SOAK – “Digital Witness” (St. Vincent Cover)
Every month Rookie, a website that’s devoted to supporting and encouraging teenage girls and women, selects a theme song. This month they enlisted the enchanting teenage wunderkind SOAK to cover St. Vincent’s glittering anti-technology jam “Digital Witness.” In 18-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson’s rendition, the song becomes a destroyed lullaby — a bedtime lull for dystopian times. When she sings “Won’t somebody sell me back to me?” in her pert, childish voice it’s a devastating, ironic twist on the capitalist commentary imbued in Annie Clark’s original. Given how coveted teenagers are as consumers, and how toxic most of this advertising is, it’s an even more harrowing line when Monds-Watons delivers it. This girl deserves to be as big as Lorde, and her ability to refashion Clark’s song in her own image proves it. Listen below.
SOAK’s debut album Before We Forgot How To Dream is out 6/2 via Rough Trade.