“Femcels! Femcels! Femcels!” Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton cry over speedy video-game bleeps, sounding like they’ve just won the lottery. “You are listening to the Femcels, we don’t have sex ever!” In this deranged parody of the life of two sexless young Brits, having greasy hair and scuzzy teeth sounds like so much fun. I Have to Get Hotter is an audio cartoon—with charmingly disheveled, pixelated production and doofy spoken-word passages about feeling like the “indiest girl at school.” In “You’re Gay and You’re in Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs),” only the second-longest song title, the girls reminisce on an afternoon at a Counter-Strike tournament, with its fetid odor of “incels and hotdogs.” “Rowan, if you want a girl to like you, you just have to say, ‘You’re gay and you’re in love with me,’” Turton coaches her friend. “And if that doesn’t work, you can just always go, ‘PLEASE LET ME TOUCH YOUR BEWBS!’”
Miles and Turton may have messy bedrooms, but they’re not actually incels. This is not the girl version of the tragic rock microgenre known as “incelcore”—there’s nothing dour or woe-is-me or stupidly edgy here, and the Femcels don’t write lyrics in 4chanspeak. Miles and Turton, an illustrator and a coder, met online. They started making music in early 2024 after Turton asked Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman to produce for the Femcels. They’ve since performed alongside breakout rappers EsDeeKid and fakemink; Miles teamed up with Worldpeace DMT on the chirped-up The Velvet Underground & Rowan.
The Femcels have released only two songs before now, but I Have to Get Hotter arrives in a bedazzled burst of moxie. Every track has enough daft escapades to pack an 11-minute TV episode as the duo obsess over twinks and trainers and make fun of insecure tryhards. On “No One Will Fuck Me When I Wear Two Different Shoes (One Jordan, One Gucci Flip Flop),” Turton fights a girl who accuses her of having lip filler and rich parents. There’s no fat in the lyrics, only funny nuggets of detail that animate the characters: “Now she’s in Turkey getting new double Ds.” The duo rambles with Adderall bluster, begging a guy who looks like Elliott Smith “please don’t stab yourself” and singing the praises of the coding language Javascript.
The jumpy lyrics are matched by restless vocals: crinkly whispers and lost-in-reverie hums, bratty jeering and demented screamo. At times, they’re like a kawaii-ified Le Tigre or Bratmobile, or Blectum from Blechdom, another pair of electronic pranksters who wove an obscene and grotesque fantasy world. It’s fun because it sounds like the Femcels are just talking shit and geeking out, doodling on the mix. They’re lampooning pick-me types by yelling about drinking Stella Artois and chanting the word “guppies” until the beat soars skyward like a rocketship. It’s the slightly perverse pleasure you get from snooping on a conversation, hearing the two confabbing at their most zoinked and unfiltered.
They’ve found a perfect fellow freak in Clateman, who specializes in shaping these sorts of scatterbrained freestyles. He pads energetic hooks with wonderfully twerpy MIDI notes and tosses in random brass, piano, and a sunny guitar solo redolent of Sugar Ray. Everything is mixed to fit the fried vibe of a low-bitrate mp3. There’s a breezy dorkiness to the synths on songs like “Indiest Girl at School” that reminds me of the Oswald theme song, or like something I would’ve heard as a kid watching Charlie & Lola.
The word “femcel” blew up within the last couple of years, typically as a meme to provoke incel dudes who cry stolen valor. But every provocation contains a pinch of truth, and the Femcels’ sensitive core anchors the record. Body dysmorphia is a prominent theme, so the duo cast it out with a spell: “I kiss this mirror/To overcome my fear!” “He Needs Me” tracks the micro-excuses someone makes when they know their situationship is ghosting them but don’t want to admit it yet (“He’s had so much skateboarding to do recently!” Turton giggles nervously). And when Turton pours a bottle of water on her crush, it’s only because she knows he won’t text her again after their hookup. LARP or not, the Femcels have a lesson for sadsack bedrotters everywhere—find a friend, hire a cracked Clateman, and start turning your cliché insecurities into corny-giddy art.
