In April 2020, the then 17-year-old had a hit with her second single Psycho – an impish confection of bass, percussion and processed screams.

Powered by her more than two million TikTok followers, the song has clocked 27 million plays across YouTube and Spotify, landing her a global deal with Atlantic Records.

But while Psycho’s streams soared, the pandemic’s full weight was closing Australia’s borders, venues and festivals.

Left watching the ticking clock on an industry rife with short-lived success, Rodriguez now exists in a liminal space between teenager and adult, online persona and live performer.

“Coronavirus started when I was 17,” says Rodriguez over Zoom, from her apartment in locked-down Sydney. “[Me and my friends] still feel like teenagers … we never got to experience our late teens, having fun, doing teenager stuff. We got out of school [but] we don’t have any freedom at all.”

Rodriguez is seemingly well-placed to handle a life online.

She began uploading cover songs to YouTube at 12, racking up 10,000 subscribers by age 14, and through her own efforts amassed a legion of social media followers by 17.

In late 2019 she became the first signing to concert promoter Michael Chugg’s new City Pop Records, releasing her first single, Emotion, that December – all before turning 18.

But everyone’s bandwidth has a limit.

“The virus started, I couldn’t perform anywhere, I couldn’t meet fans,” she says. “I lost the motivation to post videos because I was just stuck inside all day.”

Almost a year after releasing Psycho she landed two big shows in March, during Sydney’s miraculously long stretch between lockdowns, supporting ARIA-sweeping rock duo Lime Cordiale, at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre – her first ever live performances.

“I was super nervous because I’d never performed in front of, like, actual people before,” says Rodriguez, who’s part of an increasingly common phenomenon: artists with massive social media followings, snapped up by record companies, with music releases and live experience to follow.

“Because I started online, and I did it for a long period of time … [the audience] kind of just felt like numbers on the screen,” she says. “[Playing live] is definitely very different.”

Justin Bieber might be the archetype of this trajectory: he had played music at school and busked, but famously found fame on YouTube.

Rodriguez, on the other hand, was self-taught.

From the age of eight she’d escape years of relentless bullying by secretly singing along to karaoke or Nickelodeon shows before her mum arrived home from work.

Despite beckoning stardom, Rodriguez’s typical day now involves waking up at 2pm, responding to fans on social media, playing simulation games like The Sims or Stardew Valley, chatting with friends on Discord, and crashing at 4am.

Occasionally she’ll work in the studio, or perform to a small Twitch audience, but essentially she’s wallowing in the same developmental ennui as young people everywhere.

“It’s like being a teenager in an adult’s body. The whole world has been put on pause and you’re kind of just wasting away your adolescence.”

People who experienced pre-pandemic adulthood have been longing for old joys like travel, nights out and surprise encounters.

Rodriguez and her peers have had a profoundly different experience – their entire adulthoods have been shadowed by pandemic restrictions, leaving them dreaming of lives unlived.

She feels her generation is unfairly accused of laziness: simultaneously chastised for a preoccupation with life online, while being told not to take that same technology for granted.

“We don’t really have a choice – we’ve grown up with social media,” she says. “I feel older people are just like: ‘they’re complaining, they have it all, they have all this technology to keep them company’… [but] we’re doing it constantly, every day, and we can’t escape.”

So music remains her outlet.

Her new video for Billion Dollar Bitch (co-written with Mad at Disney singer Salem Ilese) continues her established persona – a kind of deranged innocence on a Halloween-high, gulping down bling in place of sweets.

US rapper Yung Baby Tate drops bars, while Rodriguez sings playful, self-affirming lyrics over bass and skittering snares.

“I wanted to feel like a Billion Dollar Bitch. I needed a song that can hype me and my fans up and just bring more confidence out into the world,” says Rodriguez. “I wanted to bring a really bad bitch energy to this shitty, sick world right now.”

Story By | Nick Buckley