In the three years since 26-year-old Mikaela Straus last put out a full-length album as King Princess, sapphic pop has clipped itself to the mainstream with a carabiner. “Good Luck, Babe!” has accumulated nearly 2 billion streams. Billie Eilish eats that girl for lunch. Reneé Rapp sings about “tongue-twisters” at the American Music Awards and tours with Syd. And while King Princess has rightfully balked at the notion of a “queer music” super-umbrella—as she put it in 2020, “I don’t want to be put in the same category as a lot of these hos”— she’s re-emerging into an era where queer horniness and heartache have become the secure stuff of certified Platinum. KP’s third album offers an additional sensation: the sting of queer indignation. On Girl Violence, pussy is (still) God, but God will smite you.
Girl Violence is a sexy, testy chronicle of disillusionment that proves sapphic pop needn’t be just euphoric or pining. Let a new crop of chart-toppers sing about dancefloor makeouts and comp-het crushes—King Princess has penned the pop-rock soundtrack to a U-Haul crash. “My girl could destroy your life,” Straus cautions on the lead single “RIP KP,” “like she did to mine.” Sometimes Girl Violence gives space to the murky, unmoored sounds of ego death, only to have Straus come back swinging with a fired-up attitude and a gnashing sound that finally matches up to her bad-boy image. Chaotic, erotic, and unapologetic, many of these songs suggest Straus’ own culpability for “girl violence” —but don’t come looking for atonement.
For years, King Princess has been called a rock star, even though her first two genre-fluid LPs—peppered with dancefloor bops, early-Steve Lacy-type grooves, and falsetto-laced electronic tracks—had only a handful of grungier tracks between them. Rock qua rock never seemed as essential to Straus as rock-star confidence: her cocksure public persona, an ongoing performance of messy gay bravado, was the secret sauce drizzled over the various styles she approached while honing her sound. But when King Princess committed to rock sonically (not just spiritually), she sounded tantalizing. From the bratty, amped-up chorus of “Too Bad” to her yowling cover of the Strokes’ “You Only Live Once,” Straus has clearly had the chops. On Girl Violence, the muse of anger puts them to use.
“Fuck me, I thought we were friends,” she snarls on “Cry, Cry, Cry,” the record’s standout earworm, her voice all but scraping the tape. Her gravelly rasp, evocative of Lucinda Williams or Miley Cyrus, is an instrument unto itself. On “Get Your Heart Broken,” it growls over the bass line, tracing the tense border between eroticism and transgression: “You’re too drunk to go home/You can sleep in my guest room/Scared you’d get off/You won’t let me get near you now.” On “Girls,” it conveys the devilish pleasure of giving in to an ex: “That would be chaos,” King Princess purrs, “I want to try it.”
On past King Princess records, Straus’ tone could feel uneven, sometimes overburdened by soulful affectation. Here, her cut-up vocals ground both the album’s tighter tracks and looser moments—the same timbre that seduces on one song is, elsewhere, exasperated or desperate. On “Jaime,” Straus’ voice cracks with a childlike whine; on “Say What You Will,” a woozy interlude with a scene-stealing feature from Idles’ Joe Talbot, it strains to the surface of a harp-laden grotto of sound, struggling for air before dissipating into digital glitch. This consistency here isn’t just musical, but thematic, too: pleasure and pain share one voice.
Girl Violence is the first King Princess record produced without long-time collaborator Mark Ronson, or released through Ronson’s Columbia imprint, Zelig. Straus may have left the major label system, but she kept industry heavy-hitters in her corner. Working with producers Jake Portrait (the Unknown Mortal Orchestra bassist partly responsible for Lil Yachty’s psychedelic pivot), and Aire Atlantica (Doechii, SZA), Straus crafts a soundscape with less bubblegum and more angst, for better (the macabre, Halloween-y outro of “RIP KP”) and for worse (the indulgently cinematic drop of the title track sounds a bit like the closing credits of a planetarium show). The trio hits a sweet spot on the album’s most straightforward, airtight songs, like the rousing “Slow Down and Shut Up.”
Girl Violence emerges after not one, but two big breakups—the conclusion of Straus’ professional relationship with Ronson, and the end of her four-year romantic relationship with film and creative director Quinn Whitney Wilson. Abandon all hope ye who seek love songs or excessive gentleness here; on Girl Violence, Straus is playing the spurned rockstar, not the simp. What’s also missing—as in most art inspired by personal relationships—is the other side of the story. After Straus posted a clip of “Girls” to TikTok, Wilson posted an Instagram story that criticized Straus for “romanticiz[ing] a mutually toxic relationship” and drawing upon “‘trauma’ from dating Black women” as recurring source material (2019’s Cheap Queen was inspired, at least partly, by Straus’ previous relationship with Amandla Stenberg).
As Straus has rolled out Girl Violence with the bells and whistles of modern marketing—inventing a fake Instagram troll account that called her a “dusty wannabe,” hosting an album release party where guests dressed as villains—she’s been willing to portray herself as a problem as much as a victim, if even just for the aesthetic. But though Straus self-describes as a “reformed” member of the “girl violence community,” the drama she actually cops to causing in the lyrics of Girl Violence doesn’t go deeper than instigating a fight, talking shit, and succumbing to temptation; she’s chaotic, but not compared with others on the record, who she describes as “wack,” “fucking insane,” and “danger.” It’s worth asking whether Girl Violence would be a more nuanced, thoughtful record had Straus explored her own part in the underlying dynamics with a touch more depth. But if her brash, biting tone helped re-establish her confidence, she’ll have to save the soul-search for the next record—for now, Straus is busy shredding.
