Audrey Hobert is standing on a chair, wearing Groucho glasses and an enormous trench coat and faux-strumming a banjo. She moves across the stage as if dancing alone in her bedroom, and she sings every song in her catalog and then plays her biggest hit, “Sue Me,” one more time, bouncing on an exercise trampoline and telling the crowd to put away their phones. After 45 minutes, she vanishes.
The house lights come on. Today she’s wearing a normal-sized trench coat and clutching a book about Elizabeth Holmes. She’s been on the road since December, and within 10 months, she went from playing for 650 fans at the Music Hall of Williamsburg to three sold-out nights at the Brooklyn Paramount.
In the year since the release of her debut album, “Who’s the Clown?,” Hobert has become one of pop’s most electrifying new acts. Her lyrics are equal parts confessional and funny — she sings of rating Uber drivers, sleeping with exes and taking naughty mirror selfies — and her fast-talking, conversational style has drawn comparisons to early Taylor Swift. Naturally, her music is also reminiscent of her childhood friend and collaborator Gracie Abrams, though Hobert’s sound has more of an edge.
After both attended college in New York, they moved in together in Los Angeles. Abrams was working on her debut album while Hobert, an aspiring screenwriter, was staffed on a Nickelodeon show. One night it all changed.
Then we just kept playing it.” Soon, Hobert was a credited writer on half of Abrams’ sophomore album, “The Secret of Us,” a massive breakout hit that sent Abrams on a year-long world tour and left Hobert to her own devices. I had been bitten by the bug.” When she wrote “Sex and the City,” a self-deprecating ballad about her romantic misadventures, she gained the confidence to go it alone. Recently, Hobert wrote down one of her goals 40 times in a notebook.
Riding the roller coaster of stardom has been easier with her best friend and sibling strapped in next to her. But for any contemporary celebrity, it’s a rite of passage to endure the inevitable waves of social media backlash. For Hobert, there was a nasty hate campaign following the August release of her NPR “Tiny Desk Concert,” which was fueled by disparaging comments about her appearance.
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