Matt Wallock on March 25th, 2022

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Earlier this week, Erin Anne Fitzpatrick – better known as Erin Anne – announced her sophomore album “Do Your Worst” with a catchy, pop-punk tune inspired by the TV show “Killing Eve.” The song, “Eve Polastri’s Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate,” is about the tension between what one’s supposed to want versus what one actually wants. “Who do you want, who do you want, who do you want?” the New Jersey-born musician sings in the chorus over high-voltage guitar and synth hooks. “It seems it should be easy.”

“Something I love about ‘Killing Eve’ is its embrace of the messy feedback loop between desire, identification and utter loathing,” Erin Anne says. “That’s an effective triad that is so queer, at least in my experience. In the song and video, I wanted to dramatize the dizzying mental gymnastics of vacillating between what we think we’re supposed to do and what we actually want to do — and then to celebrate the euphoric rush of refusing the conventional path for the one that really lights us up inside, even if it means blowing it all up and starting over again.”

The video, directed by Ambar Navarro, shows Fitzpatrick participating in a very-L.A. queer speed-dating event. She chats with Cellphone Date (Lindsey Schiffman), Big Money Date (Will Webber), Sandwich Date (Jessy Reed) and Couple Looking for a Third (Sean Rivas and Ryan Salazar), but can’t take her eyes off Dream Date (Claire Gordon).

Erin Anne’s latest single follows her synth-pop take on Paramore’s “Crushcrushcrush,” released in September. Her forthcoming album — mixed by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties) and mastered by Sarah Register — comes after her 2019 debut “Tough Love.” The singer, songwriter and producer moved to L.A. from Maine to pursue a musicology PhD at UCLA. On “Do Your Worst,” she channels some of her cyborgian influences with layered synths and vocal effects.

“I’m very much a maximalist when it comes to production,” Fitzpatrick says on Bandcamp. Her sophomore record, she explains, “is, in a lot of ways, a collection of some of the first moments that I was technologically able to achieve accurate renderings of how I hear my own emotional world.”

“Do Your Worst” is out June 10 via Carpark Records.

||| Watch: The video for “Eve Polastri’s Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate”