Album Review: existential thottie by duendita
On her second album for 10k, the Queens-born, Berlin-based singer-producer turns her Digitakt demos into a record that refuses to separate fucking from crying from getting involuntarily sedated.
There’s a piece of advice that keeps circulating from an artist in Queens who teaches her friends, painters and illustrators and people who have never touched a drum machine, how to use an Elektron Digitakt. You need to write a song for your health. She means it literally. Candace Lee Camacho, who records as duendita, built existential thottie the same way: alone first, late at night, running beats on the Digitakt until the songs existed as demos before anyone else heard them. Harpist Samantha Feliciano, drummers Julian Berann and Anton Remy, co-producer Noah Becker all came later. The tracks on this album started as private acts. They sound like it.
There’s an early line on “Super Sad!” that sets up the whole record: “I’m in the club, super sad, so I threw it back.” Sadness and the dance floor at once, no choosing. She knows she’s bad like a wanted ad, she wants to cross the line with somebody, her life is a mess. “Wanna fuck, but I’m so depressed,” and that comma does all the work, no transition, no “and yet,” no irony. Same body. “Toxic and Evil” gets uglier, funnier. “How many dicks can I fit in my mouth?” she asks in the first verse, and “having your baby was my only dream,” and then the chorus drops everything: “No, no, I’m not okay. Need to be with myself today.” She is talking the way people actually talk when they’re in it, filthy and wrecked and not okay, all in the same breath.
She studied classical voice through high school and attended NYU’s Clive Davis Institute on scholarship. The training lives somewhere in the control she has over her singing, but none of the composure survived into the subject matter. “Once or Twice” is devoted entirely to wanting someone’s body, “I lick it every day,” “gotta hit it once or twice,” and a few songs later she’s wondering how many more years of therapy she needs before she can have a kid. The whole thing keeps lurching between those two places, and the lurching is the honesty.
Most songs won’t go where “As I Am” goes. She was injected and asleep for three days. Her father was silent, crying, and they’d switched places: she was the one in the bed now. A nurse asked to hear one of her songs and pulled up a video of her singing with Emily at a restaurant in Colby, and Camacho couldn’t place herself. “Who is this person? Why am I watching? She looks real familiar,” she says, and then, “Maybe I know her. I mean, maybe I knew her.” She’s still broken. She wants to love fully and can’t figure out if those two facts fit together. “Who’s gonna love a fucked up crazy bitch like me?” is a question without embarrassment and without an answer.
The body on existential thottie is always specific, always named. “Nexplanon” says what birth control hormones do to her mood, swinging like a wrecking ball, and she’s terrified of making life. “Beach” says she’s underpaid and overweight; “Head 2 Toe” and “Once or Twice” put the body in pleasure; “As I Am” puts it in a hospital bed, sedated against its will. Birth control side effects and orgasms and involuntary hospitalization all get the same amount of specificity, all things that happened to her body.
Camacho thinks most of this is funny, which is how existential thottie stays livable. “I’m in the club, super sad, so I threw it back” is a joke, always was. “Roasting That Ass” ends its second verse with her yelling at herself: “How about you fucking finish your tracks, bitch?” “Beach,” which she called her favorite song on the album, says “I give up” four times and then “I get up” four times over a dance beat. Doesn’t soften anything. It sounds like someone laughing through the worst story they have so they can get the words out.
At the close, “Real Better Soon” puts it plain: “So glad I didn’t die when my mind tried to flicker off the lights.” She nearly didn’t survive, she’s grateful, she’s still pushing. She said the album might be for her more than for anyone else. After songs on bleeding before writing, on fights and breakups and the state mental health system and really hot sex and the fear of becoming a mother, that sounds right. But the thing about a song written for your health is that it doesn’t stay private. Somebody else hears it and realizes they needed to hear it too.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “As I Am,” “Super Sad!,” “Beach”