This year, Montreal duo Softcult has released two singles "Naive" and "Pill To Swallow," teasing their anticipated debut album. Today, the 2023 Band To Watch announced the larger project these singles are home to: Their first album When A Flower Doesn't Grow is coming out at the the beginning of next year. The announcement comes with a new powerful new track titled "16/25."
"16/25" is mesmerizing bedroom pop with a gritty underbelly. The immediate single -- an intoxicating mix of glowing vocals, gritty guitars, and a whirlwind of reverb -- calls out predatory men and the fantasy of young women that they fetishize. "She's that girl/ She's on fire/ Object of your heart's desire/ Every head in the room/ Turns to see her next to you," goes one verse about a kind of manic pixie dream girl men idealize. If you hadn't heard the chorus yet, you might assume these words were innocently complimentary. But Softcult illuminate these sinister prowlers and their weaponizing gaze with the chorus: "She doesn't know how to love you/ She doesn't know how to drive/ She doesn't know how to touch you/ She's 16, you're 25."
“It points out the cognitive dissonance men perpetuate while trying to possess and control younger women,” Mercedes Arn-Horn said.
Their debut album is self-produced and self-recorded. Its title When A Flower Doesn't Grow comes from a quote by Dutch author Alexander Den Heijer: "When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” Mercedes resonated with these words during a significant period of self-growth -- the end of a nine-year relationship, coming out as queer, and understanding cycles of internalized oppression.
"The person I portrayed myself to be on stage was not the same person making the decisions that governed my life,” she explained. “I was root bound. I was disappearing, shrinking, withering away… and I felt ashamed of it."
Watch the Mercedes Arn-Horn-directed video for "16/25" below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Intro"
02 "Pill To Swallow"
03 "Naive"
04 "16/25"
05 "She Said, He Said"
06 "Hurt Me"
07 "I Held You Like Glass"
08 "Queen Of Nothing"
09 "Tired!"
10 "Not Sorry"
11 "When A Flower Doesn’t Grow"
When A Flower Doesn't Grow is out 1/30 via Easy Life Records.
