Pupsies – Misery

Covering the hits can sometimes take us to quite different places…

[Video]
[3.62]Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It is a law of generic development that every underground music scene eventually gets its landfill variant. Digicore on the Hot 100 is pretty funny, conceptually, even if you’ve been expecting its arrival, but “Misery” is a slog, all of the same components of perfectly good annoying internet music used to make perfectly bad annoying internet music. Give me 100 crunk pastiche Jane Remover mixtapes before another hit like this.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: Oh to get Glass Beach and Exciting!!Excellent!! on the Hot 100. Oh to have Black Dresses not broken up in the way every trans project with a modicum of success implodes. Is it too Grimes of me to say this is appropriating trans culture, even if the best chiptune band Crying didn’t include any trans people? This is the kind of thing I wish I could defend because it’s “real”, but I am not a teenager, and while I hope it helps them it does nothing for me. (Though I am worried about teens who connect too deeply to this song.) The cynical part of me hopes Pupsies can apologize for bleeding on Billboard’s collective shirt; the empathetic part of me hopes she’s alright.
[3]

Oliver Maier: No, it’s the children who are wrong.
[2]

Alfred Soto: What the bloody hell is this?
[0]

Nortey Dowuona: The misery of inconsistent affection is a dagger to the throat. that’s it, that’s the verse.
[10]

Claire Davidson: It’s hard to hear a pop song built on 8-bit synths and not think of early-career Kesha, but when it comes to “Misery,” the comparison feels apt, in part because Pupsies herself seems to embrace the same slipshod vocal delivery as her predecessor, a rawness intended here to convey a lack of control. In the case of “Misery,” though, the song’s chirpy instrumental and fatalistic lyrics feel so tonally mismatched as to almost seem ironic: Pupsies has a similar lilting cadence to Kesha, yes, but none of her assertive bravado, making her sing-song recitation of self-loathing feel like a mockery of her circumstances. This approach is all the more jarring for how blunt “Misery” is in its bleakness, to an extent that verges on becoming an invasion of privacy. The song is about mixed signals in a relationship, but it’s immediately made clear that the track’s narrator is struggling with profound mental illness: self-harm is referenced obliquely in the first verse and named openly in the third, all delivered with a flustered desperation that suggests that these coping mechanisms are not mere abstractions for Pupsies. Yet the song doesn’t feel cathartic so much as dizzying, the synths handily overpowering Pupsies in the mix, creating a disparity whose sense of confinement is further exacerbated by her breathless delivery of the lyrics. From what little information is available about this artist, it appears that Pupsies is only 19, so I don’t want to be cruel, but at a certain point, it feels mean-spirited to shine a spotlight on someone who clearly is not artistically mature enough to see their music dissected by such a wide listening public. Frankly, it sounds like the experience for her would be, well… miserable.
[3]

Iain Mew: Even if they weren’t sharing space on the Hot 100 and UK chart at the moment, I would be inclined to think of this song together with Alyssa Grace’s “Bloodstream”, not so much because of their similar narrative and emotional thrusts but on my immediate reaction across both of “I didn’t realise that was a sound that could appear on a hit record”. In “Bloodstream” that reaction was entirely concentrated on the vocals, in what is otherwise a an acoustic ballad played and mixed quite typically. Pupsies’s sounds have less of a chart pedigree, but also aren’t completely new. The combination of chiptune and rock guitars is something Anamanaguchi made a career of, and the whine of her vocals is pretty restrained by emo standards. Instead, what gives “Misery” its bizarre aura is partly its impatient, shapeshifting structure but mostly the mixing: the blown-out drum sounds, the guitars that merge into a buzz, the vocals flitting in and out of focus. It’s all so obviously off that it has to be a deliberate disruption, in the same way as Alyssa Grace’s choice to have her voice break so frequently. I guess it says something about the sounds I’m comfortable with that I find this song not just equally fascinating but actually enjoyable to listen to. Some of the chiptune bits are dazzlingly pretty, the rush of different loud things colliding is a pleasure, and it’s easier to ignore the lyrics when they keep vanishing.
[7]

Will Adams: Nothing about this makes me feel good.
[1]