The new month sees releases from queer indie icons Christine and the Queens, Phoebe Bridgers and Soccer Mommy
We’re only three months into 2020 and it’s already set to be a year of total success for queer wxmen in music. Just last week, three bonafide stars of the queer indie scene all came out with new releases – each of them a surefire hit in their own respective style and each of them being artists that you can hear us discuss on the latest episode of our podcast.
Firstly, we had Phoebe Bridgers – the princess of melancholy folk – drop her first solo single in more than two years with the quasi-tragic, contemplative ‘Garden Song’. After shifting her focus from her own work to collaborate with indie supergroup boygenius (populated by fellow LGBTQ+ rockers Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) and Better Oblivion Community Centre, Bridgers has finally returned to her solo music and, oh, how it was worth the wait.
Over tender guitar chords, Bridgers ruminates on the future, however hopeless it may be, as she considers the fact that when she ‘grows up’, she’ll look up from her phone and ‘see’ her life – and she’ll realise it’ll be just like her usual ‘recurring dream’. It’s classic Bridgers: bleak, understated and unbearably tender. Long may she continue to wound us with her work.
Then, Christine and the Queens dropped a new EP and a fascinating short film to boot. After setting the world alight with Chris back in 2018, Christine (also known as Héloïse Letissier) went quiet for a short while following on from a string of knock-out live performances in 2019. Now, she’s back and giving us queer womxn life again by providing us with disco bangers and gorgeous electro-pop tinged with sombre undertones. With the release of ‘La vita nuova’, Letissier welcomes us into a new era – where we’re sure that the eroticism and eccentricity that characterises so much of her work will come to the fore.
To round out an excellent continuous output of material made by queer womxn, Soccer Mommy came along before the end of the week to give us another dose of desolate tunes with her sophmore album color theory. Following on from her scorching debut Clean, 22-year-old Sophia Allison has returned to concern herself once again with the tribulations of young adult boredom and the cyclical nature of depression, as is clear from lead single circle the drain.
Here, Allison details how she feels ‘chained’ to her bed when her family, her friends and her love are gone and how she seems to watch as a passer-by as her heart ‘goes round and round’. The entire record reflects this line of thinking, as Allison contemplates how she can live with neurotic thoughts and live happily, too. This subject turns into a question that, by the time we reach the album’s finale, not even Allison can answer – but maybe that’s okay. Maybe queer youth is all about living with thoughts that are at odds with each other and accepting that. Soccer Mommy certainly seems to think so.