Sunday, April 03, 2022

The realm of King Princess rises following the release of new single ‘For My Friends’

Imagine a little room where a girl is putting her favourite dress on while listening to punk rock hits from the '90s to get ready for a reckless night out with her best friends after two and a half years of safe Zoom calls away from the pubs. It’s been a while since they last met, and things have radically changed since they graduated from uni.

If one is employed at the bank; the other is planning on working abroad. This hasn’t stopped them from keeping in touch with one another and as Dionne Warwick would say, “That’s what friends are for”. Friendships shrink and strengthen as life happens; they bring you high up in the clouds or else crash to the ground, making you grow.  

These emotions jangle in King Princess’s first single ‘For My Friends’ from her sophomore album entitled ‘Hold On Baby’, which is due out later this year. Born Mikaela Straus, King Princess is a talented multi-instrumentalist from Brooklyn and a certified queer icon after the release of her debut single ‘1950’ for Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records label in 2018. Meant to honour the LGBTQ+ community, the song received support from the likes of Harry Styles and Halsey and topped New Zealand’s charts. That was just the start of Straus’s indie-pop kingdom, now turning into a full realm of refined creativity packed in sturdy tunes like ‘For My Friends’

Straus wrote ‘For My Friends’ inspired by her lifelong relationship with her close friends, Cicely and Chloe; “These girls have been thru the pits with me, and the more time I spend with them as an adult, the more I’m reminded that they are my home,” shouted King Princess on Instagram. This hit-to-be stirs King Princess’s soulful vocals over a tenacious production assembled around Nick Cave-inspired gloomy beats, entwined with lyrics reflecting the passion of young adulthood through a refreshed Dolly Parton rhetoric.

Is main character syndrome still a thing? No sir. It is time to normalise “the shakiness at the core of our identities,” as Michelle Santiago Cortés wrote on Refinery 29, and to get buzzed with the pals. So if King Princess can look through a car window embracing a temporary movie-star-moment as in the 'For My Friends' official music video, why can't we?

 

Martina Bovetta 

@lulinabulina 

Image: ‘For My Friends’ Official Single Teaser Cover

 

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