The Regrettes Discover Their Inner Sad Girl
The Regrettes by Lissyelle Laricchia
The Los Angeles-based rock band shows some newfound gravity on their upcoming “Further Joy.”
[NOTE: This is the first piece for My Spilt Milk by new contributor Mia Huber.]
Lydia Night is letting us in. Peering through white curtains, she looks right at us. She spins around her apartment in a baggy white T-shirt and cotton underwear. She dumps milk into the sink and watches it swirl down the drain. She balances on her toes, pulls at her face in the mirror, and rests on the kitchen floor next to a cake she smashed face down. “Spin the bottle, will I be enough?,” she mouths in the opening shot, while lying on sheets the color of ballet slippers.
“You’re So Fucking Pretty,” the second single released from The Regrettes third album, Further Joy (out April 8), departs from their usual punk rock, coming-of-age movie prom scene fun that is their signature sound, and instead plants a flagpole in the sad girl, indie pop soil. For the first minute of the track, it’s just Night’s voice and a reverb-swamped piano. You can hear the pedal creaking. The frontwoman of The Regrettes is growing, and her bandmates are growing along with her.
The Regrettes formed in the indie scene of Los Angeles art schools, and they’ll play the Toulouse Theatre on Tuesday night. They didn’t remain in L.A.’s DIY scene for long. Ink on a record contract with Warner Bros was fresh before Night graduated high school. The band became known for fast-paced songs that you could dance the pain away to. The Regrettes grabbed the music industry by the shirt collar with badass feminine rage and a demand to be listened to.
With “You’re So Fucking Pretty,” they are learning that there is just as much power in softness as there is in disruption.
“We wanted to make something that felt pretty invasive,” explains Night in an interview. The “You’re So Fucking Pretty” video, shot in her actual home, follows Night around as she anxiously paces, gets in her head, and spends the day inside. The song tells the story of Night’s unrequited love for her best friend, and the first time she admits to herself that she has feelings for a girl. It’s her coming out as bisexual.
“It was truly not something that I had planned on writing about,” Night says. It came up spontaneously while the band was alone in Joshua Tree together. Processing her experience with the band helped her feel comfortable enough to write about it and remember all that she felt.
Night recalls moments when she was younger and had infatuations with girls. She had dreams about kissing friends and struggled with the all too familiar question of, Do I want you, or do I want to be you? She didn’t know where those feelings of attraction came from, or how to call them what they were: crushes. “In retrospect, I think I had many more crushes then I realized,” Night admits.
“You’re So Fucking Pretty” shows an older Night who has the ability to develop deeper feelings and act upon them, or in this case, fail to act upon them. The girl she has feelings for enters a relationship with someone else, and Night can only watch it happen. “It lingered for so long for me,” Night recalls. It was something deeper for her, and we watch this lingering happen in the video. Night sticks raspberries on her fingers and makes them kiss. She traces the curves of her furniture, and waltzes with a powder white dress.
However, it’s not just love that is getting her down, and her sexuality isn’t the only new side of herself that she’s allowing us to see. “I’ve always credited myself on being a very vulnerable songwriter, and then I started writing this album, and was like Oh, that was some bullshit,” says Night. The past two Regrettes albums revolved around high school relationships. They told stories of growing up in California and flipping off boys who used to gatekeep them from the indie scene, leaving them with nothing but OK Computer to dry their tears. While older Regrettes songs bear just as much emotion and intelligence, Night never looked inward like she does now.
Even the other two singles released off of Further Joy thus far have a greater sense of gravity. “Monday” has the attitude and carefree spirit of a 2010 Katy Perry single, but its lyrics are grounded in harsh realities. “And typically I’d wrap it in a bow / But honestly the cracks they start to show,” Night sings over swirling synths. In “That’s What Makes Me Love You,” she sings over Cage the Elephant-esque guitar licks and alternative radio tightness, “Phone calls I’m crying on the floor / Tell me what’d you say that for.”
Dancing around a pastel-colored apartment (and looking great while doing it) may not be everyone’s image of depression, but the “You’re So Fucking Pretty” video stands in stark contrast to other Regrettes videos that explode with color, teens, energy, cartwheels, badassery, and in some cases, an Olivia Rodrigo cameo. Night have let people see another side of her, and now she faces the challenge that accompanies vulnerability: letting people truly see you.
“It’s horrifying to not be able to hide and kind of keep certain secrets anymore” says Night. “Instead of this being a diary entry, this is like straight from the therapy session.”
