 I sometimes wonder what kind of music I would listen to now if it weren't for the rise of streaming platforms. The music industry has changed dramatically in recent decades, and this has been a bane and boon in unequal measure. Many artists have seen their income slashed, while others have gotten an opportunity that they likely never would have otherwise. Would hyperpop exist, as it does, with the reach it has without the likes of Spotify? I kind of doubt it, and if there was no hyperpop, what would I be listening to? Because that platform's hyperpop playlist is how I've found many of my recent faves, whether they technically qualify for the genre or not. For example, Alice Glass is definitely not a hyperpop artist, despite being friends with many people in that scene, but the second single from her debut album still ended up amidst the likes of Glaive, Midwest, and Dorian Electra, the latter of whom she collaborated with on the banger that is Iron Fist, though I think Lil Mariko's addition to Ram it Down is the best feature on any Dorian Electra track. I had a great time seeing them in concert a couple months back, though there was some music unrelated things that happened at the venue that caused some pretty serious psychological damage, and I was immediately hooked. Love Is Violence is quite the introduction to an artist. It's opening lines, Love Is Violence, You Taste Like Rotten Meat, Sips of Spoiled Milk, I Know That I Won't Give It Up, are delivered with a trademark abrasion alongside a video that features a couple literally disemboweling each other. I mean, how can you not be into that? And it turns out that this song is not an outlier on the album, or the EP that preceded it, or I expect the years of music preceding that, but I don't actually know about that last one. I've rarely been as unsure how to approach contextualizing a review as I have this one. Usually it's a matter of determining my critical gaps and understanding that I have of a subject and doing whatever extra reading, viewing, listening I feel is necessary to make my point meaningful, i.e. the bare minimum, right? When it comes to music, that means listening to an artist's discography, hearing their growth over time. But I can't do that here, because the artist herself has disavowed much of what got her to this moment. It's an offshoot of the separating art from artist debate that hadn't really occurred to me while writing my polemic on the subject. You see, Alice Glass came to prominence as the vocalist for the electro-punk duo Crystal Castles. But after the release of two self-titled albums and another Roman numeraled three, she left. Her initial statement posted on Twitter at the end of 2014 was pointed, but vague. Sincerity, honesty, and empathy for others is no longer possible in Crystal Castles. Three years later, after the band had reformed with another vocalist, she clarified that statement, accusing her bandmate of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. He has, of course, denied these allegations, but I believe her. And I would believe her, even if his first public comment about her departure back in 2015 hadn't been what it was, but it was. And it's fucking wild. I wish my former vocalist the best of luck in her future endeavors. I think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project. It should be rewarding for her, considering she didn't appear on Crystal Castles' best known songs. Like what the actual fuck? When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. I know that I don't actually need to harp on how fucked up this statement is, but have you ever seen a more blatant public example of someone diminishing another person's role in a work like, Jesus fucking Christ, what a piece of shit? So obviously I'm not going to listen to anything associated with that guy. But it sure seems like she became the performer that I now know her as in that project. Hell, this first solo album has a Roman 4 in the title, placing it on the Crystal Castles continuity, because as she told Bandcamp, she sees it as her fourth LP. In the same breath that she said she no longer endorses Crystal Castles, Glass called it her life's work. But I have to act as though musically speaking, she came out fully formed with her solo single, 2015's Stillbirth. What a debut though, right? Opening with a three-peat of waiting, waiting, waiting for you to die over pulsing electronics, Glass has her roots in the punk scene, her first band being a local act named Fetus Fatal. Last FM tells me that there were a couple of live recordings of the band formed when she was just 15, but no one seems to have made any of these recordings actually public, so I don't know if they were any good. Which instills in me a desire to categorize her as blank core, with the blank almost definitely being the word survivor. But I know what survivor core sounds like. I mean that's as good a classification as any for lingua ignota, likewise for Banshee. These were women abused and disillusioned by metal scenes who returned to them to process their pain. Alice Glass isn't doing that, she brings the survivor narrative instead to a particularly aggressive brand of electropop. You probably wouldn't spin this alongside Dua Lipa, but more from a lack of imagination than anything else. Levitating remix featuring Alice Glass would be a lot more interesting than levitating featuring yet another homophobic rapper. I mean right from the start you've got a self-titled track that's less a song than it is the background of a club scene in some one-on-many action movie. Ideally, women led, but I could see John Wick doing some massacres beneath it. Pinned Beneath Limbs sets the tone more clearly with its lyrics written from the perspective of an abuser. And hearing, don't talk to your friends, don't talk to your family, don't tell anyone, you're not worth believing, delivered with song-through condescension, it feels bad. And it's even worse when she returns the role of Gaslighter in Fair Game as she drops the lyrical pretense entirely and seems to just be reading things that she was told almost certainly by her former collaborator. The closest thing to a chorus is a repeated where would you be without me matching these spoken line with screams of the same. It is, it's effective, but I don't actually enjoy listening to it. The same goes for Suffer in Peace whose relentless hi-hat and moving at seemingly quadruple time really just grates to my ears. And it wouldn't entirely surprise me if that was at least somewhat intentional, but at the same time this isn't some actively antagonistic music that will fight your every intent to engage. It comes from trauma, but where an album like Caligula seems to be recreating the horrors that led to its existence, Prey 4 feels more defiant. Despite the subject matter, this is unabashedly pop music. You're supposed to like it. Heck, you're supposed to like it so much that you never let it end. The album was structured to be infinitely loopable. The final track, Sorrow Ends, does not literally flow back into its opener, Prey, but the transition between them is still fairly smooth and you probably won't even notice it's happened until you're a couple songs in the first time or two. And even if there are tracks that I am cool on individually, there's nothing that I would skip on a full playthrough. I mean, that's the benefit of short songs. Thirteen tracks takes just 32 minutes to complete, with the longest song conveniently being one of my favorites. I love how the music box melodics of everybody else mix with her more subdued vocal performance. It's a rare case of Glass completely foregoing her chouts. And it offers a nice stylistic contrast, which adds some melancholy to an album more generally steeped in anger. And it's not like that anger isn't warranted, because it sure fucking is. And songs like Suffer and Swallow, with its violent fantasies of literally breaking down another person, hit their mark with crystal clarity. But it's an important reminder that there's more to this than anger. Pain manifests as a wide array of emotions, and this album runs through pretty much all of them. On Wednesday, Glass posted about how meaningful it was to her that people have responded to the album as well as they have, and specifically how much she appreciates the way people have related to her vulnerability on the album. Because it drops some of the pretense of her early solo work that the pain was fleeting. Even mine, a song about self-harm, feels more empowered than some of the tracks we get here, since it's specifically about using that harm as a way to regain lost control. It puts abuse in the past tense, while Pray 4 is clearly set in the present. And that immediacy is why people have responded to it as they have, why so many feel seen by her work. It is Survivor Pop. And it's easy to argue that Survivor Pop shouldn't exist, but I think this album makes clear that it needs to, that there should be more of it in this and frankly every other genre of music, because there are people who have gone through shit like this in every scene, and people should have the ability to hear music that reflects their experiences, even if they're not into traditionally heavy music where this sort of thing more often resides. Alice Glass has shown a way to do that, proven that it is possible to make catchy music you could play in a club that confronts this head-on. And I'm sure she won't be the last. 8.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, my cat, Cat Saracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Maddie Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. 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