Sometimes no matter how hard you try, your life can still fall apart. Girl Violence, the third album from King Princess, is the sound of Mikaela Straus picking up the pieces of a world left shattered. Fighting for freedom, stepping back from the limelight, breaking up, moving away – through it all, she somehow found the agency and creative spirit to fight the misconceptions and create the album she was destined to make.
“Girl violence is very sneaky,” Straus says. “It’s not physical, it’s deeply emotional, spiritual, and spooky. Women are both amazing and sinister—including myself—and it’s my curiosity to understand all the love, loss, and changes that come out of my love for women. Why are we so inclined to cause and receive chaos? If you’ve experienced even an iota of it, then you’ll have a story to tell. And these are mine.”
The songs on Girl Violence are probing and vulnerable, but also nuanced, sensual, and bold; a product of her physical homecoming — leaving LA after seven years for Brooklyn where she was born + raised — and a potent return to self. “I was not loving life, I didn’t feel grounded at all. I realized my feet were dangling for years,” she says of her end-stage time in LA. “Once I was back in the arms of the city I love, I started to feel easier and lighter about hard decisions that were actually in my best interest.”
Accordingly, the album brims with an exhilarating sense of freedom, stemming from Straus’ decision to leave behind the major label system that had defined much of her story up to this point. While not strictly a “breakup record” in the traditional sense, Girl Violence was in part born out of a newly-found romantic freedom following the end of a long relationship. Finally feeling at home and left to her own devices, she was able to tap into the force that fueled some of her earliest creative excitement and breakthroughs.
She zeroed in on it: one studio, a tight-knit NYC crew, and a few months of immersion. She found kindred-spirit collaborators in Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait (credits include Lil Yachty, Alex G), and Aire Atlantica (breakthrough: SZA’s “Low”) and inspiration in tracks by IDLES, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (her bedrock reference for production/mixing/vibe), and Beatles live sessions. Girl Violence slowly started to take shape.
“Jaime” was the record’s catalyst, knocked out in four hours during the first exploratory session with Jake and Aire. It was an instant earworm met with unanimous agreement – the world needed more of whatever magic was happening in that room. It’s plaintive and bruised and sonically subversive in that its chorus hinges on soaring instrumentation more than a lyrical refrain.
The erotic euphoria of “RIP KP” serves as another one of the album’s defining statements, her voice cracking with lust in hands down the sexiest cut she’s ever conceived. Straus tears into the uninhibited edges of desire with reckless abandon while straddling the line between vulgar and proper, calling into question if that line even exists in the first place.
Elsewhere, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” about a friend-turned-frenemy, is like early Go-Go’s reimagined as a 90s alt-pop smash, while “I Feel Pretty” sees her homesickness soothed, her swagger boomeranging back; and the Zero 7-esque “Origin” is the sound of Straus coming up for air.
Musically much of Girl Violence is driven by groove, like the indie rock flex of “Slow Down and Shut Up” (about sexting in a tour bus bunk), or the laconic bassline on “Get Your Heart Broken,” an anthem that encapsulates the record’s core: What the heart wants versus what you ultimately need; the knotty emotions of wrestling with one’s identity, and how that inner conflict impacts another. And of course, that which is ‘bad’ feels so tantalizingly good.
This collection may be “a celebration of the craziness of femininity, in awe and admiration of the derangement,” but it also stands as a document of Straus’ multifaceted evolution. Perennially underestimated, she now wields the chip on her shoulder as a weapon, upping the ante and taking the reins. And she’ll always be in motion with her quicksilver humor and curious, open heart.
“It’s about recognizing that we have an abundance of love in our life,” she says. “I don’t think I will ever lose the ability to stop loving or creating big loves. You can have crazy fallouts and breakups, but you aren’t incapable of loving, if anything, I think it makes you more capable.” Although Girl Violence centralizes relationship dynamics in all their cerebral, emotional, and carnal glory, above all else she interrogates the shifting sands of self. How you view yourself and move through the world, what you understand and acknowledge, and the logic you still decide to abandon—for desire, for adventure, for the ride. Through it all, she offers up Girl Violence not as an answer, but as an echo—one that’s yours to claim, distort, and make your own.
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