Teen to the Core

Teen pop is a strange genre. Practitioners are either themselves teens, sanctified by a sea of fanatic fans, or people a decade or more past those formative years, who chose, for whatever reason, to sing about young love like it’s the final frontier. At best, it empathizes with the complicated experience of teenagehood and offers structures through which to view the inherent confusion. At worst, it exploits the fragility of its fans by forcing saccharine and reductive portrayals of love and identity down their throats. Dragonette’s most recent album, Royal Blues, exists somewhere in the middle.

At 38, lead singer Martina Sobara’s voice is tailor made for teen pop. Her cartoonishly high pitch guides choruses like, “I got a lonely heart / a lonely heart / a lonely heart / a lonely heart” (“Lonely Heart”) as if she were a one woman cheer team, working with relentlessly upbeat synths and melodies to create an atmosphere fit for the Barbie universe. That’s all fine and good, but things start to go bad when her lyrics begin to portray life and love in simplified terms. On “Save My Neck,” she establishes a theme that proliferates the record: that teenage boys only function to harm or save teenage girls. “I’m in a cage with a hungry creature / Gotta learn to be a lion tamer / Is anyone gonna come save me / Say ‘King Kong, let go of that lady,’” she sings. Girls are repeatedly cast as helpless beings lacking agency, in need of saving, incomplete without love, etc. It’s a tired but common trope in the genre, one that Dragonette has chosen to place at the heart of Royal Blues.

The sonic apex of the album is “Secret Stash,” a collaboration with Mike Mago, and the only song on the album that features another artist. It mercifully prioritizes rousing dance rhythms over cloying pop synths, and features a more sober Sobara, who seems to sing from a place of genuine lovesickness rather than unchecked euphoria. This song alone suggests that Dragonette is capable of reaching higher levels of artistry; the only question is if they truly want to go there.