Graphically sexy feminist pop.

Ashnikko breaks out into intensely modern electro-pop in this album. From the first track, a heavy beat pulses through the song, melding with her high, digitally-altered voice singing the refrains. She bounces between rap and hip-hop chorus, then to high auto-tuned runs. The instrumentals carry her voice with synth, bass and experimental percussion warps. This musical style continues through most of the album. It starts to slow down more as the album progresses, with the last two songs feeling closer to country. “Baby Teeth,” the fourteenth title, even has Joep Joris Le Blanc playing the slide guitar to bring some blues influence to the track.

Ashnikko uses specific details and items in the lyrics that staunchly place the album as a product of the current times. In “Smoochie Girl,” the lyrics mention 7UP and how she might “take out my IUD.” This start to the album signals to the audience some of the range of what she will be covering through the rest of the album. The lyrics have these modern details included both as playful metaphors, such as “spin on it like a beyblade” in “Trinkets,” but also to speak on heavier topics. “Microplastics” uses the prominence of microplastics in the world to build the powerful metaphor: “want you in my body like microplastics.” This line demonstrates her longing for this person by stating the undeniable truth of how plastic runs through everyone’s veins. It also signals discomfort as, despite the sentiment of wanting this person so badly, microplastics are inherently harmful to the body.

A big theme through this album is Ashnikko’s relationships with both romantic partners and herself. She introduces a lot of progressive topics, such as attraction to women in “She’s So Pretty” and “Itty Bitty,” and non-monogamous relationships in “I Want My Boyfriends to Kiss,” wielding a strong feminist attitude throughout. Despite some of her more vulgar and graphic lyrics, like in the chorus of “Full Frontal,” in that same song she also sings “Just me and my girls, we been solving equations all week / Using our big juicy brains for the good of humanity,” which establishes her intelligence as something unrestricted by her desire.

Smoochies melds modern cultural references and a catchy beat with rich themes of how society can twist fun playful things into dangerous ones. In the final track, “It Girl,” she sings “I am not a vessel for mеn to love themselves anymore” tying together the entire album into a single line. Throughout the more pleasurable explicit pictures she paints, she also includes messages of heartbreak, hurt and establishing herself beyond the people she’s surrounded with. In “It Girl,” she describes how she wants to “kill the it girl in me,” demonstrating how she even is separating herself from the persona she used to display. This album can be fun party music or an empowering display of potent feminism and coming of age in a damaged world.