Squeeze Me – a slogan from the colorful world of toy departments: It comes as a sweet temptation in the warm store light, yet behind the charming invitation of lifeless plush and plastic faces, something else could be hidden. On Squeeze Me, the third album of Sophia Kennedy, born in Baltimore and living in Hamburg and Berlin, the seemingly harmless is turned on its head: Do you embrace me or crush me? This is the central question that Kennedy pursues with lofty determination over ten songs. After her self-titled debut (2017, Pampa Records), which fluctuated between the glamour of the Great American Songbook, electronics, and club influences and attracted international attention, her second album Monsters (City Slang) followed in 2021, diving into surrealism and transcendence. Now Kennedy and her long-time musical collaborator and co-writer Mense Reents (Egoexpress, die Vögel, Die Goldenen Zitronen) offer a more disillusioned commentary on the status quo with Squeeze Me. The complexity of interpersonal relationships, questions of power positions and self-determination, already central themes for Kennedy, weave a compact narrative throughout the album. More minimal than her previous works, Kennedy indulges on Squeeze Me in her talent for catchy melodies with pop appeal and psychedelic excesses: repetitive piano chords, shimmering synthesizer basses, strangely gleaming choirs, and a scream form the soundscape for Rodeo. Alongside Imaginary Friend, one of the pop highlights of the album, the urgent question arises: “Where are we heading to?”. Yet rather than providing answers, Kennedy joyfully and multivocally moves forward. The songwriting on Squeeze Me is characterized by its simplicity and a new tendency toward reduction. Accompanied by organ and drum machine beat, Kennedy breaks free on Imaginary Friend with irresistible catchiness and all casualness from a stale, supposed dream state – while on Runner, which lures us to a dark dancefloor, she briefly transforms into a fly. In the melancholic and dizzying Closing Time, the carousel goes off its hinges and finally crashes onto the hard ground of reality. Overall, Kennedy seems to want to display contradictions rather than resolve them on Squeeze Me: Down is up, the end is the beginning, the small is the big, the good is the evil, and vice versa. This is also true for Feed Me – the pulsing heart of the album. Here, a sour sarcasm shines through the exaggeratedly twisted perspective, gently leading us astray. “As if you were inflating a balloon only to pop it with a hot needle,” Kennedy explains. That is exactly what can be heard: A balloon buzzing through the room and then deflating. This cinematic quality runs through the entire album – no wonder, as Kennedy once studied film. In the end, she picks up speed again on the prickly Hot Match, barreling through rising clouds of smoke with a motorik beat and hot tires. Hardness and beauty, wit and melancholy, fatalism and strength: Squeeze Me turns on its head what we thought we knew about Sophia Kennedy, in line with the motto of the cover, where she or the rest of the world is upside down, depending on perspective. More focused and "poppier" than ever, Squeeze Me is Sophia Kennedy's most consistent album, perhaps even an artistic manifesto. It is a multifaceted, self-confident statement, despite or because of all the crises inside and out. Squeeze Me does not ignore the world outside, but sets its own against it. A world we somehow know, but perhaps have never seen quite like this.
Doors: 7:00 PM
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
