Bishop Briggs doesn’t just sing about champions—she claws her way into becoming one mid-verse. “I wrote Champion because I didn’t feel like one,” she says, and that’s sort of the entire thesis of her sophomore album: fake it, scream it, become it.
Released barely a year after her debut Church of Scars, Champion came fast, furious, and emotionally gutted. “It was all written in two weeks. Non-consecutively,” she clarifies, as if we were all assuming she was holed up in a bunker with a synth and a punching bag. “It became a kind of therapy. I was doing real therapy too, but this helped.”
Call it a concept album born from a quarter-life crisis. “The first album was over two years,” she says. “With this one, I always wanted to make something that captured a very specific period of time.” That period happened to be somewhere between heartbreak, rage, and self-reclamation. “I love albums where you can tell it’s about one person, one moment. That specificity makes it more relatable, not less.”
She name-drops Back to Black and Adele, but her own approach leans more bloodied-knuckle diary entry than smoky torch song. Just listen to the title track, co-written with K.Flay, which doubles as both a personal pep talk and a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the patriarchy. “I had to write something that I’d believe on stage,” she says. “Screaming ‘I’m a champion’ over and over forces you to believe it. Or at least pretend convincingly.”
This isn’t the kind of album that sips wine in the corner—it throws chairs. My Shine is the sonic equivalent of a glitter-coated snarl, with Briggs proudly howling lines like, “God forbid I’m independent.” That scream? One take. “It just came out of me,” she says. “I guess I was really angry.” The line that almost didn’t make the cut? “I make cool.” K.Flay had to bully her into keeping it. “She was like, ‘Do you not think you make cool music?’ I couldn’t even answer.”
Jekyll & Hyde slithers between whispers and shrieks, a song about gaslighting that somehow sounds like the soundtrack to a haunted carnival ride. “I came in with this creepy phrase and finger snaps,” she says. “And we just kept building.” The result is theatrical, unstable, and gloriously deranged.
Through it all, Briggs is brutally candid—whether about her own struggles, politics, or the existential ache of not being allowed to vote in a country she’s lived in for a decade. “I’m on an artist visa,” she says. “I pay taxes. I live here. But I can’t vote.” That hasn’t stopped her from throwing herself into activism, particularly around abortion rights and voter education. “Whether you have five followers or 500, it matters,” she insists. “We live in a time where staying silent reads as ignorance, not strategy.”
Still, there’s room for joy. Briggs lights up like a kid hopped up on Pixy Stix when the conversation shifts to My Chemical Romance. “I sent that reunion tour screenshot to everyone,” she laughs. “Even people I haven’t talked to in forever.” She’s been performing a mashup of MCR, Panic! at the Disco, and Twenty One Pilots live—basically the holy trinity of emo kids who survived into adulthood. “They were ahead of their time.”
So is Briggs. Her albums may be rooted in pain, but they bloom into something wild and defiant. And if she has to shout it from the stage every night to make it stick, so be it. “I didn’t feel like a champion,” she says. “So I wrote one.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
