Stream: Girlhouse, ‘Paul Blart Mall Cop’

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Girlhouse

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw Lauren Luiz, the siren from the pop trio WILD, dive into her solo project Girlhouse. After two releases in 2021, “The Girlhouse EP” and “The Second EP,” Luiz is continuing to stir her pot of ephemeral dream-pop and gritty indie-rock.

Her first single of 2022, “Paul Blart Mall Cop,” decidedly falls in the latter category. Co-written with (and produced by) Alex Tomkins and WILD bandmate Tyler Thompson, it begins as a lilting confessional, wavering between self-loathing and self-pity, before — bam — a dense wall of shoegazey guitars arrives as a moment of catharsis. By the time she’s “crying my eyes out in a Chili’s parking lot,” you want the song to last a lot longer than its three minutes.

Luiz, who now is making Nashville her home base, references her cross-country moves — the Portland native moved to Los Angeles and then New York City for her acting career, then back to L.A. as WILD took off. The song also acknowledges other ongoing battles. “The story is of me facing the ultimate dilemma as a person that has dealt with depression for a majority of their life, not wanting to live but not wanting to die,” she says.

The new single seems at least a temporary way, as Girlhouse sings, to “get me out of my head.”

||| Stream: “Paul Blart Mall Cop”

||| Previously: “Boundary Issues” / “Concussion”