Material Lover

Loving What You Can Touch

There's a particular kind of ache in modern life that's hard to name until someone puts a hook under it: the flatness of a day lived almost entirely through glass, with texts and feeds and files standing in for the objects and hands they replaced. On her single "Material Lover," Sienna Spiro built a jazzy, horn-lined three minutes around exactly that ache, and its opposite, turning a defense of tangible things and real human hands into one of the catchiest arguments of her young career^[1].

A Twenty-Year-Old's First Film Song

Born in London in September 2005 to jeweler Glenn Spiro and Arabella Spiro, Sienna grew up in a household where hand-finished, physical objects were the family trade long before she turned that value into a lyric^[2]. She started writing songs at ten, steeped in Etta James, Frank Sinatra and the other jazz and soul singers her family played, and left school at sixteen after a viral TikTok cover pushed her voice out of her bedroom and toward a record deal^[2]. By the time she released her breakthrough single "Die on This Hill" in 2025, a song she reworked for months on tour before finding the version she calls cathartic enough to sing forever, she had already built the fanbase that would follow her into film^[5].

She was twenty, and coming off that breakthrough, when she was approached to contribute to the soundtrack of The Devil Wears Prada 2^[5]. Scoring a movie was, by her own account, one of her biggest dreams, and this was her first^[3]. Watching an early cut of the film, though, she worried her usual melancholic, confessional style would clash with its brighter, glossier tone^[5]. Rather than shrink her sound to fit, she found an angle that connected her instincts to the story on screen: the franchise has always circled a print magazine's anxious grip on relevance, and the sequel extends that anxiety into a world reshaped by digital media^[5]. Watching that decline dramatized got her thinking about a loss her own generation has lived through, the disappearance of physical formats and printed things in favor of feeds and files^[1]. "Material Lover" was released as a single on May 22, 2026, written with producers Omer Fedi and Michael Pollack, and later added to the deluxe edition of her debut album, Visitor, that July^[1][2].

Reclaiming "Material"

The title does careful work. "Materialistic" is usually an insult, shorthand for someone who values possessions over people. Spiro's song picks the word up and turns it over, arguing that caring about objects made carefully by human hands isn't in conflict with caring about people, it can be an expression of the same instinct. She has said she would rather be called materialistic than settle for something manufactured with no one's fingerprints on it^[4]. It reads less like an ode to shopping than a small manifesto about authorship: things should be something someone actually made.

That philosophy carries into how she records. Spiro has said that working with her hands is part of what makes her feel human, and she has committed publicly to making music only with real musicians playing real instruments, never a computer standing in for one, and never AI^[5]. "Material Lover" enacts that argument in its own construction: the track was built around musicians playing together in a room, drums, guitar, keys and horns, with Spiro cutting her vocal in single takes rather than assembling a performance from pieces^[4]. The song's case for tangibility isn't just described, it's demonstrated.

The Body in the Room, the City Outside

Musically, the track leans into a warm, horn-inflected groove closer to the jazz vocalists she grew up idolizing than to the clipped, minor-key balladry that made her famous^[2]. That warmth is the point: the song doesn't argue against pleasure or gloss, it argues that pleasure and gloss land better when something real sits underneath them. The narrator moves between glamour and grounding, between the sparkle promised by nice things and the steadier comfort of a hand to hold or a room to stand in, without treating the two as opposites^[3].

The music video stages that argument visually. Co-directed by Spiro and Ivy Tellin, it was filmed at Electric Lady Studios, the Greenwich Village studio Jimi Hendrix built in 1970, before following Spiro out of the building and into the streets of New York^[1][3]. The camera moves from a room steeped in musical history and analog craft into the unscripted texture of the city, letting a legendary studio's glamour bleed into the ordinary tangibility of pavement and passersby. It's a small piece of staging that mirrors the song's core claim, that sparkle and substance were never really at odds.

A Soundtrack Song That Argues With Its Movie

Part of what keeps "Material Lover" from feeling like a soundtrack placeholder is how directly it argues with the anxiety built into its host film. The original Devil Wears Prada was a story about a print magazine's power and its gatekeepers; a sequel decades later has to reckon with what happens when that industry's foundations, physical publications, printed images, tactile prestige, get hollowed out by digital feeds^[5]. Spiro's song takes that industry-specific worry and generalizes it into something closer to a generational complaint, an artist barely into her twenties singing about missing things she can still remember holding^[2].

That framing gives the song a resonance beyond any one film's box office run. It arrives at a moment when younger listeners, the same demographic that made Spiro a star through TikTok in the first place, are also part of a documented turn back toward vinyl records, film cameras and printed zines, treating physical formats as a deliberate counterweight to algorithmic feeds^[2]. A song built by a twenty-year-old insisting on real instruments over computers, and explicitly rejecting AI, lands as commentary on her own industry's fight over authorship and authenticity, not just a nostalgic aesthetic choice^[4][5].

Retail Therapy or Manifesto?

Not every listener will hear the song as a manifesto. Writing in Nylon, critic Jillian Giandurco described "Material Lover" simply as an addictively jazzy, feel-good ode to tangible connection, and, sure, the power of a little retail therapy^[3], a reading that takes the song's materialism at face value: a shiny, danceable celebration of nice things and the good feeling they bring, without insisting on the deeper argument about craftsmanship underneath. Both readings can be true of the same three minutes. Pop songs are built to work on more than one level, and "Material Lover" is catchy enough to succeed purely as a feel-good single about treating yourself, even for listeners who never clock the AI-skeptical philosophy running underneath it.

That flexibility may be exactly what makes the song work as a soundtrack cut. A film about fashion and glamour needs a song that sounds like fun before it sounds like an argument, and "Material Lover" delivers both without asking its audience to choose.

Conclusion

There's a quiet irony in where "Material Lover" ended up living. Spiro's debut album, Visitor, is built around the idea that people are only ever passing through each other's lives, temporary by design^[5]. Onto that record she added a song insisting on the value of things solid enough to outlast a scroll, a text, a passing trend. That may be the real thesis underneath the horns and the hooks: if everything else is transient, the objects and instruments and hands we choose to make things with are one of the few ways we get to leave a mark. "Material Lover" doesn't ask listeners to abandon the digital world they live in. It just asks them to notice what still deserves to be touched.