On King Princess

Emotional abuse, romantic manipulation, domestic violence both physical and psychological: such things happen in too many households (and dorm rooms), more often than most of us see or admit. They happen in queer relationships too, though too few queer artists and writers represent them. Many of us have stayed away from the topic because we don’t want to let the side down: we’d rather show that love is love. When I was assembling Super Gay Poems(published in January), a collection of modern poems about queer experience with an essay about each one, I learned that the author of one superb poem about lesbian domestic violence did not want it reprinted (though I did include another, by Cherry Smyth). I also read Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), a memoir that got attention not just for its beautiful sentences but because so few good works of art on the topic exist.

That’s one reason Girl Violence, the third album by King Princess, hits so hard. Released in September, it’s my favourite pop record in a good year for pop. It’s all over the place sonically, a hungry scavenger for scraps of slow R&B, thumping rock choruses, indie guitar fuzz, doo-wop references, half-spoken bridges and half-shouted anthemic claims. It’s first-rate popcraft made to hold emotional chaos. And it has, through thirteen tracks, a single subject: how it feels to enter an abusive Sapphic romance or romantic friendship, how to live with it, how to leave, and why people stay.

The album begins with an echo-clad thesis statement. ‘You’ve got issues and you admit it/You’re asking if I look at you different … You’re fucking insane but I’m not giving up.’ The unstable partner – who turns out to be an abuser – treats the singer as her potential saviour: walking away would be selfish, or cowardly. King Princess admits the risk, then accepts the framing, because it’s alluring as hell: ‘I hate it, but I kind of like it … But nobody mentioned that girls can be violent.’ An unpredictable partner also fits an old story about an exciting romance: the course of true love never did run smooth. Or, in King Princess’s words, ‘I guess it’s true love, because it truly fucks with me.’ The downbeats come on ‘guess’, ‘love’ and the ‘true’ in ‘truly’: it’s hard for her to know what’s true.

As every slot machine magnate knows, human beings find unpredictable rewards more enticing than the kind we can expect. And it’s hot to feel wanted, especially if we’re not used to it. No wonder we make excuses, for ourselves and for everyone involved: ‘for the first time in years,’ one smooth chorus admits, ‘I feel pretty/And she’s trying her best to uplift me.’ We’re all just trying our best, right? Who wouldn’t support a queer partner through shared challenges in a homophobic world?

No wonder we let our partners try to fix us, or dictate how we dress. In ‘Jaime’, from Girl Violence,‘the clothes that you gave me don’t fit me/But you squeeze me until I could crack.’ Every option seems painful. The rolling, shoegaze-influenced blur of the instruments sets the stage for the muddle in her emotions. On ‘Cry Cry Cry’, introduced by a crackling funk riff, she keeps announcing she’s gone, but she’s never quite out the door, even though ‘you’re not getting better.’ The next track invites the listener, too, to ‘Get Your Heart Broken’ and ‘say that you’re one of us’: the half-unwilling seductress in the song then promises ‘death by a thousand cuts’, citing Taylor Swift’s song of that name (Swifties may find this album the lesbian answer to Red).

King Princess was born Mikaela Mullaney Straus in 1998, the child of a New York record producer and studio engineer. Her first single, ‘1950’, released before she turned twenty, described the frisson of once-forbidden amours:‘I love it when we play 1950 … I’m surprised when you kiss me’ (Straus said she wrote the song after reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt).

‘For My Friends’, from her second album, Hold On Baby (2022), uses backwards guitar licks and up-and-down keyboard arpeggios to portray the singer as a complicated catch; each chorus ends: ‘Loving me takes patience.’ What keeps us in manipulative, or even physically perilous, romances? It isn’t only the saviour complex, or the erotic rollercoaster, or even the false belief (which Straus has decried in interviews) that ‘love is pain.’ It’s also the feeling that we, too, need to be saved.

Straus isn’t trans like me – she was assigned female at birth – but her stage name, stage presence and interviews invite the association. She has told journalists ‘I like being a woman sometimes’ and welcomes any pronoun: ‘He. She. It. Xenogender’ (most rock critics still call her ‘she’, so I do here too). The people on Girl Violence are often girls (identified as such) but they’re always stuck in queer-coded dilemmas: do I want to be with her, or do I want to be her? If we split up, will I feel like a ghost again, someone who has to dissociate, or reject my own body, to survive? That’s the burden in the clever euphonies throughout ‘Covers’: ‘I suppose that I’m only a ghost and you never want to see me in your room … At the most I’ll be scratching at your post and you’ll wonder if it’s me or something new.’

A break-up could make you a ghost, because your ex felt like your whole life: ‘RIP KP’, as a later song title has it. The train-trestle percussion pauses to shape a silence around KP’s voice, just long enough for a promise, or a warning: ‘My girl can destroy your life/Like she did to mine.’ The next track, ‘Alone Again’, imagines life after exfiltration, when her onetime ‘best friend’ has become ‘a danger’: ‘it’s expensive to be right,’ KP reflects, and now she’s ‘screaming through the phone/Should have kinda known.’ It’s hard to stay, as Machado’s memoir also shows, but sometimes it’s harder to leave.

Because I write about poetry and also, this year, wrote a book about Taylor Swift, I get asked all the time if song lyrics are poetry, or if my favourite songwriters are poets. They’re not, and an album like Girl Violence makes it obvious: words for songs need to be sung. Their sonic environments shape their emotional sense. The bent tones and boomerang echoes all over Girl Violence suggest the way that partners in an unhealthy relationship warp and misremember each other’s words. The stops and starts, ricochets and momentum changes, reflect the classic pattern of domestic abuse known as DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender). And when I hear King Princess sing, and warble, and growl, what I hear are my friends who’ve lived through these emotional troubles: how they fell in, why they stayed, why it felt like the best trap on earth, and how hard they had to work to get free.