There’s a lot of talk about the nineties revival going through our culture right now. It’s here. It’s big. Get used to it. We want to wear crop tops again, we want everything to sound hazy and drug-induced … on and on–and on.
Erica Glyn‘s new EP, Dollars For Thieves is such a perfect throwback to the women of rock, Portishead and Sneaker Pimps. This is what every ‘dream of the 90s’ montage needs as a soundtrack. With nostalgia this fine-tuned, it had to come out in now.
What would Taylor Swift do? She would love this. And it’s only a matter of time until Drake namedrops Glyn on a blog post. He already knows “Girls Love Beyoncé”; he’s about to discover a lot of women love trip hop, too.
Glyn is stormy and electric, and positions herself as something of a a twenty-first century PJ Harvey. This EP feels like a second-generation To Bring You My Love, or How Polly Jean Got Her Groove Back. Just as PJ slithered through the music video for “Down By The Water,” Erica angrily gyrates while “All Just For You” plays. “I wanna own you,” she hisses, “I wanna owe it to you.”
The former is about drowning a daughter, the latter about devouring a lover. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And like PJ, Erica Glyn is cerebral and menacing: she’s gonna devour you, but first she’ll taunt you. She’s the cat and we’re all just mice.
These songs, more than anything, deftly combine touches of dreaminess with a sense of drowning. Nothing is wracked with despair, though: it’s an album full of songs in response to “Too Much” by the Spice Girls, only harder, and shrewder–druggier. That was what ’90s girls thought about; this is what women in the new millennium tweet about.
That music this major is coming out in January means 2015 is going to be epic.