Baby Queen: Buzzkill Review

Let’s cut to the chase – I feel seen.

Baby Queen is here to rule the world. Her debut track “Internet Religion” is a fantastic critique of our relationship with social media from a relatable and non-patronizing perspective. Obviously, after hearing such a bop, I was excited for what was yet to come. 

I’m not the arbiter of good taste. Hell, I didn’t really like her second track, the one I’m meant to be talking about here, one first listen. But damn did I come around quickly. Quite simply, “Buzzkill” is in my eyes the garage pop anthem to define my teenage years.

Every musical aspect of this track is frankly incredible. Opening on some pretty massive synth then dropping into a trashy, stripped back beat could have you thinking this is some lo-fi R&B weirdness, but no. The electrochoral backing vocals introduced partway through the first verse quickly shift the tone to a distinctly pop angle, not far removed from a dark interpretation of an early Lorde sound. The pre-chorus maintains this vibe, as does the first half of the chorus as the big saw-wave returns.

Through verse two the complexity builds both in the synths and percussion, but the track is still fairly minimal. It’s a perfect complement to the deadpan, near spoken word vocal.

But then the second chorus hits. Electric guitars are plugged in. The vibe lifts. It’s by no means happy, but the shift to a more garage indie rock approach is the sort of shift that really works well. For many it would be too off genre, but with Baby Queen’s lack of discography and strongly homemade independent approach it doesn’t jar in any way.

Lyrically, “Buzzkill” is simply fantastic. It’s deadpan, sarcastic, and miserable, but not depressing. The choruses are cuttingly honest, a confrontation of our darker thoughts that people really don’t want to face up to.

The overarching lyrical themes of youthful miasma hit hard and are strikingly relatable. I absolutely am that guy who turns up to a party and is a total buzzkill (or gets way too drunk and throws up all over campus, but that’s a different story). Just look at the chorus and tell me you haven’t felt exactly that mood.

“Look:
I don’t wanna be a buzzkill!
I hate to be a buzzkill!
I don’t wanna be a buzzkill
But this life is shit and I just don’t want it
I hate to be a buzzkill
So I cry and I cry and I just can’t stop it”

The verses get a bit more thematically diverse, briefly touching on issues of inequality, politics, and social media is a way that adds constructively to the overall tone of the track. Even better, there’s some fun bits thrown in too. The middle eight is absolutely as downbeat as the rest of the song, but singing along to ‘So I aim my gun at your buzz – Bang Bang!’ brings an oddly therapeutic euphoria to the track.

To conclude: delightfully heavy instrumentation, a fun twisting of genre perception, and lyrics that tread the line of deadpan, ecstatic, and relatable in exactly the right way. All I have to say is why are you still here and not listening to it now?

Score: a bold and perhaps slightly divisive 5/5