Fletcher is just over a year removed from her acclaimed EP, The S(ex) Tapes, a deeply personal, often uncomfortably specific, and extremely vulnerable set of tracks about an ongoing breakup she could never quite pull away from completely – her ex-partner, a photographer, even shot all the videos and artwork for the project. Her latest singles — “Cherry,” featuring Hayley Kiyoko, and “girls girls girls” — finally lift the somber attitude and see her celebrating frivolous and unapologetic romance set to trap beats and tropical synthpop. 

Still, Fletcher is the kind of person who threw her filter in a trash compactor long ago, ready to open up about her deepest secrets to a stranger at any moment. She appears over a Zoom call dressed up on top, immediately defeating the purpose of the hidden sweatpants just out of frame by revealing them seconds into the conversation. As she recounts her long journey to self-acceptance, she speaks quicker than her ideas are fully formulated, syllables pouring out laced with curses. “I lived with a lot of fear for a really long time,” she says. “When I put out my first music video that featured a same-sex relationship, I had a lot of people being like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? What if it alienates people? What if it hurts your career?’ Then I got the response from people about feeling represented. So, my mission statement the whole time has been ‘would I have needed to see this?’”

Fletcher beams when articles compiling reactions to her latest material are brought up, with fans tweeting about how her latest tracks feel “comforting” and “safe,” calling being able to inspire these feelings “the biggest home run” of her many achievements. 

In this sense, Fletcher has come a long way from her career beginnings, her attitudes towards telling these stories having recently shifted. While her music videos have always featured queer imagery, before her latest run of singles Fletcher always intentionally excluded gendered pronouns in her lyrics. She often emphasized in interviews that the heartbreak she sang about was universally relatable regardless of the genders a listener is attracted to. “There were these voices in the back of my head that were like, ‘we don’t need to be too specific because we want to include everyone. I think I was probably dealing with some internalized homophobia as well,” she says. “But I have just learned the power of specificity. I have quite literally made a career out of my personal information. So, there’s something that feels really empowering about being like, ‘No, this is actually who I’m singing about. This is the story.’”

Subversive recent number one hit singles like Cardi B’s “WAP” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” contributed to pushing Fletcher over the edge, inspiring her to remove all metaphors and taking the plunge into confidently displaying every aspect of who she is. “Some people were so turned off by [Montero], but we’ve literally listened to so many men talking about hooking up with girls all the time,” she says. “Why can’t we flip this narrative here? And girls can also do the same.”