"I’d give my body to Satan if I could only keep my soul," Nicole Dollanganger sings in a whispery, desperate voice on "Angels of Porn (II)", a song about how the singer seems to have been trapped in a food and cum-stained dungeon for days. "But I can’t seem to find the split between them anymore." This is the sort of subject matter that made her music popular among her Tumblr followers in the first place, long before Grimes made her the first artist on her new label. And no matter how chipper her plucky bedroom folk sounded on the surface on previous records like Flowers of Flesh and Blood and Curdled Milk, she was still singing lyrics like, "Why didn’t anyone tell me love is like being fucked with a knife?"
Over nimble electric guitar and booming kick drum, her new album Natural Born Losers tells tales of murdering angels, "fucking the soul of the south," and telling your lover he’s going to get fried in jail for his crimes. Like any recording that moves from lo-fi demos to sleeker production, Natural Born Losers fills out Dollanganger’s music, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentals, replacing soft piano and ukulele with thundering electric guitar and murmuring organs. And while the music’s simplicity might ring dull for some, it places what matters most with Dollanganger’s music front and center: her songwriting and her voice.
Dollanganger's fascination with desolate Americana imagery recalls other similarly moody, bleak pop singers: think Melanie Martinez’ broken-housewife routine, Halsey’s tortured teen road-trip anthems, and Lana Del Rey’s dark, star-spangled camp. But those singers’ stories still feel romantic, while Dollanganger's music is only inviting in the way the cute, white Victorian house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was at first glance. "I’ll be your sister, your young bride, your angel, your slave," she sings to her vinyl glove-clad, cop lover in a whisper on "Mean". She sings of drinking the titular liquid and getting chained up in bed on the fuzzy "Alligator Blood" and she’s bleeding to death during knife play on the pretty, minimalist guitar ballad "American Tradition" but "it doesn’t matter, 'cause my baby is still the winner." Her angelic, high-pitched voice coats every utterance in innocence, a façade considering how much this album loves giving and taking pain.
Her elemental lyrics help elevate her record above kinky bad-girl tropes: With every act of violence inflicted on Dollanganger, she reveals how corrupted she can be as well, proving she’s just as a strong and sadistic of a hunter. She never really lets any of the dark sentiments exist in a vacuum, which is important considering the violence she mines for aesthetic and emotional affect. Dead bodies get fed to the Earth’s starving animals, animals get fed to starving humans; she sees a father’s violence in his son’s eyes and sings that "history repeats our whole damn lives."
Her portrait of tortured sexuality and death is tethered to an ambiguous portrait of backwoods living, a North American wilderness where anything and anyone can be hunted. Natural Born Losers plays like a work of wicked anti-pastoralism from the perspective of a bad girl who stares out at her rustic life with not wide-eyed romanticism but sad familiarity and resignation. "This same place is getting old but dreams are fulfilled where the purple grass grows," Dollanganger sings on "White Trashing". "And I can see it all just beyond our window."
