Pillowprince is an Oakland-based indie band with a name that sounds like it belongs to either a shoegaze project or a particularly edgy Etsy store, and a debut EP that does not waste time. pretty, baby! is a genre cocktail of indie rock, shoegaze, slowcore, and queercore, which is to say: it’s both emotionally devastating and, at times, kind of fun about it. Produced by Olivia Lee and mixed by Beau Sorenson (who has worked with Death Cab for Cutie and Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, aka: people who know feelings), the EP finds that sweet spot between raw vulnerability and loud, defiant joy. Let’s get into it.
Imagine if you took Kim Gordon’s effortless cool, shoved it in a blender with St. Vincent’s calculated weirdness, and then accidentally spilled a bottle of sunshine and teenage angst into the mix. This is a four-track EP that manages to be both floaty and sharp-edged, like a daydream where everything’s a little too vivid and the ground isn’t quite solid. It’s somewhere between alt-rock and indie pop, but the kind that sounds like it’s held together with great hooks and sheer determination.
You see a song called R the Straights Ok and think, “Well, this has to be good.” Correct. It kicks the door down, steals your eyeliner, and leaves glittery footprints on your expectations. Anthemic guitars, tongue-in-cheek lyrics, and a rebellious queercore spirit make this a riotous, dreamy indie-punk anthem with some 90s alt-rock angst in a haze of weightless melancholy. You can practically hear the distant pearl-clutching; it only adds to the fun.
Babybird is a slowcore ballad that feels less like a song and more like an open wound put to tape. Sparse, hypnotic, and holding itself together through haze, it builds in quiet repetition until it spills over into something cathartic, like a feeling you didn’t realize you’d been suppressing until it completely takes over. Leaning into the early St. Vincent playbook, slinky rhythms and spoken-sung verses unravel like someone thinking out loud mid-existential crisis. The chorus is so airy it might just evaporate. The vibe is a little hypnotic, a little eerie, and yet is still kind of interesting. If you’ve ever stared at your ceiling at 3 AM, feeling just a bit too aware of your own existence: congrats, this song is for you.
Care About channels the grief of the Club Q shootings into something both weightless and suffocating, like a ghost on your chest. Dream-pop guitars shimmer while the vocals plead for empathy because, apparently, that’s controversial now. It’s haunting, beautiful, and lingers like static on an old TV.
Then, just as you sink into the haze, the song jolts. Twitchy, restless, and wired on too much caffeine, it captures infatuation at its most unhinged: 90% stress, 10% heart eyes, 100% terrible decisions. The melody bounces like it physically can’t sit still and by the end, neither can you.
Pillowprince could’ve just made a solid indie rock EP, and that would’ve been cool, but instead, they made this: something raw, defiant, and genuinely important. pretty, baby! is about identity, grief, joy, community, and most importantly: it sounds good as hell.
pretty, baby! is for the people who live for messy guitar tones, for hooks that hit you in the gut, and for the feeling that maybe, just maybe, everything will be okay if you play it loud enough. This is absolutely worth your time.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
