King Princess’ new record opens up with a revelation: nobody mentioned that girls can be violent. It might sound hyperbolic, but violence is a worthy description of the way only a girl can break your heart. Sure, it all stings, but lesbian breakups are just more painful. There’s nothing like the headrush when a new sapphic romance begins. The intimacy comes with ease, but that same rush can just as quickly take a dive when the smoke clears and cracks start to show. It’s emotional whiplash, and sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. King Princess gets this, and she doesn’t shy away from the mess on this new record.
Pain and pleasure, heaven and hell, peace and violence—these polar opposites inform the feelings explored on Girl Violence, and also across the entire discography of King Princess (real name Mikaela Strauss). But Strauss’ insistence on revisiting the same themes in her music doesn’t make any of her songs feel played out or boring, or make her a one-note artist. If anything, the callbacks to her older songs, purposeful or not, make the new material resonate even harder. To get hurt over and over as a result of refusing to harden yourself: that’s the kind of pain that makes Strauss’ style so familiar.
Girl Violence follows Strauss’ previous release structure of a new album every three years. Her last LP, Hold On Baby, came out in 2022, following up her 2019 full-length debut, Cheap Queen. Throughout her career, she’s never succumbed to the pressures of honing in on one kind of sound. From the start, she’s played around with slow romantic ballads, electro-pop, and even hip-hop influences. The range of sounds explored on Girl Violence is no different. It’s her first album since switching to an indie label, Partisan imprint section1, which she partially credits for the freedom she felt in making this album.
When you get your start as a teenager, like Strauss did, the pressure to live up to prodigal expectations can make or break you. Perhaps the best example of this conundrum that exists is Lorde, who wrote some of her most gut-wrenching lyrics in her earliest years and didn’t receive the same kind of accolades when she tried to change her tune on follow-up records like Solar Power. There’s something about the purity of a young mind writing about their first tangles with love and heartbreak and devastation that makes it more gratifying, be it the lack of self-consciousness or the rarity of the heightened emotions, which tend to dull as we get older. Strauss, though, is not above messing up and feeling things as deeply as possible. Every song she writes about heartbreak feels different than the last, because she isn’t one to feign wisdom in her lyrics.
One of the earliest examples of Strauss’ songwriting talent exists on her second-ever single, “Talia,” a devastating song about heartbreak and seeing the ghost of your ex wherever you look. Strauss revisits the idea of ghosts in one of the poppier tracks on Girl Violence, “Covers,” though this time, she’s the one doing the haunting. “Do you miss the feeling / Of being proud / And staring at me / Well God you had me / And what now?” she asks of a former lover, before resigning to her status of a ghost. “You’ll hear scratching at your post / And you’ll wonder if it’s me who’s haunting you,” she warns.
“RIP KP” is a devilish and sexy track that serves as a fleshed-out representation of the kind of powerful anthems Strauss is capable of creating, balancing her identity as the hunter and the prey in her romantic endeavors. The energetic and electric song is reminiscent of one of her earlier singles, “PAIN,” where she also plays with vocals as part of building out the beat. She considers herself more of a musician than a vocalist, she recently told Paste’s Matt Mitchell, and her hands are all over this record, playing guitar, bass, piano, drums, mellotron, moog–you name it.
The track she plays the most instruments on is “I Feel Pretty,” where she looks for peace through a new lover, finding solace in feeling pretty for the first time in years—a loaded statement for someone who has publicly documented their exploration of their gender identity, both in their music and in interviews. Maybe even more importantly, she sings, ”For the first time in years, I feel painless.” But the harsh guitars point to a different story, one of sharp edges and death by a thousand cuts. And with this song’s placement in the first half of the album, there’s so much more to come and bring those familiar feelings of pain back. Just a couple of tracks later, she gives some advice that only someone whose taken it themselves could offer: “You should fuck around, fuck around and get your heart broken.” There is no pleasure without pain, no high without lows, no love without loss. Making light of heartbreak is just one way to cope.
The pain is more present in “Alone Again,” a bouncy track that’s melodically far more upbeat than the heft of the lyrics. “I’m a loser, she’s a taker / And a user of what I gave her,” she opens the song with before delving into the repeated cycle of “crying on the floor” and “begging at the door.” But her confidence is back by the end of the track, where she remarks: “I got bigger dreams (bigger dreams) / Then being your baby / Honestly, I’m so relieved it’s over.”
“Cry Cry Cry,” released as the album’s second single, is quite the departure from some of Strauss’ slower ballads and airier pop tracks, delving into a more angsty, pop-punk sound reminiscent of the early 2000s, which her husky vocals lend themselves to nicely. “Jaime” is sonically similar, with even the name being the kind of girl’s name that a pop-punk band of the early aughts might use for a song title. Lyrically, it fits that theme too, with the sincere duality of admiring a girl you can’t have, while recognizing her flaws. “Jaime, I’ve been secretly wishing you’d date me / Despite all the times you were wack / If you told me I’m cool, I’d collapse,” she sings.
But the real heart of the record lives in “Girls,” a boisterous ballad with the kinds of intonations only a seasoned musician could create. It maintains the theme of wanting something you shouldn’t and echoes the opening track and record name’s references to girl violence, which in this case, is self-inflicted. “And to let you back in / That would be violence / That would be chaos,” she croons, before chaotically admitting, “I want to try it.” A perpetrator of her own vicious cycles in her life, Strauss isn’t ashamed to get real about the role she plays in the unrivaled chaos that sapphic relationships bring.
If there’s one thing Strauss is gonna do, it’s own her shit, and that message is loud and clear all over Girl Violence. That same confidence to own her misgivings in love is present in her confidence to own her sound, because with her third full-length album, she’s proven that as long as you’re good at what you do, you don’t need a reinvention. Being unafraid to really be yourself is hard for any artist, but Strauss makes it look easy, whether that’s by writing unflinchingly honest lyrics or donning the unsexiest costumes (like an unflattering Lord Voldemort cosplay) for her Bazongas parties. As a lifelong musician, she possesses the chops to be perfectly polished, but also the instinct to choose raw vulnerability, which gives her the rock star edge that many of her contemporaries lack, allowing her to take up a space all her own.
Read our digital cover story on King Princess here.
