The Singles Bar: Girl Wilde flaunts her ‘Bad Side’
The alt-pop singer reemerges with a new single and lease on life.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
Girl Wilde emerges from her cocoon with a new lease on life, regained self-worth in her back pocket and an appropriately volatile, but flowery, aesthetic. In past lives, she had confidently cut through the noise with a sharpened blade of monstrous hooks and even grander melodies. But now, removed from space and time, the Los Angeles starlet rises to new heights with “Bad Side,” a naughty alt-pop mid-tempo concealing something other than the obvious. The song, helmed alongside Allie McDonald (one half of EXES) and Dave Burris (RKCB, Saro), excavates and brandishes “the side we try to hide from people when we first meet them,” the singer says.
Between the flecks of pop-punk-isms and the spellbinding electroshocks of instruments, guitar and drums mostly, “Bad Side” combs “the mess, the struggles, the downright uncomfortable and unattractive truths,” she continues. “We found ourselves giggling over the stupid and destructive things we did as our past selves to seem more desirable. We felt sassy and empowered.”
Girl Wilde twists such animalistic and basic values into a frenzied wall of sound. She sits along the lines of Tove Lo, Troye Sivan and Julia Michaels, quirky but fresh-pressed. It’s as alternative as it is polished and easily digested, underground and in the sun, emotional and restrained. “You told me you were into roller coasters,” she accepts on the opening line before spinning a delicious web. “So, what’s the problem / Do you want to stop.” She’s flippantly devilish, seductive in all the right spots, but she’s never too much.
“Bad Side” is a reset, so to speak, for a pop wielder looking for her big break.
Listen below:
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