“What is it about you? Why are you so strange?” Marie Davidson’s acerbic brand of humour leaps into action from the get-go on her latest album, Working Class Woman. Across four minutes of tense, scattershot drums, opening track ‘Your Biggest Fan’ sees her roll through the often-heard utterances of supposed ‘fans’ (“Do you really need to carry round all that gear with you? My god!”). It’s an amusing insight into the life of a touring musician, and one that Davidson is keen to ensure is taken in the right way.
“I did it to poke fun because I’m sure there might be some people that will hear this track that are also touring musicians themselves, and artists will connect in some way with what they hear and recognise some common phrases,” she tells me. Humour has been a common tool across much of Davidson’s work going back over the last five years or so, her deadpan vocal style and upfront lyrics having acted as vital tools of catharsis as she emerged from struggles with depression. “I found that humour is a great tool to cope with anxiety,” she says. “I started this solo project because I was in quite a severe depression, and my music is all about unlocking those dark thoughts.”
Working Class Woman follows on exactly two years from her last LP, Adieux au Dancefloor, and comes about after a period of heavy touring which saw her travelling with few breaks for almost two years. Much of the album was written on the road and tested live during that time as part of a show dubbed ‘Bullshit Threshold’, and the result is her best record yet. Lead single ‘So Right’ pairs Italo disco with more downbeat influences while album highlight ‘Work It’ is a hypnotic meshing of jacking drum machine grooves and Davidson’s commanding vocals that nod to her unrelenting touring schedule (“You know how I get away with everything? I work all the fucking time”).
Amongst Davidson’s Baker’s Dozen list of albums are an abundance of key influences on her sound, from her approach to lyric-writing to those that steered her towards the hardware-based production heard across her work. “Some of them will always be there, but some will be subject to changes,” she admits. “I wanted to be honest and cover the important phases of my life from discovering certain music as a teenager to starting to make music, and up to now.”
Marie Davidson’s latest album Working Class Woman is out now on Ninja Tune and can be purchased here. Click the picture below to begin reading through her 13 album selections
