OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR WIFE #6: Young Enough To Know Better
How Charly Bliss's rockstar loser spirit won my heart, or, "It's *MY* quarter-life crisis and *I* get to choose the music!"
This is my longest and probably most self-indulgent newsletter yet. I’m intentionally releasing it on the 4-year-anniversary of Charly Bliss’s sophomore record Young Enough, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a retrospective. More accurately, it’s a personal-essay/artist overview that I wrote a couple months ago about (among other things) post-college ennui, food service hell, dating apps, bodily fluids, gender dynamics in power pop, and the importance of Girl Loser representation. Some names have been changed to protect, well, me.
Almost every day during the summer of 2021, I listened to a song about peeing your pants on a trampoline.
It had been one year since I finished college over Zoom. I was waiting tables and coming back home to my parents’ house, where I’d collapse into my childhood bed and try not to wonder why, at just twenty two years old, I felt like my life was already over, all the potential drained from my once-bright future. I knew I was being fatalistic, which only worried me further: If I had the self-awareness to understand how skewed my thinking was, why couldn’t I outgrow it? Though I was– in all technical and legal senses of the word –an adult, I feared that I’d missed some crucial steps along the way, that my heart and mind were destined to remain in a permanent state of latent teenage melodrama.
I served espresso martinis to business school students, I went on chemistry-devoid dates that I knew wouldn’t lead to anything meaningful, I walked aimlessly around the neighborhood I grew up in (and could feel myself growing out of), and I became mildly obsessed with the power pop band Charly Bliss.
In “DQ,” a standout track off their 2017 debut album Guppy, frontwoman Eva Hendricks impulsively giggles at the news that her ex-boyfriend’s dog has gone to the farm upstate, before immediately begging him– the ex, not the dead dog –to take her back. She acknowledges her cruelty but instead of apologizing for it, she twists the knife with a devious rhyme: Does he love me most now that his dog is toast? And that’s just the opening verse.
In just a few lines, Hendricks bounces from playing the role of a heartbroken Cruella to that of a good-time girl, holding her own amongst frat boys and partying through the pain of “always” getting dumped on her birthday. One of my favorite YouTube comments from the song’s music video is from a user who goes by the name Vee Hickle, who incredulously remarks, “She always gets dumped on her birthday. Like, every time. No exceptions.” Another comment from someone called desiidenied reads, “Sitting in court for drinking in public. I’m totally upset but this song is making everything better. I just want to jump up and dance. I can hardly contain it!!!”
Over unflinching drum bashes and revving guitars, the song reaches its colossal peak at the chorus of rapid-fire first-person declarations: I’m four years above sixteen / I bounced so high I peed the trampoline / I’m too sad to be mean / I’m gonna end up working at Dairy Queen. It was this hook that made “DQ” my quarter-life crisis anthem. Underneath the edgy dead dog jokes, immature urinary humor, and mocked fearmongering from “real adults'' who threaten wayward youths with the prospect of dead-end jobs if we don’t clean up our act, is the story of a heartbroken young woman wandering through an extended adolescence that she feels ill-prepared to deal with on her own. It’s the perfect Pathetic Girl banger. Eva’s lovable fuckup persona is decidedly unglamorous, sticky from melted ice cream, cheap beer, and piss. She’s quick to make herself the butt of the joke, to acknowledge the silliness of her suffering.
Once as a kid I came up with the (brilliant) idea to jump on a trampoline while wearing moon shoes, and ended up twisting my ankle. I knew that my injury was both 1) entirely my fault, and 2) objectively hilarious, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Still, I clung to the goofy novelty of it, hoping that the punchline would make the pain worthwhile. What “DQ” captured for me was that specific moment of examining your pain and telling yourself, “I need to laugh about this or else I’m gonna cry about it.” And then sometimes crying about it anyway.
***
As a subgenre, power pop is characterized by its hook-driven songs, bright guitar melodies, and a general dissonance between its peppy tone and melancholia of its lyrical content. Such broad categorization allows for bands across generations that might not have much in common sonically to fall into the same tradition. Its versatility and overlap with other genres has allowed it to continuously shapeshift since its inception in the 60s. There’s never a lack of demand for catchy, jangly chord progressions over which a sunny-voiced frontperson earworms their way into your head with a misleadingly fun melody.
“The point of power pop is never originality; it’s about musical craft and hitting the listener’s pleasure centers over and over via ruthlessly efficient and svelte songwriting,” Steven Hyden writes in a 2022 UPROXX profile of Peter Gill, frontman of Philly power pop band 2nd Grade. Writing a great pop song is hard. When it’s done well, it looks easy.
Hyden also points to common genre tropes– “romantic heartache, sexual lust, going out on a Saturday night, maybe a certain smart-alecky attitude.” While discussing whether or not Tom Petty (one of Gill’s biggest influences) qualifies as a power pop artist, Gill says that he wouldn’t go so far as to make such a claim about Petty’s catalog as a whole, but points to one song in particular– “Even The Losers.”
“Power pop is loser music where losers become winners in their dreams,” Gill concludes, in a pretty spot-on summation of the genre’s enduring philosophy. It’s music to sing into your hairbrush while you’re spending a night at home because your date stood you up; a fantasy where the nerd gets the girl, the geek picks up a guitar and becomes a rock god.
Charly Bliss often draw comparisons to kitschy, hook-heavy 90s and early-00s pop rock bands like Weezer and Fountains of Wayne (the band themselves have cited the 2001 Josie & The Pussycats soundtrack– penned by Fountains of Wayne frontman Adam Schlesinger –as a major influence). Though these comparisons are mostly based on instrumental and production similarities, the “rockstar loser” ethos that permeates their lyricism and performance plays just as crucial a role in cementing Charly Bliss in the same musical lineage. A chorus in which the lead vocalist pathetically pleads, am I the best / or just the first person to say yes? like Eva Hendricks does on “Glitter” could easily find its home in a slow, introspective acoustic ballad, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, Hendricks spins her insecurities into sugary hooks and screams them from the rooftops.
***
“DQ” clocks in at exactly 3 minutes and 19 seconds, which meant that I could listen to it twice on the walk from the 33rd Street 6 train stop to my waitressing job at a restaurant and bar in Murray Hill. This establishment (which I will not name) specialized in overpriced cocktails and equally-overpriced Americanized Greek food. During my first week, Alan– the zealous bartender who would say things like “if there’s time to lean there’s time to clean” without a hint of irony, and favored EDM remixes of songs that should have never been EDM-remixed (the very existence of an EDM remix of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a fresh wad of spit in God’s face) –told me that he loved working on Fridays. Not because Fridays were the night where we made the most in tips– Alan wasn’t in it for the money –but because he loved making customers happy.
“That’s what it’s all about,” he said, “Putting smiles on people’s faces.”
Before I could think better of it, I responded, “So we only put smiles on people’s faces on Fridays? No other days?”
I was met with a quizzical look from Alan and a delayed chuckle from our manager, Matt, who pointed at me and said, “I like this one, she’s funny.” Matt’s compliments always came off as condescending, like you should be so lucky to find yourself on the receiving end of his praise.
I would enter a sort of dissociative state while waiting tables. My service smile was practiced, my recitation of happy hour specials rote. My hands took on minds of their own, mechanically punching in orders, uncorking wine bottles, wiping down tables, swiping credit cards for groups that asked to split the bill seven ways. It was easier to ignore the ache in my forearms from carrying stacks of dishes and the cramping in my legs from seemingly endless trips up and down the stairs to the kitchen if I pretended that my limbs were robotic enhancements, rather than my own flesh, blood, and bones. When the regulars– men my dad’s age who’d show up at 5 and drink till closing time –would snake their arms around my waist or place their palms on the small of my back, I’d imagine myself wearing a fully-body tinfoil hat.
Once, after coming up behind me and unexpectedly grabbing my shoulder, Matt remarked, “Woah, you just jumped, like, a mile.” I laughed it off, unaware of the reflex before he’d pointed it out and rosy with embarrassment once he had. Clearly I needed to upgrade from tinfoil to sheet metal.
On one slower night towards the end of the summer, a woman stumbled into the bar looking disheveled, sort of in a quirky-romcom-protagonist way, only realer and sadder. Also young, and already very, very drunk. I assumed she was probably a college student– newly of legal drinking age, still learning her limit –which surprised me even more when she announced to me, the bartender, and anyone else within earshot that she’d just lost her job; the company she’d worked at for the past five years was going under and they’d laid off most of their staff.
I would learn later that night, after helping her walk back upstairs from the ladies’ room, that she was thirty two years old, and I’d spend the last few minutes before we closed mopping up her oatmeal-textured pinkish-brown vomit while she apologized profusely, stuffing three crumpled twenties in the tip jar. Her cab pulled up outside, she said sorry for the hundredth time, I reassured her that it was okay and told her to get home safe. As I sprayed the hardwood floor with lemon-scented cleanser, I absentmindedly hummed the chorus of the 2014 Charly Bliss song “Urge to Purge”-- if this is playing grown-up / hold my hair back as I throw up. For a band with a relatively small discography, Charly Bliss have quite a few tracks that explicitly mention bodily fluids.
Upon remembering that the puking, newly-unemployed woman was a whole decade older than me, I was overcome with an awful mix of pity and dread. At twenty two I was cleaning up a drunk, jobless stranger’s vomit. At thirty two, would I be the one who was drunk, jobless, and vomiting in a shitty bar while some twenty two-year-old loser cleaned up after me? The notion that in ten years, I could still be so lost, so directionless, making an absolute ass of myself, was almost stomach-turning enough to replace her puke with my own.
***
For a while, my Tinder anthem was “Percolator,” the opening track off Guppy. I’ve listened to it probably hundreds of times and I still get the instinct to pick up my air guitar whenever I hear the opening riff, which is 30 seconds of unadulterated 90s garage rock perfection before Eva’s vocals come in. The first time I played a Charly Bliss song for my mother, she remarked that Eva sounded “like a baby hamster.” And sure, her voice is jarring. It’s high-strung to an almost cartoonish degree– like if Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls fronted a garage band. Eva’s signature squeal isn’t for everyone, and it reaches its squeakiest, most sugar-rushed heights when the songs are at their most emotionally explosive.
I’ve always loved Eva’s decision to open her debut album by letting the listener know exactly who she is, and then immediately making fun of herself for it: C’mon baby get me high / there’s always something new to buy / I cry all the time / I think that it’s cool I’m in touch with my feelings.
There’s a specific flavor of feminine uncoolness to Charly Bliss’s music. I don’t mean that as an insult– if anything, it’s high praise, and a means of characterizing how Eva expands upon the nerdy, rockstar loser persona that’s become a staple of power pop. That nerdiness has always seemed quintessentially male– it’s the guy who’s picked last in sports, the boy who pines after the golden girl who ignores him for some meathead jock. Like in many other male-dominated music genres, the female love interests in power pop songs are often sung about from afar, with little characterization beyond their beauty and unattainability. These songs are populated by geeky “nice guys” and the cooler, more masculine men that they compete with for the affections of pretty, popular girls. The framework in which the underdog everyman is always– as the term implies –a man, renders the underdog everywoman functionally nonexistent, and begs the question: What about the girl losers?
“Percolator” is an exaggerated reclamation of the gendered insults that have been thrown Eva’s way– she’s a ditz, a flirt, a drama queen, too silly, too friendly, too emotional. Her self-directed mocking on the opening lines makes it even more satisfying when she turns that same ridicule towards the edgy, pseudointellectual indie rock frontmen who dominated the scenes she came up in, deadpanning, I am pregnant with meaning / could I be more appealing? / writing slurs on the ceiling. “Percolator”-- and to some extent, Eva’s artistic persona in general –is a wholehearted embrace of everything she’s been told would keep her from being taken seriously. She plays up the girliness, the goofiness, the drama of it all. Her live shows often feel like extreme, almost drag-like performances of youthful femininity, with Eva bouncing around in platform heels, layers upon layers of hot pink tulle and blindingly bright sequins, a bunch of sparkly barrettes shoved into her teased bleach-blonde hair– all while shredding on her guitar and squealing at the top of her lungs.
It’s still somewhat rare to see a female musician whose stage persona is hyper-feminine without being hyper-sexual. This isn’t to suggest that there’s anything inherently wrong with the latter or that Eva’s artistry and performance style are entirely sanitized, desexualized, and G-rated. She’s got no problem singing about sex, though she tends to dwell on the more unsexy aspects of it– she has a breakdown in the contraception aisle, she laments how her antidepressants have made her unable to orgasm, she indulges in a jealous fixation on her boyfriend’s ex and compares it to watching softcore porn. In the second verse of “Percolator,” she lampoons her own reputation for being overly flirtatious: Don’t you know I aim to please? / I’m everybody’s favorite tease / put your hand on my knee / that’s what friends are for.
I aspired to that sweet spot of taking myself just seriously enough while still being able to turn the joke back on myself. Whether I was conscious of it at the time or not, the nothing-to-lose up-frontness of “Percolator” became my go-to dating strategy to counteract my principled and virulent hatred of first dates. To this day, I’ll often joke that the reason my current relationship works is because we technically never went on one. First dates always felt like job interviews, like the very concept of them was a setup for failure. The table at whatever nondescript dive bar I’d schlepped out to on my night off work felt like a seesaw; on either side were me and some young professional nursing an IPA. As the conversation tilted back and forth, I’d wait for one of us to hit the ground and disappoint the other.
For the most part, these were perfectly nice men, but there was rarely much beyond that to pull the date out of job-interview-seesaw territory. It wasn’t like I was expecting us to fall in love within a matter of hours– at the time I wasn’t even sure if love was what I wanted –but I also couldn’t see those hours leading to any lasting connection, especially if we started out by showing each other the most polished, presentable versions of ourselves.
Out of self-defense or self-sabotage, I attempted a sort of “what you see is what you get” approach to first dates, figuring that if I made myself “unloveable” from the start, I wouldn’t have to wonder whether or not I deserved love in the first place. I donned outfits that were tackier and more attention-grabbing than my usual day-to-day attire, making a concerted effort to wear louder colors, clashing patterns, and more revealing silhouettes than I was used to (or comfortable in). I purposely showed up late to see if punctuality (or lack thereof) would be enough to sway my suitor away from me. To combat my insecurities about eating in public, I would order the messiest dish on the menu. During our conversations, I’d bring up topics you’re generally not supposed to on first dates– sex, money, religion, politics, petty gossip about people he’d never met. I namedropped exes and frenemies and dead relatives. I swore like a sailor who’d just stubbed all ten of his toes. I doubled down on controversial opinions (even ones I wasn’t fully convinced of) to see if he’d bite.
My rationale was that if I put all my too much-ness on the table right away, there’d be no risk of disappointing him in the future. If I was consistently, knowingly fucking up, I wouldn’t have to worry about the looming prospect of one big fuckup ruining everything, because there’d be nothing to ruin. It was a selfish instinct, and in hindsight, unfair to these poor guys who were just trying to get to know me. Months later, I put “Percolator” on a Spotify playlist I’d made to document that era, the playlist description reading, “If I was your waitress or your Tinder date at any point this summer, I am so sorry.”
Despite my efforts being under the guise of not hiding the “real me,” I don’t think that this was the “real me” either. The idea was to bypass the performative aspects of dating that made me so uncomfortable, but the performance never stopped— I’d just rewritten the script. Much like the inclusion of “Percolator” on my Tinder profile, my abrasive, anti-first date protective measures were just pieces in the puzzle of clever one-liners and photos from my good angles that I’d curated with the goal of presenting the most intriguing, covetable (if untouchable) version of myself. Straight from the adored, myself over yours / C’mon baby, keep dreaming. It wasn’t me– it was a projection of what I wanted to be, and what I wanted men to want. I regarded the process of putting together an (un)dateable persona as a form of self-actualization; if I could make others believe that I was more attractive, more confident, and more compelling than I actually was, maybe I could turn my carefully constructed artifice into reality.
***
With their 2019 sophomore album, Young Enough, Charly Bliss morphed their fuzzy 90s-inspired grunge pop into something shinier and more synth-driven, citing Lorde’s 2017 breakup album Melodrama as a major influence and enlisting the help of Grammy-winning producer Joe Chiccarelli. Not only is their sound on Young Enough bigger and brighter than ever, but so is the narrator that Eva embodies. Desecrated and complacent / I’m at capacity, I’m spilling out of me! she exclaims during the chorus of the album’s lead single. During the bridge, she refers to herself as both an East Coast witch and a sentimental, anxious kid. At this point in the song’s Michelle Zauner-directed music video– depicting the members of Charly Bliss committing a heist –the camera spins slowly above Eva as she makes snow angels in a massive pile of dollar bills and extolls the virtues of killing your inner people-pleaser: Triple overtime ambitious / sometimes nothing is delicious
Young Enough saw Charly Bliss embracing grander and sleeker instrumentation while their lyrical themes grew darker, and, to a certain extent, more self-referential. Where Guppy feels like a series of standalone, slice-of-life vignettes, Young Enough has an arc that you can somewhat chronologically follow from track to track.
During a 2019 Artist 1 On 1 interview, Eva spoke about how her songwriting approach had changed from the first album to the second, particularly how the writing process behind Young Enough pushed her to unlock new levels of vulnerability: “I wanted to try and write from a place of, ‘if I said exactly what I [felt], what would happen?’ I didn’t feel like a song was done until it felt painful to read the lyrics because it felt too true or open.”
And it worked. It’s not easy to hear Eva’s voice shake while repeating the words you don’t wanna hurt me, baby as though she’s slowly backing away from a wild animal that’s ready to pounce; to watch her fall head over heels for her own self-sabotage with lines like I’ll occupy your nation, fool! / I can’t get out from under you; to listen to her scream tomorrow is coming / it’s always so ugly / tomorrow is coming / I know you don’t love me about a partner whose cruelty she’s become so accustomed to that she fears entering a future without it.
The album’s title track could be mistaken for a straightforward love song, but its lyrics reveal a more sinister story when you listen closely: Bright, luminous in size / I am diving to drown in you. The beauty and destruction collapse in on one another. When something hurts too much to face head-on, Eva fixates on the aspects of it that are radiant and romantic, as if digging through dumpsters to admire the shimmer of broken bottles and bits of scrap metal. She doesn’t sentimentalize the dysfunction and abuse that she’s singing about, but empathizes with the instinct to do so as a means of self-preservation. It’s a messy and painfully real response– one that’s so rarely met with understanding or sympathy –that all-encompassing yearning that blinds you to the harsh realities of a toxic partnership: nobody knows you, the weight of your trust / how I crushed and consumed you and loved you too much. The feeling that no one else could possibly understand the world that you’ve built with someone who’s hellbent on repeatedly demolishing it and building it back up, just to smash it to pieces all over again.
When Eva manically declares I’m fucking joy and I hemorrhage light / he can destroy everything that I like on “Bleach,” it’s a last-ditch attempt to regain control over a situation that’s left her disempowered. The first time I listened to the bridge of “Bleach”— I mean, really listened —I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and burst into tears, though in the moment, I didn’t fully understand why:
Columns of confetti colors bleed
Kisses pressed into a screen
Cried so much I couldn’t see it right
Sparks that bled into the seams
Young enough for something beautiful
Betrayed and dumb enough to be the first crisis cashing out
I misheard the line “kisses pressed into a screen” as “kisses pressed into a scream,” and didn’t learn the actual lyric until over a year later. I think that on some level, my lyrical misinterpretation was a form of projection. No longer far away was the sound of my shoulder blades slamming against a wall, the hot slime of unwelcome lips on mine, the crush of fists pinned down over a heart that pounded out threats to pop out of its cage.
I shouted along to “Bleach”-- incorrect lyrics and all –while turning my bedroom into a one-woman moshpit on sleepless nights; in the kitchen, cooking for myself when nobody else was home; in the shower when I didn’t want to know whether or not I was crying. I turned the volume all the way up and cranked the faucet just as high. When the water scalded my flesh, making it glow a plump, bright red, I refused to step away from the heat, preferring to boil alive from the outside-in, rather than let whatever was blistering inside me tear its way to the surface.
***
The next track, “Chatroom,” takes the bonfire that “Bleach” ignited and douses it in gasoline. While many of the songs on Young Enough allude to abusive relationship dynamics, “Chatroom” directly addresses an instance of sexual assault that Eva experienced at the hands of her ex. Despite the weight of its subject matter– or maybe because of it –it’s one of the most joyful, triumphant, and downright fun songs in Charly Bliss’s catalog.
While premiering “Chatroom” as a single, Eva called it the most straightforward pop song she’d ever written, going so far as to say that she “needed it to be a pop song.” The synths sparkle and eventually explode, mirroring but never outshining Eva’s defiant vocals, piercing lyrics, and layers upon layers of hooks.
“Chatroom” feels like such a singular musical feat, but the closest comparison I can make is to Grimes’ 2012 breakout single “Oblivion,” another piece of synthpop whose infectiously catchy melodies and angelic, ethereal production almost obscure the darkness of its lyrical content. Grimes wrote “Oblivion” about being assaulted by a stranger, and as a result, being afraid to walk alone at night. This is never stated explicitly in the lyrics, only obliquely referenced, as the echoed refrain of see you on a dark night becomes a battle cry. Similarly, when Eva sings I wanna see you stripped down naked on “Chatroom,” it isn’t to convey sexual desire, but rather an “emperor has no clothes” revenge fantasy, in which the persona that her abuser hides behind is stripped away and his true character is revealed. With damning lyrics like I was raised in the spotlight / his word against mine, it’s a testament to Eva’s ability to harness both her rage and vulnerability into something as bright and explosive as the volcano she likens herself to on the song’s bridge: Marked me dormant, I erupted. “Chatroom’’’s beauty isn’t born of denial or romanticism, it’s an assertion that the beauty doesn’t have to come at the expense of feeling your pain in its entirety.
In the aforementioned Artist 1 on 1 profile, Eva walks back some of the protective irony that saturated the songs on Charly Bliss’s debut record: “On Guppy, even though the lyrics were very honest, I had a tendency to get close to saying something really hard to say, then swerving and making fun of myself instead.”
The songwriting on Young Enough doesn’t entirely reject the snarkiness and self-deprecation that made Guppy so memorable, but instead sharpens it. Where Guppy’s songs used sarcasm to provide emotional distance and comic relief, the humorous moments on Young Enough make every gut-punch hit even harder. Eva’s eye-rolling taunts of everybody knows you’re the second coming on “Chatroom” do more than just mock and belittle her abuser, they take a blowtorch to the pedestals from which men like him lord their power and perceived credibility over their victims. Eva inflates every experience to its most cartoonish proportions, whether that’s giving into an all-consuming, life-ruining crush (sailing toward forever / I’m content to crash and cling for life); trying to get over an ex by kissing everything that moves; or even meditating on something as seemingly boring as credit fraud– on “Camera” someone steals Eva’s credit card to buy the titular camera, and when the purchase is intercepted, she wonders whether her bank has prevented a masterpiece / or something sick and twisted. At the core of Charly Bliss’s magnetism is their ability to dive headfirst into the weirdness of everyday life and blow it up. The mundane never stays mundane, it becomes an adventure or an ordeal— usually both.
***
I’ve affectionately referred to Charly Bliss as “quarter-life crisis music” and I’d be lying if I said that my connection to it wasn’t inextricably wrapped up in how I felt during that time. I got into them when I was in my early twenties, fresh out of college during the first year of a worldwide pandemic, floundering in my career and my love life. It’s hard to say whether I would’ve latched on so strongly had their records found me any earlier or any later. For me, they’ve always been a twofold encapsulation of 20something ennui paired with a tacit acceptance of life’s absurdity.
I spent the week before my 24th birthday listening to Young Enough opener “Blown to Bits” on repeat. Over winding synth passages, Eva takes stock of the experiences and influences that have brought her to the present moment. She shouts out song titles from Rilo Kiley and Mitski; provides lyrical snapshots of karate lessons, reality shows, and afternoons in her mother’s yard; and celebrates moments of unexpected victory, even when they’re fleeting. Especially when they’re fleeting.
As the drums and synths grow louder and her bandmates’ backing harmonies build, she repeats the hook over and over, her vocals becoming increasingly robotic and distorted. All alone in my first grown-up apartment, among the popcorn ceilings and weak faucets and fruit flies, I shout along, pounding on walls and countertops at the outro:
Sell it for parts, I’m asking for more
I don’t know what’s coming for me after 24
Universe in mourning, I don’t know how to quit
It’s gonna break my heart to see it blown to bits
It’s gonna break my heart
It’s gonna break my heart
It’s gonna break my heart to see it blown to bits