Virtually famous: King Princess

While Mark Ronson has mostly been hanging out with the big kids lately – producing Lady Gaga and Queens of the Stone Age, forming a new duo, Silk City, with Diplo, and producing a monster with Bruno Mars in Uptown Funk – he’s found time to start his own record label and unearth someone new too.

King Princess, born Mikaela Straus in New York, is the first signing to Ronson’s Zelig imprint, and he sounds smitten.

“No more than two lines into the song 1950, I was open. By the time she sings the lyric, ‘Did you mean it when you said I was pretty?’ in the second verse, I had all kinds of emotions running through me and I was a proper fan,” he wrote on Instagram in February.

He’s not the only one to think 1950, inspired by the Patricia Highsmith novel that became the film Carol, is a special song. The lustrous ballad is now approaching 100 million Spotify plays, and she only did her first ever gig in LA earlier this week.

The video, in which the gay 19-year-old plays up to that androgynous stage name by performing with a drawn-on moustache, has been watched three million times on YouTube.

This week the song was joined by four more just as good on her debut EP, Make My Bed. More than enough to crown her one of the most exciting new artists of 2018.