Stream: Jensen McRae, ‘Happy Girl’

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Jensen McRae (Photo by Caity Krone)

When we last heard from Jensen McRae, the singer-songwriter was twisting hearts into knots with her debut EP, “Who Hurt You?” and the follow-up single, “My Ego Dies at the End.”

The EP was highlighted by the songs “White Boy,” “Starting to Get to You” and the Phoebe Bridgers homage “Immune.”

Today she announced she’s setting her sights bigger — on March 23, the Woodland Hills 24-year-old will release her debut album, “Are You Happy Now?,” via Human Re-Sources. Among its 15 tracks, the album features four from her EP.

“Happy Girl,” released today, is her second single since the EP and a sublimely crafted confessional carried by assured vocals. In this case, she is assuring that the smile on her face might not actually be genuine.

“‘Happy Girl’ began, quite fittingly, as a mistake — I was trying to play one chord progression but wound up playing the opening notes of what it eventually became. I was in [producer] Rahki’s studio, halfway through my last year of college, reflecting on all the girls I’d been to get me to that point,” McRae says. “I thought about how I’d done everything I was supposed to do, had sanded off the edges of myself that had always pushed people away from me, and I still wasn’t happy. And I thought about how articulating the pain and loneliness of being chronically apart from others is often more trouble than it’s worth.

“So I wrote this song about the language gap between feeling pain and explaining it, and, as on ‘Dead Girl Walking,’ how it is both easier and harder to manufacture a happy exterior than to invite people into your darkness.”

||| Stream: “Happy Girl”

||| Also: Stream “My Ego Dies at the End”

||| Previously: “Who Hurt You?” EP, “Starting to Get to You,” “Immune”