Sophie Morgan Howarth, better known as Luvcat, is telling me about the inspiration for her new song Silent Killer. She was living in Camberwell, south London, in a ‘magical’ flat with her bandmates, Tom and Jack. But towards the end of their tenancy, she ‘felt like [the flat] wanted to get rid of us. There was a really bad carbon monoxide leak, and I had to physically drag the boys out, because they’d already slipped into delirium.’ Luckily, they’d had an alarm fitted the week before, ‘or else the gas man said we’d all be dead. And I just thought that was such a good metaphor, because love is a silent killer, too. You can’t see how it’s torturing you, until afterwards, if you make it out alive.’

Sounds morbid? That’s exactly Luvcat’s shtick.

Tucked up in the corner of a north London boozer with burgundy-lined lips and a peroxide blonde beehive, the 29-year-old looks not unlike her fellow Gen Z singer Sabrina Carpenter, 27. Luvcat’s first album Vicious Delicious is full of songs about tragic love affairs ending in sometimes gory, often darkly funny murders – usually of her useless romantic interests.

Clearly young women relate. The album has been streamed more than 120 million times, and its lead single, He’s My Man, has 68 million listens. Last summer, her US doppelgänger Carpenter – whose own music videos always feature a man meeting his end – tapped Luvcat to open for the 65,000-strong crowd at one of her Hyde Park shows. Carpenter even wrote her a ‘lovely’ note she now keeps taped to her wall. ‘She gave me a shoutout on stage,’ Luvcat says now. ‘And I couldn’t believe she remembered mine and the other performer’s names. I’d have had to read them off my phone!’

Luvcat

The electrician’s daughter from Merseyside that Carpenter introduced to 65,000 people was actually a performer 20 years in the making. Luvcat grew up in a deeply gothic household in Liverpool – a refreshing accent to hear in an Islington pub – with parents who weren’t musicians themselves (her mother Maria is a beautician) but filled the house with The Smiths, The Cure and all manner of macabre music. Her father David was a punk who would take Maria to alternative clubs in his battered car, while she backcombed her hair en route. ‘That mythology of their youth was always told to me,’ Luvcat says.

David, also a Morrissey devotee, told his daughter that The Smiths’ singer kept a black-and-red book by his bed to catch the lyrics that came to him in dreams. So when Luvcat was seven, he gave her a notebook and told her to write down whatever came to her. She still has it. The first entry reads: ‘Hi, my name is Sophie. I’m seven years old, and today is my first day of writing songs to be like Morrissey one day.’

Sabrina Carpenter

A guitar arrived soon after. (She had wanted a skateboard, in tribute to Avril Lavigne, but taught herself to play anyway.) In her teens, she became ‘obsessed’ with pin-up girls and would paint them in her GCSE art class – until her work got ‘banned from being put on the walls’.

Her unlikely break came at 14, at her mum’s best friend’s wedding in Chester. Asked to sing in the church, she picked a Bob Dylan tune – and afterwards was approached by a fellow guest, Simon Jones, bassist in the band The Verve, who wanted to know if she wrote her own songs. The next day she bunked off school to play to him in his studio. Jones’ advice? Stop listening to ‘old miserable men’. He took her to HMV and bought her a stack of CDs by female artists: Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Kate Bush. ‘Ever since then he’s been my musical guardian,’ Luvcat says. ‘Last year for my birthday, he got me a red Fender Mustang.’

Still, this chance encounter didn’t mean overnight success. Luvcat spent years busking in Liverpool city centre and giving out DIY EPs. At 17, she put an advert in the newspaper looking for a guitarist; Tom Fripp answered and remains her ‘right-hand man’ today. But it was when Luvcat started editing and posting clips on Instagram that things really changed. She racked up 230,000 followers, and soon fans were learning unreleased songs from live clips and arriving at shows dressed as her. At one gig in Cologne, supporting Brit Award winners The Last Dinner Party, Luvcat wore a £40 dress from Urban Outfitters; when she returned to the city for her own show, thanks to an Instagram account @luvcats.clothing dedicated to sourcing her outfits, the entire front row was wearing it. ‘I just thought that was the sweetest thing,’ she says.

Now regularly playing sold-out shows across Europe, she has a summer of festivals ahead (Splendour in Nottingham is next, on 18 July). Success also now means she has a line of unlikely collaborators. For a duet on her recently released Lovebites EP – a reimagining of He’s My Man, a song about a slow poisoning – she recruited the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, who took the brief so seriously he went off and read up on exactly how arsenic tastes, smells and feels. The record label, she reckons, had been hoping she’d pair up with ‘a young sexy man’. She gave them the 77-year-old poet and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay on sax instead. ‘I just always want to surprise people,’ she says.

Luvcat

It also means Luvcat is happy to chat about disastrous gigs with the calmness of someone no longer performing to empty rooms. She’s convinced Brixton’s Windmill pub is ‘cursed’: every time she plays it, something explodes. The worst was when she invited all her pals to watch three years ago: an amp blew, the spare guitar was untuned, and the power cut out. ‘Everything that could go wrong, did. And it’s all on YouTube.’

Even now, her pre-show nerves are brutal. She needs to be left alone with a cup of tea and a little red wine while her bandmates sing her You Are My Sunshine to calm her down. (Afterwards, it’s the rest of the bottle.)

Sabrina Carpenter

So, after playing Hyde Park with one of the world’s biggest pop stars, what’s next? A second album, written partly in Hollywood with ‘a very magical, mysterious man’ she won’t name. It may also, finally, settle the question fans keep putting to her: the circus. Because in her songs, Luvcat keeps telling the same vague story of joining one as a trapeze artist, then fleeing after a doomed affair with the ringmaster. Is it true? I ask. ‘Of course it’s true, but I don’t talk about it much. If I’m going to tell that story properly, it will be on an album.’

You’ll have to listen to find out.

Lovebites is out now; for live dates, see luvcat.co.uk