Egg Drop Soup canonizes their fiery legacy with a final, muscular album 'One Hit Woman'
Egg Drop Soup canonizes their fiery legacy with a final, muscular album 'One Hit Woman'
Egg Drop Soup have nurtured their particular brand of tough-as-nails alt-rock into a formidable force since releasing their earliest singles over 6 years ago. One Hit Woman marks the group’s latest and perhaps final effort, released at a moment when the core trifecta of Samantha Westervelt, Olivia Lee Naperstein, and Bailey Chapman explore individual creative evolutions with other projects. In true fashion, Egg Drop Soup refuses to go quietly into hiatus, instead taking this moment to double-down with a parting salvo that irrefutably canonizes the band’s fiery legacy.
One Hit Woman unfolds at a brisk pace, propelled by mechanical percussion that moves with a persistent rat-a-tat-tat alongside meaty basslines adding a muscular dimensionality to the band’s scuzzed and fuzzed sonic framework. Guitars rip and roll amidst the seething rhythms, bending and flexing each track into thrilling directions as the band tackles topics with head-on intensity. Skillful production by Travis Pavur is careful to emphasize every element of the compositions, providing a level playing field that celebrates the contributions of each member and with plenty of space for their individual attitudes and remarkable proficiency to shine as well-oiled components of a greater whole.
For an album that barley cracks the 20-minute mark there’s a veritable buffet of sounds on offer that showcase Egg Drop Soup’s stylistic range while maintaining a tight focus on their core ethos of independent, resolute feminist perspective. Alt-rock, heavy metal, and thrashy punk bump shoulders in the band’s unrelenting mosh and provide a foundation for simmering expressions of frustration and anger to boil over into scathing diatribes that rail against unearned entitlement, economic inequality, and societal malaise.
“Bath Salts” builds on a colossal, doomy churn accented with a metallic aggression that bristles like a cornered animal prepared to unleash feral fury on faceless assailants before breaking out into a closing solo that screams with an unhinged ferocity. The massive crunch and punishing rhythms of “No Friends” presents a scorched earth landscape clipped with bleak nihilism, and “Regicide” endorses toppling entrenched institutions around the anthemic rallying cry “someone let me out of my iron cage, someone let me out of the gilded age,” ushering in a new era of personal freedom and empowerment rising from the ashes.
The album’s title track stands unique among the others, notably slower of pace and possessed of a downtuned, shadowy demeanor that underscores a general feeling of unease. Despite the pervasive gloom “One Hit Woman” succinctly embodies the vigorously feminine philosophy that Egg Drop Soup aggressively champion, presented here with an icy cool exterior that burns with an unquenchable inner flame stoked with the confident manifesto “I am a wonder, I am a woman.”
Stream One Hit One Woman on Spotify and follow Egg Drop Soup on Instagram.
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