Jonah Bromwich owns several copies of Is This Desire?
We’ve been riding for Meg Myers — the Los Angeles-based singer who readily blends violence and sex — for a minute now, I can’t say I’m surprised that the rest of the world has yet to catch up. There’s long been a space in alternative music for bruising, counter-intuitive, female-fronted rock (Savages being the latest incarnation). But Myers is a solo act, and difficult to position as an inheritor of the Riot Grrl mantle. Her previous songs have been fantastic, but have somehow fallen through the ever-shrinking faults between the genres. And the rule for writing about music is, if we can’t triangulate an artist via a sensible combination of their influences (it’s Nirvana meets The Backstreet Boys!), then people often ignore it.
Myers’ newest single “Desire,” then, is a savyy act of positioning. It’s as raw as anything that the singer has released thus far (rarely will you find such a self-posessed line as “I want to fuck you” in indie’s swirling cloud of euphemism), but it sees Myers as an heir to Paramore lead singer, Hayley Williams. Myers has the power and the range to own a heavy rawk chorus, and her songwriting complements soft-loud-soft nicely—she’s as exciting when she’s cooing as when she’s belting. Getting signed to a major label can go one of two ways—either the label crafts you in it’s own image, or you make the label work for you. Myers, now on Atlantic Records, has clearly done the latter—“Desire” available as a single now, is a high-fidelity version of the things that she’s been doing all along.
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