It’s not easy being a wunderkind all grown up. 24-year-old singer, songwriter, and ex-Regrettes frontwoman Lydia Night is undoubtedly talented and hardworking and has been from an exceptionally young age. From 2015 to 2023, Night’s former band The Regrettes drew influence from ’60s girl groups, ’70s power pop, ’80s glam-country, and ’90s grunge and riot grrrl, channeling it all into youthful, unabashedly feminist pop-rock. Their third and final album, Further Joy, took a sharp turn towards synth pop. Night was just fourteen when The Regrettes formed. She played their final show at age 23.
Post-Regrettes, Night has decided to strike out on her own. The rollout of her solo debut Parody of Pleasure comes with a YouTube vlog series titled Pop or Flop which chronicles her transformation into a pop star. “My marketing tactic is oversharing and embarrassing myself on the internet,” Night deadpans in the second episode. The pop stars Night has cited as the album’s influences—Madonna, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani—all have larger-than-life personas that listeners can’t help but get swept up in. Parody of Pleasure straddles the line between being the “I’m a pop star” album (usually a debut) and the “being famous sucks, actually” album (usually happens a couple albums in) but gets too bogged down by the tropes of both to give Lydia Night a proper re-introduction.
Instead, Night’s artistic identity gets lost in empty caricatures and pop pastiche. We get attempts at bitchy, hedonistic bangers that come off more like Kidz Bop covers of Kesha, or the kind of songs a mean girl would sing in a Disney Channel original movie. We get an Imagine Dragons-style “oh-oh-oh” chant in “Loaded Gun” accompanying generic lyrics like “I’m like sugar until I’m spice.” We get AutoTune thrown haphazardly over Night’s vocals, particularly egregious on “Meltdown,” twisting her voice into borderline unlistenable balloon animal shapes. We get boxes checked off on the “Making a Pop Album in the 2020s” to-do list—the obligatory piano-led tear-jerker “Trust Fall” makes it clear that Night lacks the vocal chops to belt out the kinds of heartbreak ballads that populate Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan records, meanwhile the faux-lofi country-clapping ditty “You Sir” comes off like a less clever ripoff of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Slim Pickins.” We get Night exclaiming “Let’s get freaky! / Let’s burn it to the ground!” and doing nothing of the sort. We get a repeated insistence of Night’s emotional messiness paired with squeaky-clean production and nothing that sounds truly divisive or challenging—brattiness in name only, GUTS but make it gutless.
Parody of Pleasure comes off the heels of not just one but two high-profile breakups. About a year before the Regrettes called it quits, Lydia Night and her long-term boyfriend—actor and Wallows lead singer Dylan Minnette—did too. The album and accompanying vlog series are both rife with vague (and some not-so-vague) allusions to Night’s enemies—in the eighth episode of Pop or Flop, she strokes an orange cat like a cartoon villain while wondering aloud if any of her “opps” will be at the event she’s attending later. But feuds and petty pot-shots do not a pop star make. The album’s back half features the three-track suite of “Loaded Gun,” “Chameleon,” and “You Sir”—songs that sound as though they were written for a target audience of Reddit sleuths. The on-the-nose-lyrics about her ex’s new girlfriend on “Chameleon” in particular (“I saw the pictures from the photo booth and freaked out,” “she’s on the website where I’m buying all my favorite clothes”) come across as blatant pandering to parasocial fans who want the pop song equivalent of a TikTok titled “Lydia Night and Dylan Minnette Breakup EXPLAINED.” The “shady af comebacks” delivery of lines like “Does she like sleeping in the bed I put our sheets on? / Does she like eating at the table that we fucked on?” does little to remedy this. There’s a moment in one Pop or Flop episode where Night quips that her manager thinks her public persona makes her seem like more of an influencer than a musician, and I have to agree.
There are moments that come close to rescuing Parody of Pleasure. It’s a shame that the hooks and introspection of “Pity Party”—which sees Night questioning “Is this forever? Am I a name that you’ll remember?”—suffocate under the weight of overproduction. The electroclash-tinged “Gutter” is dumb, horny fun—think PG-13 Peaches, though “PG-13” kinda defeats the point of Peaches (also, why does Night pronounce “butter” like “budder”?). “The Bomb” has a great bridge…because its melody is lifted straight from Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova.” The winky two-liners and ad-libs make “The Hearse” and “Love Dumb” excellent pop songs—catchy and charming in a Carly Rae Jepsen kind of way—but it makes you wonder what they’d sound like if they were catchy and charming in a Lydia Night kind of way.
It’s natural and expected for a band that formed while its members were teenagers to break up, and for the frontwoman of said band to feel trapped by a project she’s outgrown. Parody of Pleasure is an attempt to shake off the limitations of Lydia Night: Regrettes frontwoman by becoming Lydia Night: Pop Star. But who exactly is Lydia Night the pop star? Even she doesn’t really seem to know.
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
