Trophy Wife get ugly and pathetic on ‘So Hard’
Trophy Wife have always been ahead of the game. Their 2024 full-length, Get Ugly, is one of the most underrated albums of last year. Now, the alt-rock Brooklyn four-piece are back with their first single in over a year and proves they’re all bark and bite.
“Can’t you get pathetic for me? I want to watch you crawling towards me,” McKenzie Iazzetta sing-whispers, opening the single with seductive enchantment that’ll soon reach a fever-pitch.
We have here all the evidence of their revolutionised lyrical approach we might need: Trophy Wife are taking discussions of female rage and subjectivity to new highs and new lows. What ensues is a breathless examination of sex, shame, and power.
The echoey, slap-heavy guitars turn to a distorted, abrasive melody into an expansive, rattling, mercurial bloom. The noise, as well as Iazzetta’s lyricism, tracks a refusal of submission in the form of submission. “You don’t know your limits, and I don’t have any,” Iazzetta admits, before a reflective melody takes her voice, allowing us to track her mind as it runs away from herself.
This year, Sabrina Carpenter’s been the undisputed queen of the cheeky double entendre. Just look at Tears, where crying gets tangled up with sexual pleasure, or House Tour, which turns nosing around a new property into a metaphor for rising intimacy.
But now, there’s a new contender gunning for her crown. Forget the coy winks and sugar-coated takes on femininity – Trophy Wife’s So Hard kicks down the door and leaves all sense of polite restraint in the dust.
“So let’s lay down on the floor, yeah / With my face pressed on thе mirror, I / I stay on all fours, you’re making / This so hard, it’s so hard,” the chorus soars. For a woman limp beneath the weight of expectation, lust, desire, submission, being a hot mess becomes hotter, messier with the repetition.
That’s the scary thing about ‘So Hard’. We have no way to access the woman in explicit free-fall. We don’t know whether she likes it or not, whether the “hard” is the pleasure of a shocking sexual experience. It seems she doesn’t know whether she likes it or not, either. The woman remains unknowable, despite her confession.
And therein lies the Trophy Wife magic. Their sound is as enigmatic as their sentiment, and yet the music feels all the more knowable because of that.
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