Cheap Queen, the debut album by King Princess, played like one of those summer nights that stretches on forever. Across a series of louche, Mellotron-heavy ballads, the New York songwriter and producer born Mikaela Straus sang about shooting the shit with friends and exchanging furtive glances with girls across crowded parties, each scene rendered with the insouciant, reflexive cool of an Eve Babitz story. It was a debut whose supreme confidence belied the fact that Straus first became famous after their Patricia Highsmith-referencing debut single “1950” went viral in early 2018. Where so many musicians react to virality with hesitance—quickly shifting gears or denouncing their early work—Straus delivered on her early promise with the grace and mien of a star.
Like Cheap Queen, Straus’ second record Hold On Baby is urbane and self-possessed, the work of a keen-eared musician coming into their own as a producer and stylist. She sounds even more like herself: More flexible as a vocalist, more cutting as a lyricist, more confident in her own power to bridge gaps between disparate styles. If Cheap Queen’s palette was ambiguously vintage—all old-school soul flourishes, redone as to slot in easily somewhere between Troye Sivan and Lorde—Hold On Baby firmly positions Straus as someone who came of age in the 2010s, when indie rock was hitting its mainstream peak.
Working alongside a murderers’ row of mainstream-indie heavy hitters including Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Ethan Gruska, Shawn Everett, and Mark Ronson, Straus pulls influences liberally but never thoughtlessly: A Strokes-y guitar line lopes through “Cursed,” while “Crowbar” nods to Sufjan Stevens’ fluttering piano ballads; the piano at the beginning of “Dotted Lines” recalls Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid’s work on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, and “Sex Shop” feels of a piece with the alienated sexuality of St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy. These references never feel winky or obvious, in large part because Straus’ own sense of mood—their fondness for warm tones and spacious atmospherics that can turn cold and claustrophobic in a second—always takes precedence. She presides over the affair with a cool hand and a keen awareness of when to pull back—the restrained elegance of someone who’s spent most of their life hanging around studios.
Hold On Baby is a more solemn record than its predecessor. The energizing frisson that Straus found on Cheap Queen has been supplanted by anxiety and despondence. Hold On Baby isn’t a breakup album; instead Straus finds inspiration in the tensions that arise in a long-term relationship. On “Hold On Baby Interlude,” they describe themselves as “a chipped tooth with the nerve exposed,” and that queasy tension pervades the album. The plush, weightless love song “Winter Is Hopeful” curdles its sweet nothings (“I’m always thinking, thinking, thinking of you”) with ribbons of acid: “But you never believe it.” Straus practically whispers the lyrics; it feels like she’s practicing lines from across the room rather than actually addressing the object of her desire. “Change the Locks,” one of a handful of songs produced with Aaron Dessner, explodes from pleading minimalism into booming, gritted-teeth arena rock, even though one of its primary tensions is impossibly small: “Losing your mind over something I wore/Just ’cause it’s yours.”
