EP Review Flossing - Queen of the Mall

Much like her other outfit The Wants, there’s an icy new wave heart to much of Flossing - the solo project of New York’s Heather Elle - that feels out of step with 2021. Full of hard beats and uncompromising metallic crunches, it takes your ears a couple of plays through to relinquish to the cold, leather-clad underground lair that the singer is seemingly operating out of. But once you’re there, ‘Queen of the Mall’ offers a Jehnny Beth-like sense of harsh pleasure. Opener ‘Switch’ throbs along on an industrial bass pulse, its opening line - “I am both scared of and intrigued by the deviant nature of man” - immediately going for the jugular, whilst ‘TRAP’’s punishing drums are not for the faint hearted. Centre-point ‘Add To Cart’’s icy dancefloor strut doesn’t land quite as well as what comes either side, but overall Flossing’s debut is a bold and unapologetic one.