable by the resilient rays of morning sun threatening to disrupt the vibe through cracks beneath the front door.
This eerily quiet, cursed endeavour is a seemingly unnatural habitat for a 21-year-old pop star. Still, Alessi Rose shuffles towards the bowling lanes, careful not to slide on the polished floor in her heeled, cowboy-adjacent boots (having proudly shunned the concept of renting bowling shoes). She meticulously selects a marbled purple ball and pauses before launching it over the line. Then, she watches in dismay as it slowly rolls towards the gutter before concluding to the empty parallel lanes: “This is a safe space to be bad at bowling”.
Adding to the unusual aura of this morning’s schedule is the fact that for Alessi, it precedes an English Literature lecture. Yet perhaps this follows the thread of her entire uni experience, which thus far has been tinged with abnormality – subtly evident in the plethora of handmade bracelets that jingle on her wrists as she bowls. Plastic beads spell out ‘delulu’ – a nod to her fanbase, the self-proclaimed ‘delulu girls’, who follow Alessi’s music with the same fervent dedication as Swifties, despite the fact she’s yet to release her first EP.
In between seminars, she’s hosted studio sessions where they gather to listen to new music, and in return, they’ve organised militant campaigns to have her music played on the radio, collated and circulated snippets of unreleased tracks (recorded via TikTok lives or the spattering of support gigs Alessi’s played so far) and even hosted fan projects for each other’s birthdays.
“They care for each other so deeply. That bond you can create over loving someone’s music is so deep, and I would have died to be part of that when I was 14,” Alessi tells NME as tears of joy, illuminated by the ruby-toned LEDs, brim. Having grown up listening to Gracie Abrams in her bedroom in Derby, music used to be a solo endeavour, so the movement forged around her own songs has been a sweet surprise.
It’s also given her the confidence to explore more challenging themes within her songwriting, namely her experiences with OCD, which she initially found difficult to divulge. “Writing was always a way of capturing the thoughts or the feelings and keeping them in one place for myself before they spiral out of control,” she explains. “Now that I know there’s a group of really supportive, lovely people who are listening to it and are the age that I was when I was writing a lot of the stuff, it’s like, OK, it’s helping someone, and it feels like I’m doing a good thing.”
Of course, the dual life of pop stardom and academia draws some obvious comparisons. “I do feel like Hannah Montanna,” Alessi laughs, admitting to being heavily influenced by the girl power-imbued teen pop that dominated the 2000s. Yet unlike that era, which held its young female artists to inhuman standards of perfection, Alessi is keen to embrace the messiness inherent to girlhood through confessional, high-octane pop anthems about a chaotic, fleeting romance destined to collapse or the debilitating euphoria of having an unhealthy, all-encompassing crush.
“Look, do I want all these 16-year-olds to go on dates with people that are really bad? No, but are they probably gonna do it anyway? Yeah. So I’d rather they at least have a song to play afterwards and be like – ‘I just did that!’” she says.
It’s why her forthcoming debut EP exists simultaneously as a cohesive introduction to her personal brand of autobiographical songwriting and a wholehearted embrace of pop in all its forms. “I feel like pop is so back. There was a point where no one wanted to admit that they listen to pop music,” she says with a displeased eye roll. “I listen to pop music all the fucking time, and I will cry it to the heavens.”
So, as the game draws to its anticlimactic conclusion, with Alessi drawing exactly with NME (a subpar score of 68 each), she heads off to uni, energised with the news that she’s just sold out her first headline show. Yet it’s the fan response to her music that she admits exists as a main priority right now, eclipsing any concern for looming essay deadlines.
“I just wanted to create what I wanted when I was 16,” she says. “I hope it’s something I would have listened to back then and been like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like this has been taken straight out of my diary.’”
Alessi Rose’s new single ‘Break Me’ is out now. She will play London’s St Pancras Old Church on April 24
