The California-born, Vienna-based Iranian-Austrian multidisciplinary artist’s newest LP is a very catchy mix of eclectic, political and mainstream, electro-pop, disco and new wave, centred on the contradictions of being a female artist today with all of its freedoms and capitalist trappings. The title phrase, “Young-Girl” is taken from the publication Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl, originally published in French anarchist journal Tiqqun. The book portrays the Young-Girl as a symbol and prime ‘product’ of consumerism under modernity, echoing in the album's themes of craving eternal youth or feeling like an emotionless doll. While there are many serious issues at play here, music has a particularly euro-pop flavour, Royer variously singing in English, French and German, and in some of the strongest tracks come up those other languages, such as the fabulous Chic-style disco pop of Sage Comme Une Image, and the deeper-voiced semi-spoken cabaret style of Nichts Neues Im Westen. This is sharp, clever work, fusing the serious socio-political with the very danceable and instantly commericially engaging, such as the slowerbreathy, French and English talky 80s-style electro-pop opener Babydoll, the shimmering, dreamy, wistful poppy Young-Girl (Illusion) which contains some caustically funny lines such as: “Don’t mess with a girl that wears rabbit fur / I can guarantee that bitch has nothing left to lose”; Indoor Sport’s power pop, the indulgent but very infectious 80s rock-pop of Lights Out Baby, Entropy!, or the vaudevillian feels of closer Fassbinder. Wonderfully pop and more, laced with irony, oddness and great choruses and a great follow-up to her 2022 second album Harlequin, it’s no wonder that she’s opened for artists as varied as such as LCD Soundsystem, Lana Del Rey, and Air. Out on Stones Throw Records.
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