An era in postmodern pop music has been coming to a close for a while now, and with its conclusion Pigtails finds herself flooded by an ocean of possibilities as an artist, all of which seem to be ripe for use in this precise moment in time. She’s in the midst of something very keen in her new single, and although this is a statement that could perhaps apply to a lot of her peers in the rising indie pop scene we’ve been hearing more and more of in the last couple of years, there’s something very special about the aggression she’s channeling right now. Pigtails does everything she can to put an incendiary sensation into her words and the melody accompanying this visual experience in her music video for “In My Head,” and in my view, she does a terrific job.
There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles in the actual instrumentation here, but this is because all of the moxie is supposed to be centered on the lead vocal alone. Even though doing as much has been pretty difficult for her peers in recent times, Pigtails demonstrates a comfortability with attitude-based melodies that feels very refreshing next to all of the insulated sounds her rivals have been cultivating on both sides of the Atlantic in 2022.
She wants us to feel the rhythm of the music more from her verse than the percussion, which is something that takes both spirit and actual melodic muscle to produce even with the most elaborate of production setups (which she seems to have left out of the equation here).
A respectable amount of hype has been building around Pigtails since she dropped this new single and its music video towards the end of November, and I’ll say this is a rare occasion on which the subject lives up to the buzz it’s attracted and then some. From the sleek attack of her lead vocal to the delicate phrasing of her lyrics, there isn’t a spot of substance to this piece that doesn’t ache with charisma and honesty, and in modern pop, that isn’t exactly easy to come by.
