The second single laying forward the upcoming fourth album by based post punks, Desperate Journalist, is Personality Girlfriend, another vigorous cut with a captivating concept which gets across a more upbeat and broadly more accessible side of the band's piercing post punk.
"Personality Girlfriend is about my frustration with the world putting women into boxes/on pedestals (delete as applicable, but they are the same thing)," vocalist Jo Bevan describes. "The stupid idea that we are either gorgeous airheads with no inner life, or Plain Janes 'with a great personality', is exhaustingly pervasive in the way people talk about relationships, and both 'categories' are negging, nasty excuses for not granting respect to the person in question.
"The song is also a riposte to the tired old cultural trope that in order to be worthwhile or interesting a woman has to be incredibly strong and some kind of paragon of virtue and/or intrigue, when men are rarely held to the same standard and in fact a complex, troubled male protagonist is standard fare (in life as well as art). I had essentially had enough and wanted to just lay my flaws on the table and go 'look, I am sometimes a mess and I can be difficult and confusing and I do desperately want to be loved, I'm a real person with needs and desires and interests and I fucking dare you to discount me'. It starts off sarcastic and then ends with a confession of insecurity, because I've never found it easy to navigate any argument without crying."
The new song arrives with a video directed by Nick JS Thompson. Maximum Sorrow!, Desperate Journalist's new album, was recorded entirely in Crouch End during lockdown, and it releases on July 2nd, 2021 through Fierce Panda Records.
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