Rising Superstar - LEXA - Releases Exciting New Alt Pop Single ‘Baggage Claim’
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
In LEXA’s own memorable framing: Scouting for Girliepop, Arctic Montheys, Transvil Levine. Where cathartic messiness and human authenticity are not limitations but the entire point, and the music is richer for every one of them…
In a moment where conversations about representation in music often remain at the level of aspiration rather than practice, ‘Baggage Claim’ by LEXA arrives as something genuinely and materially significant. The lead single from her forthcoming EP A Guide to Heartbreak, the final instalment of a trilogy due this autumn, the track makes history with entirely trans+ writing credits: co-written with SATCH, the established songwriter who launched the Transpose songwriting camp in collaboration with The Ivor’s Academy, and co-produced with Charlieeeee, whose production credits span Fred Again, The 1975 and Gary Barlow. That creative team brings both craft and real purpose to a track that LEXA has described as a reclamation, and the music earns that word fully.
The sonic world of ‘Baggage Claim’ sits in the territory LEXA has articulated with characteristic precision and wit: sonically reminiscent of Scouting for Girls, Rachel Chinouriri and Devon Again, occupying a space she herself names as a new sub-genre where dreamy, girly-pop melodies and funky guitar riffs collide. The production delivers exactly that, the indie-rock framework given a warmth and melodic generosity that pushes it toward something more emotionally open than the genre’s cooler, more angular tendencies. The guitar work carries genuine joy in it, a celebratory energy that the track’s subject matter of heartbreak and reclamation both requires and justifies. To write a song about being shattered by a relationship and make it this alive is a real achievement.
LEXA, Rainbow Honour’s Musician of the Year and known to wider audiences through her role in Sex Education, arrives at ‘Baggage Claim’ with the emotional transparency of someone writing directly from experience: her first breakup with a trans person, material that is simultaneously personal and political, painful and healing. “Being able to create a track about my first breakup with a trans person, that shattered me, with an all trans songwriting team is beyond healing,” she says. “It’s a reclamation of the 00s indie rock I grew up on.” That reclamation is audible in every bar: the Britpop and indie-rock classics she grew up loving, returned to her on her own terms, made by and for people who were not always visible in that tradition when it was first built.
The production’s balance between the nostalgic and the immediate is one of the track’s most impressive qualities. Charlieeeee’s touch ensures that nothing here tips into pastiche or mere homage: ‘Baggage Claim’ sounds like now, shaped by then, which is precisely what a reclamation should sound like. The melodic hooks are immediate and genuinely infectious, the funky guitar underpinning giving the track its physical energy while the dreamy pop sensibility keeps it open and emotionally warm rather than simply driving.
LEXA’s accrued following of over 190,000 speaks to an artist who has been building something real, and with ‘Baggage Claim’ she steps into the clearest and most fully realised expression of her artistic identity yet. The EP trilogy’s final chapter promises to arrive with both emotional depth and the kind of sonic confidence this single makes entirely plausible.
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