Cat Burns is posing for a photo shoot when I arrive at The Oval. Dressed in oversized double denim and furnished with gold jewellery, the 24-year-old is striking poses like she’s been doing it all her life: with her hands above her head; a strong stance in front of the stadium seats. In a few weeks she’ll open cricket tournament The Hundred. She seems calm, confident – as if she’s taken the whirlwind two years she’s had completely in her stride. Or maybe it’s the fact she’s been here before, aged 16, for a shift serving food on the grounds.
“It doesn’t even feel like long ago,” says Burns, who wrote her first song at the same age. Growing up in Streatham, south London, it was in a makeshift music studio in her friend’s shed that her first lyrics came to life, and she started pursuing her dream. It was another four years until her career really took off, when her track, “go”, a pop anthem about being cheated on, became a TikTok sensation.
Burns’s fanbase grew from there. Her music, about heartbreak, first loves, coming out and early adulthood, struck a chord for the young people experiencing those things too.
“go” was released in 2020, but it was two years before TikTok found it. She never expected it to resurface, she says, now settled in the corner of a small meeting room. This one, written aged 18, wasn’t actually about her own life. “At the time, my guitarist had a heartbreak, and he told me the story, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is perfect for a song’. And then it just kind of wrote itself.”
In its first two years, it had a million listens, but it died out and Burns thought that was the end of it. But then TikTok discovered it, and “it just blew up”. Burns was the UK’s highest-selling female artist in 2022, and has now been nominated for three BRIT awards.
Burns’s gift is in how she makes her struggles feel relatable – how she lets you feel comforted and understood by her songs. “I always want to make music that makes people feel heard and seen, and able to just listen to while they’re going through something,” Burns says. As a young teenager, she’d spend hours on YouTube listening to musicians like Tori Kelly. “How her music made me feel was how I wanted my music to make other people feel,” she recalls.
Her most resonant – and the she feels, the most important – song was released at the end of 2021. “Free” recalls her experience of coming out as queer to her family. “As much as it was a song for me, it instantly felt like it was a song that was going to help a lot of people,” she says. “I was very excited to put it out and have people connect to it.”
Burns came out to her mum in April 2020, and her sister shortly afterwards, and had a positive reaction from her family. “I’m very lucky to have such a welcoming and loving family that accepts me and loves me for who I am. Everyone was just normal and wasn’t bothered.” But she knows her fans might have a different story, and Burns has received hundreds of messages from people who have used, related and listened to the song to heal from their own experiences, or to come out to their own parents.
Burns has a little more life experience now than when she first started writing. That helps with the music, she thinks, but she never listens to her tracks after they’re released. “When I’m preparing, I’ll listen to it over and over and over again, but when it’s out it’s no longer mine. It’s kind of the world’s now.” Her fans – on TikTok and beyond – are devoted: everything she hints at or releases is met with thousands of excited comments.
But it wasn’t always this way for her. In fact, rejection has been second nature to Burns since she entered the famous BRIT school, which also taught Adele and Amy Winehouse, aged 14. “Being a black woman making pop music, I think at first a lot of people couldn’t understand it or get the vision,” she says. “Because there haven’t been many, they just thought it probably won’t work. I got a lot of ‘no’s, so I just decided to take it into my own hands and put myself out there and post it. I wanted to prove that demand was there.”
She’s definitely proven that. Since plummeting into the limelight she’s supported Ed Sheeran on his tour and had Sam Smith remix her song. Moments like these are becoming more common, but she doesn’t take them for granted – and she hasn’t forgotten that very first call. “I was in the cab, and my manager told me I’d be supporting Ed, and it was just crazy. He’s one of my biggest inspirations. It was a really lovely full circle moment.” In 2017, when Burns was in the audience of the BRITS with a school group, she watched in awe at Sheeran performing, without knowing she’d one day be opening for him.
Still, despite an upcoming sold-out tour in October, Burns is an introvert who needs downtime alone at home. Her bedroom, the place where her music starts, is her safe space, and one she returns to regularly. “I need to decompress and have those moments to chill, reflect and be able to show up as the best version of myself,” she says. She speaks kind words to herself before each performance to calm her nerves and prepare for the stage.
Touring can be especially difficult for her because she is autistic and has ADHD, which she was diagnosed with in 2023 and 2021 respectively. “It’s a lot to get used to. It’s a whole new way of life and you have to find your routine.”
It’s something she’s still working on as she learns to understand herself more. Her diagnoses helped her understand her way of thinking. “I always felt inherently different from everybody else and I just didn’t have a name for it or know what it could have been. As I got older, I really identified with the symptoms.”
Her debut album early twenties promises to follow the themes her fans know and love her for. “It’s the highs and lows of being in your early twenties, from falling in love to heartbreak to figuring out and learning about yourself and how you want to move forward.
“It’s all about how I want to move forward now I’m going into my mid twenties, too.”
early twenties is released on 12 July