Video: Miya Folick, ‘Pet Body’

Kevin Bronson on August 16th, 2016

0

“I’m just an ordinary subject / in an ordinary book,” Miya Folick deadpans in her new single “Pet Body,” a bristling guitar rocker that crystallizes the identity she forged on last year’s “Strange Darling” EP. Folick’s songs have ranged stylistically from folk to psych-rock to this, but it’s the issues to which she speaks that resonate — here, how women are often made to feel invisible, or at least expected to play the role of “girlfriend of the year.” If “Strange Darling” cast Folick as a zen Liz Phair, “Pet Body” (unveiled today via an animated video by Brian Smee) is a three-minute slap in the face.

It’s been a long time since that EP was released, so Folick re-introduced herself today this way: “I’m from Santa Ana, California and grew up going to a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist church in Orange County. I played basketball for nine years and hated it the entire time. I went to NYU, but stopped going to class and would spend all day walking around the city by myself. So I left and moved home and spent the rest of that semester learning how to play guitar from a person I went to high school with. I play music because forming thoughts into sounds blends emotional and rational thought in a way that turns me on. I met my band on Tinder.”

“I just a brain with a pet body / I’m just a feeling in the room,” she sings in the chorus. Not with that guitar in her hands, she’s not. If ever.

||| Watch: The video for “Pet Body”