Trophy Wife – ‘Pathetic’ album review: More heartbreak, more art
New York alt-rockers Trophy Wife follow up their criminally underrated debut with a near-perfect grunge record detailing the intricacies of the female condition with diaristic abandon and full-frontal soundscapes pulled straight from the depths of a sex dream.
The Skinny: On their 2024 debut, Get Ugly, Trophy Wife, consisting of vocalist McKenzie Iazzetta, bassist Christian Pace, and drummer Michael Martelli, released a rebellious female-rage album, lashing out at myriad perpetrators (the symbolic, the phallocentric, the societal) who force women into submissiveness. Shame was a product of inequality, and rage was the friction point.
Now, on Pathetic, Iazzetta has moved beyond the dichotomy of good and bad to sludge around in the grey areas, with a pen as bold as PJ Harvey’s on her visceral debut Dry, or indeed Fiona Apple’s on Tidal. “You know your limits, and I don’t have any,” she spits on the first single, ‘So Hard’, before admitting later, “I always give in this time of night”.
It’s perhaps the most impactful and alluring world-building of the modern female psyche in recent history. Standouts include second single ‘Kind of Girl I Am’, which uses patchy vignettes of half-remembered hedonism to expose shallow levels of emotional intimacy, to ‘Nesbit’, which strips the self down to it’s vulnerable, and often blameworthy, core, and the slower, wandering ‘Alone’, a single tacked onto the album right before completion, which thumps with a seductive bassline indicative of quiet late-night lust.
It’s a rare thing that a woman puts herself on the line as Iazzetta does on Pathetic, and the art is all the more honest for it.
Beyond the searing lyrical self-excavation, the group has officially found the Trophy Wife sound – salacious scuzz, despondent vocals, ample distortion, a climax made of bodies fumbling over one another – to spit out nine tracks that feel claustrophobic and dirty, and unapologetically so.
If the vocals are the lightning blip, the soundscape is the thunder, often racing through complex, crystallised counter-melodies or frictive textural effects, no better than in roaring album closer, ‘Dirty Movie’. On Pathetic, Iazzetta and co prove that everything in our modern day is uncomfortable by sonically lining up everything in its right place. “I’m a taker, and you’ve got it all,” she sings on her final victory lap.
Standout Track: ‘Dirty Movie’
The Verdict: On Pathetic, Trophy Wife are relentlessly ambitious, shockingly bold, and refreshingly honest, spinning voyeuristic fantasies into their own playground. Iazzetta might finish most songs in a shrieking wail, but by the end, you know exactly what she’s saying.
Release Date: July 10th, 2026 | Producer: Charles Dahlke | Label: Independent, distributed through AWAL
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