Macy Rodman’s New Single Is A Nostalgic Nod To the Hijinks of Young Punks in Love

Rodman’s music is a product of her trajectory that follows her organic path through life. Guided by her intuition and artistic pursuits she’s made her mark. Shortly after arriving in New York City in 2008, she wasted no time dropping out of fashion school (the raison d’etre for her move), finding its creative restrictions and market focus didn’t align with her vision.

 

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Not stymied by obstacles, she self-taught herself how to master digital audio workspaces and synthesizers in friends’ Brooklyn lofts and warehouse spaces, where she was welcomed by a new community of noise makers that continues to inform her work. “I like something that’s easy to love,” she says. “Maybe there’s an entry point that is easy to latch on to, and then, once you’re there, you see what else is really happening beneath the surface.” 

After an isolated childhood in Juneau, Alaska, which can only be left by plane or boat, she was unable to find her queer tribe. To fill that void a young Rodman illustrated visions of alternative futures and alternative selves from fashion magazines, Top Cow comics, Amazon warriors, art cinema, and video games. Tomb Raider and Lara Croft, specifically, loom large in her oeuvre of the period, the virtual violence providing a cathartic expression of radical feminism.

Driven by the repressed trans rage of her youth, she searched for a space to belong, which is the closes thing to a guiding philosophy you’ll find informing her new album, Unbelievable Animals. Animals, released on Friday on Accidental Popstar Records, the imprint founded by Shamir, Macy creates worlds that are not surreal, but hyperreal, where everything is false so everything is true, where the relativity of truth becomes defined by the ecstatic moment of performance and experience. “The title Unbelievable Animals prevailed because while writing the record, I saw my life in past loves laid out in front of like a Discovery Channel special and it made me feel like I wasn’t alone in my feelings. We are all just Unbelievable Animals,” Macy says. 

 

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The massive, sugary, propulsive sound of the record–confession and heartbreak set to club-ready beats with ‘90s radio rock inflections–is decidedly not the sound of quarantine or isolation. It is the opposite, the sound of reemergence, of rebirth, the return to the dance floor. Liz Phair, Faith Hill, Cher, Madonna, and more heroes of that era spiritually inhabit its tracks, where slick pop production and the sneering punk attitudes of Marianne Faithful and PJ Harvey mingle at the ‘90s New York nightclub.

It’s in that milieu, that you’ll discover the joy of Rodman’s work, the constant dialectic of self discovery emerging in a disconnected world, where anyone can see their reflection —all you have to do is turn away from the world’s endless hall-of-mirrors long enough to take a look.