There is something wonderfully ridiculous about Scene Queen. For years, Hannah Collins has taken everything alternative music is supposedly not meant to be: hyper-feminine, pink, provocative, unapologetically ‘bimbo’ and shoved it straight into a breakdown. She turned the idea of being underestimated into an aesthetic. She made femininity heavy. She made the joke the weapon. And, crucially, she made it fun.
That is why METALICIOUS is such a strange listen. It is not a disaster; it is not even particularly bad. In fact, there are moments where Scene Queen sounds bigger, heavier and more confident than ever. But for an artist who built her reputation on making the unexpected feel inevitable, this feels surprisingly safe. There is a nagging sense throughout METALICIOUS that Scene Queen is starting to play it safe within a formula that was originally exciting precisely, because it felt like there was no formula.
Opening track Pink Flip Phone is perhaps the clearest example. It is instantly recognisable: glossy, bratty and bursting with that Y2K aesthetic Scene Queen has made her own. It is the sort of song that practically demands to be blasted from a car stereo with the windows down. As an introduction, it works. But once the initial sugar rush wears off, there isn’t an enormous amount left to chew on. The lyrics are simple. Catchy, yes. Memorable, absolutely. But not particularly complex. And that distinction matters when Scene Queen’s best material has always been capable of hiding something sharper underneath the glitter. Previously, the absurdity was often a Trojan horse; you’d laugh first and realise afterwards that she had slipped a genuinely pointed observation into your head.
Here, the joke is increasingly just the joke.
The biggest head-scratcher arrives with Drop Dead Gorgeous, featuring TX2. On paper, collaborations are something Scene Queen has historically done extremely well. She has a knack for bringing emerging artists into her orbit, particularly artists who feel like they belong within the alternative community she has helped cultivate. There is often a sense of purpose behind those pairings. They feel like artists championing artists. Which makes this one particularly difficult to understand. TX2 might be an up-and-coming name, but their presence here feels less like an exciting meeting of two artists and more like an unnecessary distraction. Their reputation for controversy, rage-baiting and clip-driven social media antics makes the pairing feel especially at odds with the values and community spirit that have historically made Scene Queen’s collaborations so enjoyable. And yes, you can separate the artist from the song…but I don’t personally agree.
The song itself isn’t terrible. In fact, Drop Dead Gorgeous is classic Scene Queen. It has the hooks, the attitude and the familiar collision of sugary pop sensibilities with heavier instrumentation. There is even something reminiscent of her Barbie & Ken collaboration with Set It Off in the way the two vocal performances play off one another. But that’s exactly the issue. For a collaboration that raises so many eyebrows before you even press play, the music needed to justify the pairing. It doesn’t quite. Instead, it feels like a perfectly competent Scene Queen song that happens to have TX2 on it. There is no explosive chemistry, no unexpected left turn, no moment where you think “Oh, that’s why these two needed to make a song together!” It’s fine, and ‘fine’ is a pretty damning word when you’re talking about Scene Queen.
Thankfully, the title track provides the heavier collision the EP occasionally promises. METALICIOUS, featuring Left To Suffer, feels like the record finally taking a deep breath before throwing itself headfirst into something uglier. Left To Suffer bring a genuinely heavier edge to the track, and rather than swallowing Scene Queen’s identity whole, the pairing gives Scene Queen room to prove that the bimbocore aesthetic doesn’t have to mean staying sonically comfortable. The guitars hit harder, the atmosphere is nastier and the contrast between her deliberately exaggerated persona and Left To Suffer’s brutality is exactly the sort of ridiculous combination that should work on paper but somehow works even better in practice. This is where METALICIOUS feels most like the Scene Queen of old—excessive, silly, heavy, and working because it shouldn’t.
There are other moments across the EP where Scene Queen pushes herself further into heavier territory, and those flashes are arguably the most exciting part of the record. They suggest that there is still plenty of room for Scene Queen to evolve beyond the confines of the bimbocore blueprint. The frustrating thing is that she doesn’t seem particularly interested in destroying that blueprint yet. And perhaps that is where the disappointment comes from because the ‘bimbo’ thing was never the problem. The problem is when it becomes the whole point. There is only so long you can keep making the same joke before the audience starts waiting for the punchline to change.
When Scene Queen first emerged, the bimbo persona felt like rebellion. It was a middle finger to the idea that alternative music had to be dark, masculine, miserable or intellectually self-serious. She could put on a tiny skirt, paint everything pink, talk about sex and still absolutely wreck a breakdown. More importantly, there was often a political vein running through the ridiculousness. That gave the music teeth. The humour had consequences. The femininity had purpose. The stupidity was deliberately performed rather than genuinely dumbed-down.
On METALICIOUS, though, that distinction feels increasingly blurred. There is still intelligence here, but it feels buried beneath an aesthetic that has become so established that it no longer carries the same shock value. What once felt like a subversion of the scene now occasionally feels like a brand being maintained. And that’s a shame, because Scene Queen is capable of so much more.
As a longtime fan, it is difficult not to listen to METALICIOUS and feel a little deflated. Not because the songs are offensively bad, they aren’t, but because Scene Queen has previously made music that felt impossible to ignore. Music that could make you laugh, scream, dance and then realise five minutes later that you’d just been handed a fairly brutal social commentary. This time, I mostly found myself waiting for that moment. It never quite came.
Instead, METALICIOUS is an EP that feels caught between evolution and repetition. It is more adventurous sonically in places, yet somehow more basic creatively. It is heavier, but not necessarily more interesting. It is louder, but not always more impactful. There are still songs here worth returning to. There are still breakdowns worth throwing yourself into a wall for. Scene Queen’s vocal confidence remains undeniable, and when she pushes into heavier territory, she reminds us exactly why Scene Queen has become such a distinctive presence within modern alternative music. But distinctive is not the same thing as endlessly repeatable. METALICIOUS feels like Scene Queen looking at the machine she built and deciding not to smash it just yet. For some listeners, that will be enough. For those of us who remember when the machine was being built; when every pink-tinged breakdown felt like a middle finger; when every ridiculous lyric carried something sharper underneath; when the whole thing felt genuinely unpredictable…it is hard not to want more.
Scene Queen has never needed permission to be loud. She has never needed permission to be feminine. She has certainly never needed permission to be a bimbo. What she needs now is another reason to make us believe it matters. Because the glitter is still shining. The screams are still loud. The pink is still everywhere. But on METALICIOUS, for the first time, the cracks underneath the surface are starting to show.
For fans of: Delilah Bon, WARGASM, TX2
‘METALICIOUS’ by Scene Queen is out now on Fearless Records.
Words by Ell Bradbury