Written by Tee Tolmar
In a world that is quick to dismiss artists with predominantly female fanbases, Haiden Henderson leans in, proudly creating music for his self-described “cult of alternative pop girls.”
The Canadian singer-songwriter, who broke out after a TikTok video went viral during the pandemic, has built a devoted following that he jokes bears an almost eerie resemblance to the cast of The Vampire Diaries. But beyond the aesthetic, Haiden sees something genuinely meaningful in having a majority female audience. “Girls get there quicker. They find pop music faster. They’re more excited about it. And they’re the ones that show the rest of the world any kind of music,” he says. He thinks it also comes down to a willingness to be open. While guys often shy away from showing excitement, female audiences are far more willing to care, to invest, to commit fully to something they love. Haiden describes himself as a deeply passionate person, and gravitates toward an audience built the same way.
It is a perspective that feels particularly refreshing given how persistently that kind of fandom gets written off. The dismissal of artists with female audiences, and the casual implication that mass devotion from girls somehow signals lesser artistry, is a pattern Haiden is well aware of. He tells me he had only just watched a video about 5 Seconds of Summer (for whom he is currently opening on tour) grappling with the same thing. “Such a bizarre thing, because my whole team is… women. Our conversation on a daily basis is how do we make sure that we keep the girls excited and happy and wanting to be part of this fandom.”
That fandom has grown around music that is, above all else, achingly honest. Haiden’s latest EP Tension is, by his own admission, a document of the past year of his life. No filters, no holding back. “If you want to know what the last year of my life was like, all you have to do is listen to the songs. I tell you point blank, right on the nose, exactly what happened.” The title track, Sweet Tooth, and Good TV are the ones he flags as the most uncomfortably specific. The latter, he admits, may have gone “a little too specific” even. But it’s exactly his newfound openness and “willingness to be ugly” on Tension which gives the EP its unflinchingly personal quality.
It is a songwriting philosophy rooted entirely in lived experience, which Haiden describes as both gift and curse. “Sometimes it’s annoying as fuck,” he laughs, “because I’ll sit down and I want to write a song but I won’t know what to say because I don’t have anything in my body to pull from.” The sessions for Sweat are a case in point. He went into the studio with a title and an intention, wrote something he describes plainly as not good, and left frustrated. Buried in the wreckage, though, was one small melodic fragment he could not shake. He went home, sat on his couch with a guitar, and the rest of the song came pouring out. “I kind of see it as a Sudoku,” he says of the broader process, “trying to fit a certain number of life experiences into the structure of a song.” When a fan approaches him with a lyric tattooed on their skin or tells him a song helped them through something, it is a reminder for him that these specific real-life details can still become universal.
Music has been an incredibly rewarding avenue for Haiden, who came to music almost entirely by accident. He was studying aerospace engineering when Covid hit, and found himself in a pandemic spiral: skipping class, picking up a guitar, getting completely obsessed. What surprised him was how immediate the pull was. “All of this inspiration and excitement and fulfillment that I wasn’t feeling with engineering started flooding my body.” He’d grown up only really listening to R&B and hip hop, attended a high school with no arts programmes whatsoever, and had genuinely never thought of music as something people made.
There is a moment he reckons, that everyone has had, where the penny-drops and you stop hearing a song on the radio and start hearing a person who wrote it, recorded it, put their whole life into it. For Haiden, that moment came through the guitar itself. Picking one up at a friend’s house, almost at random, something clicked. “Wait, so people do this. This is somebody’s life.” From there, the rabbit hole opened up fast, and he started writing song after song and uploading them to TikTok. It was his tenth that went viral. Record labels started calling. He was still just a kid sitting in his bedroom in a bathrobe.
Experimenting with who he wanted to be, now that he suddenly had a platform, has been a long process. Whilst his earlier work is light and pop-y, visually Haiden has always leaned toward the gothic and the vampiric, citing Prince, Madonna, and the infamous Damon Salvatore as reference points. Tension marks the moment his music began to catch up with his aesthetic. For a long time, he was drawn to the idea of an artist whose look and sound exist in deliberate tension with each other. He loves that Teddy Swims, heavily tattooed and rugged, opens his mouth and out comes something achingly soulful. He loves that Justin Bieber has spent years looking like a “skate rat” while making “girly pop music.” The juxtaposition, to him, is its own kind of artistry.
Haiden is also honest about the fact that his earlier music was partly a product of figuring things out. He was recreating sounds he loved, learning by imitation, not yet confident enough to stray too far from what was already working. “I was kind of replicating a lot of things that I was hearing to figure out how to make music. I’m maybe getting more and more comfortable not sounding like other people.”
Tension is where that comfort started to show, the aesthetic and the sound pulling in the same direction. As he grows more sure of his identity as an artist, he gives me the following ‘ingredients’ for a Haiden Henderson hit: interesting guitar, “used in a way that isn’t just banging on it like every other straight white guy”; high, Britney-ish vocals set against it; and drums that “possess you” and make you need to get up and move. It’s a specific vision, and one he’s been working toward for a while.
Whatever comes next will be louder, he promises: less polite. The drums are pounding, the guitars are turned up, and the honesty is heightened. “The songs are a little bit less polite and a little bit more in your face. Riskier. But it’s going to sound similar, I’m just trying to make it better than it’s ever been.”
For the girls, of course. The ones who get there first.
Leave a Reply