Elle Varner

Elle Varner, born Gabrielle Serene Varner, is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist raised in Los Angeles who studied at New York University’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, an incubator that has produced several contemporary R&B and pop artists. Her music blends classic soul phrasing with modern R&B and hip-hop-adjacent production, and she is known for candid, conversational songwriting that leans into everyday relationship dynamics rather than glossy pop abstraction.

She broke through with «Refill», a breakout single whose confessional tone and unusual, culinary-flavored metaphor set the template for her early sound, later joined by songs like «Only Wanna Give It To You» and «Don’t Wanna Dance», which lean more directly into R&B and dance-adjacent grooves. Later work such as «I Don’t Care», «Fuck It All», and «Rover» shows an artist comfortable moving between vulnerability and defiance, often foregrounding live instrumentation reflecting her multi-instrumentalist background.

Varner occupies a space in R&B where songwriting craft and musicianship are as central as vocal performance, situating her alongside a generation of artists who came up through NYU’s Clive Davis program and helped keep melodic, instrument-driven R&B present in the 2010s pop landscape.