'HICKEY' IS TRICKY

Australian indie duo Royel Otis's new album is both poppy and problematic, writes Helen Brown, while Laufey delivers sublime glamour and Mac DeMarco goes back to basics

- Helen Brown

A year is a long time in pop. Twelve months ago, Royel Otis were being feted as indie-pop's most lovable boys-next-door.

★★★☆☆

A year is a long time in pop. Twelve months ago, Royel Otis were being feted as indie-pop's most lovable boys-next-door. Sweet, Aussie beach-bar tunes jangled through the Nineties grunge influences of their buoyant 2024 debut, Pratts & Pain. Their openhearted covers of two anthems by women - Sophie Ellis-Bextor's “Murder on the Dancefloor” and The Cranberries’ “Linger” - went viral. But their second album, Hickey, lands as Royel Maddell (guitar) and Otis Pavlovic (vocals) deal with controversy around its lead single, “Moody”.

It’s a slacker-strum of a track, so Nirvana-indebted you can practically hear the sleeve of Kurt Cobain’s cardigan snagging on those saggy electric guitar strings. Over the hook, Pavlovic offloads about a girlfriend who’s “a bitch when she’s moody”. So much so, he complains, that she only focuses on the calls he doesn’t pick up and misconstrues his best intentions. “Late nights she’s always accusing,” he sings, “Her questions are loaded/ She’s cryptically coded.”

They’re lines that play into old sexist stereotypes of women as irrational nags. In response to online criticism, the band issued a sort-of-apology in May stating that the song is “written from a specific perspective, it is not intended to convey a broader view or standpoint about women in general”. It’s worth noting that “Moody” was co-written by a woman, Amy Allen (best known for her work with Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo). And if Carpenter’s able to call out her “Manchild”, should we be so aggrieved by this?

On the other hand, Royel Otis also put out a video visualiser referencing an early scene from the 1997 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s