King Princess: Hold On Baby — Strap yourself in for a boisterous ride

There may be a royal thing going on here (from Mikaela Mullaney Straus’s stage name to the title of her 2019 debut album, Cheap Queen, but there are very few airs and graces to be found across the dozen songs that casually drape themselves across Hold On Baby.

Signed for the past five years to Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records (an imprint of major label Columbia Records), King Princess has always made clear her LGBTQ+ aesthetic – her 2018 debut single, 1950, pays tribute to Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, later republished, and filmed, as Carol.

Indeed, such is the exuberant swagger of these queer-pop gems you are convinced there are few songs you will hear in 2022 that are better than the likes of Change the Locks – “I have fed a million bodies and mostly it’s been awesome, but you’re the one for whom I wanna come …” –, I Hate Myself I Want to Party, For my Friends, and Let Us Die.

The latter, in particular, is a definite contender for song of the year: a throbbing, turbo-charged raga-like tune that documents, pretty much, up to 50 assertive, if possibly criminal, ways to leave your lover (“drive a car right off the cliff … stick your fingers in the sockets … drop the iron in the tub …”).

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Hold On Baby is right – strap yourselves in for a non-binary and boisterous ride. kingprincessmusic.com