magine, for a second, a world in which all your girlhood dreams come true. Everything feels beautiful, glamorous, and light. This is precisely the world 21-year-old Mollie Elizabeth invites you into with her debut EP, Dirty Blonde. Not unlike her Pinterest mood boards of soft pastel pinks and vintage silks, the Washington singer-songwriter curates an intricate and articulated world of feminine excess and joy.

Mollie’s music isn’t just a fantasy; it’s a way to orient yourself in this cold world, to not just survive its cruelty, but to beautify it. “It’s hard and scary to be in the world right now,” she says. “It’s just so difficult to connect or even know who you are.”

It took a very modern fairytale to get her here. Growing up outside of Seattle, our heroine suffered panic attacks from an early age. She often felt sick to her stomach with fear. “I just always tried to go back to this whimsical feeling when it all got too much,” she says. She was drawn to Old Hollywood icons like Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, and Marilyn Monroe. “They made me think: why can’t I do that in everyday life, like dress up really fancy just to go to the grocery store or to go to the airport?” she says. “I just found so much solace in embracing femininity, whimsy, beauty, and everything like that.”

Her mother had introduced her to vintage legends early on, playing her Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney on an old radio at the family’s beach house in Oregon. Mollie immediately associated their songs with joy, finding their sound far more compelling than the modern pop she heard everywhere else. She carried the nimble sense of storytelling from their songs into her own, a practice she took up as soon as she developed motor skills. She wrote songs before she could even put pen to paper, humming little ditties to herself about the process of tying shoes. From then on, instead of journaling, Mollie would digest the world around her through song.

While music had always been an insular activity, Mollie decided to start posting her songs to the internet during the pandemic. The disconnect and loneliness forced her to seek human contact online. At first, the music took a backseat to makeup tutorials; then, she posted a song called “Vegas Venetian,” a hyper-romantic modern classic that secured Mollie’s place in an ultra-modern fairytale. On the morning after posting, she woke up to millions of views and hundreds of messages in her DMs. “Dad, I think it’s happening,” she told her father that morning.

Not long after, she flew out to work with super-producer Dean Reid (Lana Del Rey, MARINA) on Dirty Blonde, her first EP. Together, they focused on modernizing and maximizing Mollie’s classic vintage sound. Dean added lush orchestral swells to Mollie’s modern-classic take on life and love, while still bringing her sweet vibrato front and center.

Dirty Blonde is full of both daytime splendor and torchy nighttime romance, from the cheeky romp of “Dinner For One” to the dusky amour of “Until We Meet Again.” It’s Old Hollywood glamour through and through. Mollie perfumes her music with a rare kind of chic, one that comes with a winking self-assurance and a genuine sweetness.

There are millions of people out there who have been looking for someone like Mollie: the fancifulness, the whimsey, the classical taste. They’re not the people you necessarily find in high school, but they’re out there. Come join the tea party.