RODDY, an Orlando-born indie-pop artist based between Nashville and New York, tackles the exhausting business of keeping everybody happy on “MenacE.” Her musical theatre training provides a background for a song with a dramatic trajectory: irritation accumulates, the stakes rise, and the final stretch gives that pressure somewhere to go. The subject suits that expanding scale. Years of swallowing an opinion can make one honest conversation quite an event.
Defiance, Boundaries, Liberation
-PurpleMistress
What interests me here is the humour inside the anger. RODDY takes the troublesome-person label and considers its advantages. Once protecting your time earns somebody’s disapproval, being agreeable starts looking like a lousy bargain. The indie-pop framework gives that argument room to grow, matching the shift towards self-preservation. There’s an appealingly petty pleasure in the premise, too—the reliable peacemaker finally leaves someone else to manage the fallout. “MenacE” makes that change of attitude the centre of its appeal, with conviction throughout.
