At the release of their debut EP, the Californian queergaze trio Pillowprince already have a remarkably actualized sense of identity. The cover of Pretty, Baby! features a cobalt blue, stencil-like image of a barking, spike-collared Doberman; this blue is used liberally in their other visuals and is a perfect abstract summation of their sound. The shade covers their bright, pop-ish moments and their darker, fuzzier ones, managing to be vibrant and brooding at once, as is this EP.
Pretty, Baby! opens with ‘R the Straights OK’. It’s a tongue-in-cheek pointing and poking at heteronormativity and privilege (“growing up is easy when you’re rich and white like me”). With a singsong melody that further exemplifies the simplistic thinking of the privileged, it’s delivered from the point of view of one of these rich, white Straights, questioning why members Olivia Lee, Sea Snyder, and Liza Stegall would choose to home themselves in an alien counterculture when her life of conformity is a breeze. It’s funny until it’s desperately sad, quietly ending with the reveal of the repression of her queerness. Lee’s vocals as this character verge almost hysterical, hard-bending and flipping quite beautifully upwards, yodel-like in places.
The remaining three tracks aren’t poppy like track one but reflect that bright cobalt blue aura with a deep, shoegaze-y fuzz. ‘Babybird’ includes a sultry, doomy bass and almost ghostly vocals, and ‘Mercurial’s lyrics swim about in impressionistic haze. “These two stilted birds / dark, temporal / dogs that run toward but never touch” and “unfathomable form / soft propitious adore / bronze” give the sense of a nebulous, anxious love, a confusion of feelings that appear sometimes as animalistic and sometimes entirely indistinguishable. The closing track repeats the title-drawn question “when are you gonna care about?” over and over, with increasing accusatory force and sonic build, reaching a pinnacle of either a resigning anger or a final desperate plea.
But the question surely can’t be in relation to the listener caring about Pillowprince, because, from the first listen of this debut, it’s very difficult not to care about them and their exciting future.
