American singer-songwriter Eli has spent the past year transforming her pop star aspirations into a lived reality, and the 25-year-old is now confronting both the rewards and the costs of that ascent. Her 2025 debut album, «Stage Girl», which NME named one of the best debuts of last year, established her as a theatrical, Y2K-coded pop force whose confessional songwriting tackles past relationships and the performance of gender as a trans woman.
The album's deluxe edition, «Stage Girl (Not A Dream Anymore)», expands on that concept. Framed as a record made by a winner of an American Idol-style talent show from a parallel universe, the project has taken multiple forms over its two-year rollout, including one-woman theatre shows, a web series, two releases, and a forthcoming world tour. Eli describes the deluxe version as a vehicle for unfiltered self-acceptance, with tracks like «iTouch Da Da» and «Marianne» exploring themes of masturbation and lesbian situationships within the album's meta-narrative framework.
Hailing from small-town Massachusetts, Eli was a self-described theatre kid inspired by vocalists such as Mariah Carey and reality competition shows. After a brief stint studying Recorded Music at NYU, she moved west to Los Angeles, where she was discovered by Mark Ronson's Zelig Records imprint. Her path to pop stardom was not entirely linear; she experienced a fleeting era of internet notoriety as an adolescent Vine star before her music career took shape.
Her growing fanbase now includes fellow artists Troye Sivan, Doechii, and Zara Larsson, drawn to what Eli calls her «put on a show kind of girl» approach to performance. But the breakout year has also brought a mental and physical rollercoaster, as she describes it. «Breaking out and achieving a level of fame you wanted or affirmation from people you admire, getting commercials, I really did look at these things as a genuine escape from capitalism and having to work,» Eli told NME. «I thought that to be Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez that I'd suddenly be hella happy, I could come out as trans and be the baddest bitch, give all the fortune back to other people and keep a little bit for a nice house, a wife and a dog. But I've just realised that there's bigger fish to fry, and bigger conversations to have.»
Those bigger conversations have not come without friction. In August, Eli performed at Olivia Rodrigo's inaugural Daisy Chain Fields fundraiser in California, sharing a bill with boundary-pushing feminist artists including Mitski, Santigold, and Stevie Nicks. She opened her set with a speech written during the car ride to the festival, calling for harmony, freedom, and the eating of the rich. The audience responded with cheers and applause, but when videos of the speech circulated online, detractors accused her of hollow champagne socialism, citing her father's former role as Chief Operating Officer at investment firm Geode Capital as evidence of hypocrisy.
The fallout included a wave of death threats and transphobia, leading Eli to deactivate her X account entirely. It was not her first experience with internet trolls; weeks earlier, she had ruffled feathers with an open letter to Taylor Swift in a similar vein. «There's layers to it,» she said of the vitriol. «I'm learning now that there are better ways to get my message across than how I thought. Your intention can be really like: 'Fuck yeah, we're gonna heal, and we're all gonna be good,' and it can not be taken that way.»
Eli frames the experience as a lesson in acceptance. «It's a big learning experience for me to accept that I cannot control misunderstandings, and I cannot control anything but my own alignment with myself,» she said. «It really can put you in a state of disillusionment or hopelessness – but I'm learning to get creative.»
Despite the turbulence, Eli maintains that the core messages of her work will endure. «The purest part of being an artist is being a channel for something else, and that's what's really special and magical,» she said. With the deluxe album out and a world tour on the horizon, the singer continues to navigate the space between the pop star fantasy she once imagined and the more complicated reality she now inhabits.