A lot has changed since Nat Puff went viral on Vine. Back in 2014, she developed a cult following through hilarious parodies of artists like Frank Ocean and Mitski.
Since then, she's taken a break from social media and has focused on becoming an artist herself, switching from poking fun at other people's music to writing her own. "In true lesbian fashion, I started doing music to impress girls," she told Forbes in 2020. Her comedy work "started as procrastination and then it just caught on," she added.
Bridging the line between music and viral online comedy has always placed her in a unique position among her fans. "It has got me a lot that has been really important for my music career," she said. "Being able to walk that line between being a person that people know for the jokes and a person that people know for the music has been really incredible. I feel like I have this level of intimacy with my fans which is hard to find."
Under the name Left at London, Puff has released tons of music, including an EP called "Jenny Durkan, Resign in Disgrace," which called out the then-mayor of Seattle for condoning police violence. Her debut album, "t.i.a.p.f.y.h.," appeared in 2020, and her second studio album, "You Are Not Alone Enough," is set to be released in 2022.
She has also created a three-EP sequence called "Transgender Street Legend" and told POPSUGAR a bit about the inspirations behind the album covers. "The concept behind the covers of all of the Transgender Street Legend EPs tells the audience a little bit about the perception of trans woman by cis people," she says."[In] the first EP, I'm all dolled up and there's somebody in the rafters . . . holding a knife up to my throat." The image, she says, "is meant to represent sort of how all women, trans women especially, are forced to sort of conform to femininity as sort of a way as to prove their femininity, as to prove their femaleness." The cover of the second EP shows her wearing scrubs and holding the knife herself. "That's supposed to represent sort of how trans-ness is viewed by a lot of cis people as a mental condition rather than just an identifier," she adds.
The cover of the third EP, which was released on June 15, "is just somebody washing blood off of a knife," she says. The image "is meant to be vague on purpose because that it's either meant to be [about] the perception of cis people just straight up wanting us dead, or it is the breaking of the cycle. The person in the knife could be me." But at the end of the day, the image has a clear message. "Cis people will perceive trans people as dangerous," she says, "but the fact of the matter is, from the start, it's been cis people. That knife is being held by a cis person, both in reality and metaphorically."
Puff's forays into music were inspired by her father, a session musician who passed away this year and who is the subject of the song "Make You Proud," the EP's lead single. "I want to be able to talk about his presence in my life and how important it was and how integral it was to my starting music," she says. Recently, she opened up to American Songwriter about what music means to her. "In music, you can capture specific emotions that are impossible to capture otherwise," she said. "It's absolutely insane what you can do with music."