Nashville femmecore power-pop quartet The Dreaded Laramie are releasing their debut album, Princess Feedback, today on Smartpunk Records. Full of crackling pop hooks and transcendent melodies, the album is a piece of pure pop joy. They’ve already been making waves with the lead-up singles like the femme-forward pop rager “Breakup Songs” and the candy-coated sad-girl track “Where’s My Crystal Ball?”
The band were kind enough to break down the new album for us, track-by-track, giving us a unique and exclusive insight into the new album. Check out what they had to say below.
Track 1 – “Mess”
“Mess” really represents the thematic lyrical shift on this album. In past releases, my lyrics have been kind of cryptic at worst and impersonal at best, mostly for fear of what other people would think of how I really felt. This song–and this album–feels like the first time I have really expressed how I feel on the record (literally), come what may. There’s a shameless kind of throwing-my-hands-up-in-the-air-giving-up attitude about it that is relieving and freeing and cathartic. Cards on the table, it is my favorite song on the album.
Track 2 – “Breakup Songs”
When I wrote this, I was halfway through my first read-through of Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, and so the lyrics are really informed by that. It’s a song about both creative and emotional recovery–I was dealing with a fresh breakup (duh) and wanted to write something that felt fun to me and wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I set out to write a song that I would’ve been embarrassed to show my ex while we were together. I am not embarrassed by the result.
Track 3 – “Life is Funny”
This song is a departure for us in so many fun ways. The intro is unlike anything else we’ve recorded–Isn fact, in the original demo, this section was big and bombastic. Dave had a really helpful hand in making this song the tight and driving track that it is. We made a lot of revisions to the structure in the studio and even in the mixing process. Between the key changes, ripping solo, and the chance to get really silly with vocals, this was a very fun song to bring to life.
Track 4 – “Happiness”
“Happiness” stands out to me as the most emotionally even-keel track on the record. I wrote it during a long season of feeling moderately bummed out (and creatively numbed out). Sometimes life just feels like an instrumental chorus walking down a scale, ya know?
Track 5 – “I Should Go”
Lyrically, this one is pretty sparse. There aren’t many lyrics, and the ones that are there are pretty basic. No big words, all short phrases. The music, though, is going totally wild. Everyone wrote totally incredible, intricate, winding parts for this song. That’s the way some relationships are, in my experience–so much meaning isn’t in what’s actually said, but in what’s underneath. Definitely a song for fans of hyper-analyzing the meaning of what’s said, unsaid, and interpreting (read: imagining) every possible permutation of that.
Track 6 – “Fishnets”
In my experience, whenever recovery starts to go really well, something will happen to derail things and set you ten steps back. Recovery for me is kind of just a widening of the time between those shifts. That pendulum between feeling fine and feeling totally freaked out inspired the lyrical and musical shift between the verses and chorus of this song. The verses are in 4/4, and in those, I’m feeling good and chill and normal (e.g., “I’ve got a good routine / wake up, morning pages, ginger tea”), and the choruses go into 6/8, and there it’s like, I’m thrown out of whack: “I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t like it / you’re the only reason I got in these twisted fishnets.”
Track 7 – “Communion”
I wrote this song in 2016, and somehow the lyrics were edited the least out of all the songs on the album. It’s a song about utter dependency and putting all of your self-worth in another person’s approval. Lyrically, it feels like a glimmer of emotional honesty in a time that was otherwise pretty repressed for me, which makes it a pretty special track to me.
Track 8 – “Easy”
People just LOVE saying that you know a relationship is good when it’s easy. But how easy can it ever really be?! I know nobody and no relationship is perfect, and a healthy margin of imperfection should be embraced, but there’s a difference between loving each other through imperfection and being in a Bad Thing. Good luck figuring it out.
Track 9 – “Birmingham Bulls Win!”
This is about going to a minor league hockey game with two of my closest childhood friends, being so happy to be with them, and also so sad for a reason that I could not understand or articulate. There’s a section of the book Healing Through the Dark Emotions (by Miriam Greenspan) where the author talks about alexythmia, being unable to express/articulate/locate your feelings, and also being unable to really feel them. Reading that section, I felt really seen, and the hockey game in particular came to mind. Adam and I spent an embarrassing amount of time finding a way to work the word “zamboni” into the lyrics.
Track 10 – “Where’s My Crystal Ball?”
I hate having to solve problems. I hate it SO much. One time I asked a group of students some open-ended philosophical question (I believe it was something like, “What makes a life a good life?”), and one of them groaned and said, “Can you skip the part where you make us guess?” and that made me laugh very hard but also I get it. This song is like that student’s question. Sometimes it seems like it would be so nice if we didn’t have to think or act or endure.
The Dreaded Laramie have tours coming up with Pink Squeeze and Teens in Trouble. Check out the tour dates below.
The album is out today, and you can purchase or stream it here. Follow The Dreaded Laramie on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok for future updates.
Photo courtesy of Maris Souza
