Erotica Veronica by Miya Folick

The album cover of Erotica Veronica captures Miya Folick canted on the edge of a mud pit high up in Angeles National Forest, limbs flung wide like a fever-dream fossilized midway between earth and primordial soup. It’s an apt portrait: Miya is driven by instinct, drawn to the murk and muck of growth rather than stalled by its complexity. This brazen spirit is what led her to self-produce her latest full-length record, Erotica Veronica (forthcoming, Nettwerk Music Group). The record is arguably her most canonical work thus far: saturated with her catchy lyrical sensibility, astute musical craftsmanship, and her signature vaulting, acrobatic voice.

Both critically acclaimed precursors to Erotica Veronica - her debut Premonitions and sophomore LP Roach - have been lauded as coming-of-age rhapsodies. It is tempting to say the same of Erotica Veronica; after all, this new album shows us a woman running headlong into sexual exploration, often teetering on the adolescent edge of hedonism and fear. Yet, unlike the feral freedom of youth, this roving spirit is anchored by the particular wisdom and depth gained only through lived experience. Perhaps it was the witchy riddle of Premonitions joined with Roach’s excoriating honesty which prepared her for this deep dive into the sensual world.


After a meteoric couple of years touring with Mitski, Faye Webster and Japanese House, as well as scoring feature film Cora Bora, this record is a return to Miya’s private world. She lays it on us in turns like honey and heartache, each medicinal in its own right. Miya’s vim and vigor bubble beneath the contours of her curiosity in a way that makes Miya both audacious and hauntingly profound. Erotica Veronica is her psychosexual, psychosensual masterstroke: a kaleidoscopic portrait of self-realization and integration.

The record was written in a lightning month and a half, on the heels of a brutal, burn-out stretch of touring. Determined to make a straight-shooting indie rock record, Miya turned to guitar to write a majority of the album. She brought on Sam KS (Youth Lagoon, Angel Olsen) as co-producer and drummer, and recruited frequent collaborators like Meg Duffy (Hand Habits, Perfume Genius), Waylon Rector (Dominic Fike, Charli XCX), and Greg Uhlmann (Perfume Genius, SML) on guitar, and Pat Kelly (Perfume Genius, Levi Turner) on bass. Leaning into these musicians’ personal style and skill, she went into the studio with the intention of capturing raw, live sound - opting for full takes rather than splicing and editing recordings together. The clarity of the sonic landscape is a fitting foil for the record’s thematic cats-cradle. Lyrically, we find conflicting moods and feelings crossing paths, as if Miya were tracing her way back to vitality through a hedge maze of herself.

The title track, Erotica, finds Miya breathy and romantic. “I just wanna flirt with a girl in broad daylight on the street / I can see her chapped lips, burnt by the sun as she’s leaning into me.” The song unfurls like a fern under dappled spring light, a twinkling piano melody lulling us into fantasy. But under the euphoric, springtime air, we catch a whiff of the dilemma that haunts the record. There is a partner on the receiving end of these confessions. The song and the album seem to wonder: what is the right thing to do when your desires are more complex than the narrow channel our culture allows? “The album is about being queer within a heteronormative relationship structure and within a heteronormative society,” Miya explains, “but it’s also just about desire and eroticism in general. I don’t think we give each other enough room to explore freely and figure out our own right paths.”

Fist is the album’s most outwardly tempestuous track. Starting with a sincere, almost apologetic recounting of her lover’s civility, Miya spirals progressively into anger, offering a hint that she - or the accumulation of pains big and small that have taken shape inside of her - may be the true antagonist in this narrative. The line “This rage, this rage, is my inheritance,” comes like a warning, before Miya releases a 10-second long scream of seismic reverberation.

The record’s most unnerving imagery comes on This Time Around, where Miya time-travels back to a waifish vision of herself in a long-gone relationship. Dulcet vocals draw harsh contrast to the shattering lyrical portrait of resignation and frailty. The song feels almost like a lullaby to a past self. As she sings, “You wrote me a letter I read on my phone / to tell me why to make you come I had to get choked,” we can hear present-day Miya turning her suffering around as if it were a puzzle piece, seeing how it might fit into the jigsaw of the present.

Musically, Felicity is the breakaway track. It is the only song which was not originally written on acoustic guitar. Instead, Miya wrote it in collaboration with Jared Solomon (Remi Wolf, Dora Jar, Lola Young), and layered synths and woodwinds atop of traditional instrumentation. Jill Ryan’s flute shimmers gayly under the lilt of Miya’s vocals, lending a sense of celebration. The song points to the lesser known definition of the word felicity: “finding appropriate expression for one’s thoughts,” which, Miya says, is “a cornerstone of the album: putting language to how I feel, which I didn’t do for so long because I didn’t know it was a feeling I was allowed to have.” Apt articulation, Felicity suggests, promises to bring us into closer connection with those we love, and with ourselves.