There is potentially nothing more sickening than post-oversharing anxiety, but Katie Noir provides the ultimate antidote in her painfully relatable latest release, Vulnerability Hangover. The 21-year-old independent artist, songwriter and medical student from Germany wrote from the pressure points of overthinking, memory and the things that refuse to leave the throat cleanly, shaping alternative pop from emotional exposure and darkly comic self-interrogation.
The baroque dark chamber-pop aesthetics echo Amanda Palmer’s work, but Noir keeps her vocals diaphanous, soft and pure, embodying the vulnerability within the single until you feel compelled to hold it as if it might shatter. Tim Burton could build a whole gothic fairground around it, especially as Noir carries the vocal conviction of rap in a tilt-a-whirl thought-spiral pop form, letting phrasing and confession land with visual force.
The lines, “I wanted them to hear me / Not look beneath my skin / Now every hidden memory / Feels like someone walking in”, exemplify Noir’s ability to poetically metamorphose pain into something visually visceral. As Track 3 of The Aftermath EP, Vulnerability Hangover begins the project’s Vulnerability chapter, following I Prefer Jason and the debut-album era of What Is Unseen Still Exists. Noir understands the terror of wanting to be understood while fearing the cost of being seen, and she makes that contradiction sing.
Vulnerability Hangover is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.
Review by Amelia Vandergast
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