King Princess released Make My Bed towards the end of my high school days, but revisiting it now: it IS an incandescent sound in a bleak space. Hopefully it’s not a jinx to say that King Princess peaked when this EP was released. Her 2020 album, Cheap Queen, didn’t feel like it beamed bright enough to oust this five-track album. The great thing about Make My Bed, is that each song acts as a point in a story-arc diagram. In this record she’s able to scope gender, sexuality, and the representation of the strong, open minded youth. Her voice is a sanctified being on it’s own.
My personal favorites are tied, “Make My Bed” and “Talia”. The track transition in between is clean but crackle as both songs are already filled with so much power and momentum; expressed through a celestial sound. I adore the yearning in “Talia”, and how it’s preceded by the downcast in “Make My Bed”.
“Upper West Side” is the perfect climax adept in discussing identity and class-disparity. Then the umbrella theme of fleshing out circles back with “1950”. Absolutely sublime. With the way it’s written, it’s an ambit of the artist’s yearning, growth, and sexual awakening. King Princess said in an Ingenue issue 7 interview: ‘I want people to judge my music based on its merit – come for the content, but stay for the good songs’… but her music’s king because both the content and sound amass into this magnum opus.
9/10: The heir to Macy’s writing about class disparity is pretty fucking dumb tho tbh