A powerful new voice with a flair for perceptive, witty and brutally honest lyricism, Bea & Her Business — born in 2004 and a London-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Bea Wheeler — explores themes and experiences many of us recognise, from a distinctive perspective we’ve never heard before. She started posting on TikTok when she was 16 — mainly covers with the occasional original song on the piano thrown in when she was feeling brave enough. In the early stages of 2020 a follower’s request for Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness led Bea to experiment with the rich, distinctive vocal tone that would come to underpin her subsequent work; the cover blew up the same week her school closed down for Covid, opening up enough free time for Bea to make daily posts, eventually attracting attention from (and duets with) the likes of Tove Lo, George Ezra and Paloma Faith. When Bea had a huge gig to 100,000 people — sensing Bea’s apprehension, her team had attempted to downplay the enormity of the audience ahead of the show. But there’s no obfuscating other numbers: a debut single with by now far over 20m streams and counting on Spotify alone, over a million monthly listeners worldwide, and in excess of soon to be 40m TikTok likes. This success looks to continue with whatever lies beyond. But in all this it’s the scope for human connection Bea finds most potent.