It's fair to say that everyone’s been prepped for Scene Queen’s vehement X-rated debut album. At the time of writing, the Bimbocore-pioneering artist has racked up 24 million streams alone of Pink Rover, an anti-harassment manifesto that includes the lyrics ‘And if that bastard whistles / Put a knife up to his boner’, while the video for MILF (‘Man, I Love Fucking’) sees Scene Queen aka Hannah Collins twerking and singing into a 12-inch dildo. Safe for work, Scene Queen is not, and the anticipated debut album, Hot Singles In Your Area, is no exception. Faced with 15 raw and rampant tracks straddling topics from S&M to pegging, it feels like we’ve been merely microdosing on Scene Queen until now.
The first thing you’ll notice are the songtitles, reading like a roll call of porn’s most wanted (MILF, Amateur, POV), inspired, Hannah explains, by the pre-pop-up-blocker era of internet porn ads and celebrity sex tapes. In the spirit of ‘something for everyone’, the album’s musical pastures are equally varied and provocative, underpinned by raging metal but alluding to rap, hip hop, country, pop and dance, showcasing Scene Queen’s willingness to embrace an array of sounds.
But one sound dominates them all: the uncensored narrative of the Queen herself. Packed with scathing humour, vitriol, cynicism and filth, here Hannah’s staggering abilities as a lyricist shine through. At her most profound she broaches the topic of grooming and underage sex on the discordant rap drop 18+, where she injects the bubblegum chorus with the lyrics ‘You get a lot of girls / But not one is 18+’. Elsewhere, Whips And Chains uses sadomasochism as a vehicle to comment on drink-spiking, soundtracked by 00s bling-culture hip hop, while the Wargasm collab Girls Gone Wild – an electro blitzkrieg on patriarchal bro worship – brilliantly uses all-girl playground chanting to inform us that ‘If I had a dick / I would be dangerous’. Even the album’s comedown moment, a gorgeous ethereal ballad that outros Hot Singles..., is labelled with the title Climax. It appears Scene Queen’s ability to leverage pornography metaphorically is endless.
Though Hammer readers will embrace the riffs and beatdowns throughout (the moshpit-assisted hoedown on MILF is savage), the album hijacks many genres outside its alternative core. From the Kanye West-inspired rap cadence of POV, featuring The Ready Set, to the Lady Gaga-esque vocoder on Stuck, featuring 6arelyhuman, and a nod to Ginuwine’s strip-club anthem Pony on slinky dancefloor- filler and album highlight Amateur, Scene Queen melds pop culture references and her acerbic dialogue with absolute ingenuity.
Her shout-out to the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t come harder (pun intended) than on the graphic, sapphic ode to cunnilingus, Finger, with Hannah spitting lyrics like a hyper-randy Dr. Seuss. It’s a show of an artist in complete control of her narrative, and while Hot Singles In Your Area might not be short on shock tactics, it’s the best vulgar display of power you’ll hear all year.
Hot Singles In Your Area is out this Friday, June 28
