Nieve Ella / Flowerovlove / Katie Gregson-MacLeod

What’s it like to have your song synced on ‘Heartstopper’?

Flowerovlove, Nieve Ella, Katie Gregson-MacLeod and music supervisor Matt Biffa discuss the unique appeal of the Netflix hit’s soundtrack.

Hollie Geraghty
  • By Hollie Geraghty
  • 25 Nov 2024
  • min read

When Heartstopper first arrived on our screens in April 2022, it was quickly hailed as a cultural phenomenon for gen Z. With its heartwarming queer teenage storyline, groundbreaking LGBTQ+ representation and moving performances from rising stars Joe Locke and Kit Connor, the only thing that rivalled the buzz the show initially generated was the show’s own soundtrack.

Featuring songs by the likes of Baby Queen, Orla Gartland and CHVRCHES, the Netflix hit’s thoughtful music placements not only sent hordes of new fans to those artists’ streaming profiles, but made the coveted Heartstopper sync a significant goal for a whole generation of up-and-coming artists.

‘I texted my sync team every single Friday,’ confesses 19-year-old south London singer and Heartstopper superfan Flowerovlove, who features on the season three soundtrack. ‘I was like, “Hey, what a beautiful day it is today. Have you heard anything about Heartstopper?”’

The artist, real name Joyce Cisse, is signed to Capitol Records and was previously synced in an advert for Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand Rhode, so knew immediately that she wanted a shot in Heartstopper. ‘Sync is always a priority for me in this job,’ she adds.

Her persistence eventually paid off. With the support of her fans on TikTok, who insisted that her songs were ‘Heartstopper-coded’, Joyce finally got her music in front of the show’s creator Alice Oseman. Her track Love You features in episode eight of season three (titled ‘Apart’), which landed last month. ‘Everyone was so excited when it was finally out, because they know how long I've been wanting this,’ Joyce tells M.

Featuring on the Heartstopper soundtrack was also a major goal for 21-year-old Shropshire-born indie-pop artist Nieve Ella. After watching the show with her best friend, she quickly began to manifest her own Heartstopper-shaped ambitions. ‘We always used to say, “One day our song's going to be on there,”’ she recalls. Her song Car Park features in a joyous moment in episode three (‘Talk’), but having only started releasing music in the summer of 2022, sync, until recently, was a totally foreign concept. ‘I still don't really know how it works!’ she admits.

Both Nieve and Joyce are aligned in what they each believe makes a song perfect for the much-loved show. ‘[Heartstopper] is so real as it shows exactly what happens in that age,’ says Nieve. ‘The songs are also so real because they're from artists that are that age. We're all experiencing that whirlwind of life.’ Joyce agrees: ‘All of [Heartstopper] just felt so gen Z. It makes you feel seen.’

The first time that 23-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod tuned into the show, she also felt the music was ‘of my generation’: ‘It's not often that you hear those kinds of songs on soundtracks,’ she adds. But when the first season of Heartstopper came out, sync wasn’t exactly a priority for the singer (though her track White Lies did feature on Love Island last year). ‘It was always something that felt like a far-off world, until it wasn't,’ she tells M.

These artists’ assessments of the unique qualities of the Heartstopper soundtrack are pretty spot on, according to music supervisor Matt Biffa, who’s also worked on shows like Sex Education, One Day and I May Destroy You. ‘When you're a teenager, everything is just so much all the time,’ he recalls of his initial understanding of the brief. ‘You wanted to feel like anybody could make that music in their bedroom. It was supposed to feel democratic, open to everybody in the same way that the show is open to everybody.’

When it comes to curating the soundtrack, Matt says, it’s all about conveying exactly how a character is feeling in a particular scene. ‘We're just looking for maximum emotional impact or maximum joy, or whatever it is that the scene needs,’ he says. ‘The emotion has to be right over secondary considerations.’

'Sync is always a priority for me.' - flowerovlove

That process of finding those perfect songs is, unsurprisingly, a thorough one. Each season will begin with a playlist that Alice, Matt and executive producer Patrick Walters will all contribute to. Alongside his own homework, he’s also, he estimates, approached some 15 to 20 times a day by Heartstopper hopefuls (‘You need to be quite gentle,’ he advises). But there’s a fine art to the curation process, not to mention an admittedly ‘intangible, inexplicable set of criteria’.

Matt says he’s noticed some Heartstopper fans who have read ahead in the graphic novel series the show is based on will pitch songs centred around the plot — but that’s not what they’re looking for. ‘There has to be an almost lack of specificity that makes the song more universal,’ he explains. ‘You've probably got more chance of [getting a sync] just doing your own thing, following your own emotions and your own sound.’

Then there’s the practicalities of making the sync work, for which Katie was apparently a model student. Her emotive demo Complex was originally recorded with instruments and vocals on the same track, which proved tricky when it was paired with a pivotal scene in which Charlie opens up to his parents about his mental health — meaning the lyrics needed to drop out at times in order to make the dialogue audible. To get around this, Katie re-recorded each part of the track separately.

‘It was lovely to get the opportunity to do that, because I'm sure that it would have been easy for them just to be like, “That’s not going to work” and just go with someone else,’ Katie says. From a music supervisor’s perspective, this was exactly the attitude they needed. ‘Having the flexibility, or the willingness to slightly rework something, is really a plus,’ Matt adds.

More than anything, though, it simply comes down to not overcomplicating things. ‘A great song is a great song,’ he states. ‘You can see yourself fitting into the Heartstopper world, absolutely. But then when you get to the actual nitty gritty and the specifics of your song being the absolute best for that scene, and nothing else will even come close, that is a whole other thing.’ In other words, writing a song that is authentic will go further than ‘writing something and imagining little animated leaves floating around’.

The benefits of the exposure from featuring on Heartstopper for each artist have been plentiful. Katie broke her usual rule of staying away from numbers to find that her monthly listeners had gone up ‘significantly’. Joyce, meanwhile, asserts that there’s ‘definitely some new people’ among her already Heartstopper-adoring fanbase, while Nieve has spotted numerous YouTube comments from listeners saying they’d found her music after watching the show.

But the real impact of this particular sync is one that can’t be measured with stats or follower counts. ‘The importance of it is the feeling that your song can align with the scene that resonates with people,’ Joyce reasons. Katie agrees: ‘The real response that matters to me is the messages and the comments that I've been getting. I'm still getting tons of comments every day from people being like, “So you're the reason that I'm sobbing!”’

Ultimately, this boost for the Heartstopper soundtrack class of 2024 has only reaffirmed why each artist was making music in the first place. ‘[My song] lives these different lives beyond the few hours and the feeling that I wrote it in,’ says Katie. ‘It gives it a new life.’

Or, as Nieve plainly puts it: ‘That art is meant to be heard and be seen. That's why it's created: it's supposed to be out there.’