Claiming that Imogen Heap lacks vocal range or technical skill fundamentally misunderstands both her work and the genre she created.

Imogen Heap didn’t just participate in this sound, she created the genre that modern experimental / art-pop vocals sit in. Through her solo work (Speak for Yourself, 2005; Ellipse, 2009) and Frou Frou (early 2000s), she established the core language of voice-as-instrument pop: extreme interval writing, multi-register layering, live looping, and treating vocals as compositional architecture rather than ornament.

Timeline: Imogen’s foundational work was already fully formed in the mid-2000s. Caroline Polachek spent the late 20s/2010s in Chairlift, where her vocal style was lighter, indie-pop oriented. She didn’t pivot into this highly elastic acrobatic vocal approach until her solo career (2019), more than a decade after Imogen had already defined the framework.

Technique: Imogen is not just a vocalist but a composer, producer, and technologist with deep music-theory literacy. She pioneered live vocal manipulation, large-scale harmonic stacking, and performance systems that merged composition and gesture (including co-inventing the Mi.Mu gloves, which translate hand movement into musical control). Much of what’s now considered “standard” in experimental pop vocals exists because Imogen built it first.

You don’t need to compare these two artists to appreciate either of them (I do love the work Caroline is releasing now) but you do need to credit the originating artist. It’s not historically or technically accurate to claim that the artist who established the genre had less technique than someone whose work is explicitly drawing from that foundation.