Sweden’s Vera Hotsauce (aka Carlbom) may be just 18, but she’s already got an impressive degree of artistic self-confidence and sure-footedness. Her debut single, Bottoms Up, saw her willing to interrogate her own flaws and emotional darkness through a sharp, smart song in the interzone between R’n’B and pop. And if that song showed that she was unafraid to open up on her music, her next single takes it to a whole new level.
Bottoms Up was open, but in a brash, nihilist way. New single Daddy sits on the opposite end of the spectrum, sadder and more vulnerable. Here we meet a Vera Hotsauce torn-up and worn-out on a touching, heart-ripping story of a child looking back on a life without a parent. Musically, it takes the form of an innovative piano ballad, augmented and brought into Hotsauce’s stylistic world by electronics and pitch-shifts. The singer is fearless enough to plunge to the bottom of her own feelings, and on Daddy, it’s that, along with her eye for the most striking details (‘My sister, she’s looking just like me, even though I just met her like two times’) that hits the listener impossibly hard. She’s got the knack of writing a sad song beautifully, and Daddy is testament to that. Hotsauce says:
The song Daddy is extra important and beautiful to me. It’s a 100% true story and a message to the one that was my biggest hero and my biggest love when I was a kid. As I said, this mixtape is so so so beautiful and true to me, my life experiences have been a catalyst for this body of work. It’s about a person that means very much to me that left a long time ago.
This is not a celebration of him, this is not a statement that I need him in my life, this is something relatable for every fucking kid in this world that’s been abandoned by a parent. I wanna tell all these kids with broken hearts that you gotta learn to fix yourself and that I know what you’re going through. I also wanna tell my story, because there’s a lot of people that’ve only seen one side to my artistry. It’s my crappy past that has made me into who I am today.
You can check out the premiere of Daddy and its video below.
Daddy is out on November 16 as part of Vera Hotsauce’s debut mixtape/EP Let Me Show U What Love Is, also out on Tenacity Records on November 16.