Southern Ontario Gothic

Welcome to the Zoomer Age, where no one has a job and everyone has a side hustle; where retromania rules supreme but the things you used to love suck now; where deepfakes and psy-ops and nepo baby discourse flood every artistic medium with contradiction. How does that all sound? If you ask me, quite a lot like the 26-year-old Toronto artist Brat Star, who by the above metrics is probably the voice of my generation.

Brat Star is over “aesthetic revivers” and thinks “capping is the real pandemic”; like a chaste Ninajirachi, she wonders if her only friends are “Apple headphones and Ableton 10.” With a CV from the gig economy, she’s been a waitress and a student and a DJ and an “overachiever” and a “dumb bitch.” She packages hopecore in a decoupage of freak folk, deadpan anti-pop balladry à la Sidney Gish, and 2010s beatmaking. It’s all Modge Podge-d together with the kind of shrugged braggadocio that clicked for Drain Gang and the “gangster Nancy Sinatra” herself, Lana Del Rey (“Margot Tenenbaum” ends with a spin on the “Ride” monologue, and “Dirty Hokas” interpolates “Love Story”). Her vocabulary would poison a Victorian child: a blend of shitposter rhetoric, mirror Post-It manifesting, and Hegelian-ish theory, it’s as clear a representation I’ve seen of contemporary online dialect.

“My style is polarizing,” Brat Star admits on “David Fincher,” “but doesn’t it work for you?” Her musical influences, similarly incongruous on their face, stem from an era of digital music post-iTunes and pre-slop when casual internet explorers could cultivate a sprawling taste profile for free. She worships Drake but says Fiona Apple “saved her”; she spun her fair share of trap edits in Berlin, but ultimately aspires to be like Shania Twain. Southern Ontario Gothic prioritizes what Brat Stars calls “piano shredders,” tremolo-heavy ditties augmented with chintzy looped strings and campfire song guitar. Luke Graves’ live-tracked fills and drumrolls bring essential muscle, and a low end channeling boom-bap and mid-aughts R&B underscores her most memorable mantras.

If the song titles didn’t give it away, Brat Star’s hyper-referential writing takes a Letterboxd-native approach. Whether likening her process to Fincher’s notoriously tedious shoots (“We’ll do a thousand takes if that’s what it takes, anything for that body of work”) or typifying a certain strain of too-cool girl in “Margot Tenenbaum,” she commits to the idea that everyone’s life is a movie these days, and we’re all locked into some kind of bit. Loukeman, who mixed the record and nabs a couple co-production credits, proves a real asset to getting this across. His collagist approach to pop, electronic, and ambient helps guide Southern Ontario Gothic smoothly through its musical movements, so Brat Star can keep her head in clouds of hypothetical solipsism: “When I’m famous, I’ll barely have to exist for myself, because I’ll exist in everyone else’s head.”

For all her aspirations to cloutier pastures, she’s happiest reveling in down-home pleasures: a late-night dart in the parking lot, kissing your crush off a White Claw, looking up at the sky. She deals in a distinctly Canadian vibe that also permeates the music of Vancouver’s Sophia Stel, who just released her own debut. A mix of studied self-effacement and contentment in the now, it comes natural to an artist who grew up thinking of Toronto as the big city. “I just romanticized Toronto in a way maybe someone romanticizes Paris or New York,” Brat Star told Clairo in a recent conversation for Interview. It’s a sharp insight into how she manages to artfully toe the line between sincerity and sarcasm: She really does find beauty in the mundane.

Occasionally she flies too close to the sun, melting her signature into something more like schtick. The “Margot Tenenbaum” lyric “Insecure and pretty, it’s everyone’s problem” resonates on the track, less so engraved on accessories from the Paloma Wool fall collection. Sure, it’s comically full circle that a slightly hipper subset of the female fans envisioned on “Aritzia Sweater” can now dress for work in her disses, and since it’s no longer 1993, I’m not going to accuse a gal with a singular licensing deal of “selling out.” But it does reflect how outside of Brat Star’s hermetic diorama, some lines scan more like a corporation’s pandering tweets than natural vernacular. The Tom Tom Club-type groove on “Aritzia Sweater” can’t quite account for jargon like “face giving unalive,” “going nonverbal,” and “my soul’s on fleek,” AAVE-tinged Zoomerisms so overly parodied it’s almost punching down. “Dirty Hokas” draws a relatable connection between the titular sneaker and cushioning yourself from harsh reality, but it could do without the forced YSL lingo “slatts.”

Different strokes for different folks; the Brat Star enterprise will certainly rub some people the wrong way. But wheatpasted all over Southern Ontario Gothic’s version of Ontario is the message that if you can’t please everybody, you might as well ride for yourself. “I need hope, I’m crushed by the weight of expectations,” Brat Star trills on closer “Rob Ford,” an ode to crashing out illustrated by the former Toronto mayor who, exposed for smoking crack in a leaked video in 2013, still refused to leave office. That’s what Brat Star does best: wringing some damn hope out of the hellscape she’s inherited. Stick it out through the trollish one-liners and half-joking ennui, and a galvanizing abundance grindset emerges. Maybe it’s one big psy-op, but I’ve got a different theory: She understands that even the surliest youth of today secretly yearn for a hit of millennial optimism.