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Jul 30, 2024 By Caleb Campbell

Leeds-based art pop singer/songwriter Francesca Pidgeon debuted under the moniker Dilettante with her 2019 record Hatesongs, followed by her 2022 album Tantrum. Those records found her carving out a loop-heavy style with an expressive symphonic element, drawing from experimentalist art pop acts like Dirty Projectors or Tune-Yards.

Next year, she’s set to return with her latest album, Life of the Party, Pidgeon’s first self-produced release. The record also finds her exploring themes of personal autonomy and alienation, touching on aging, the pressure to start a family, and monogamy. Pidgeon explains, “I went to see Poor Things and I really felt like Emma Stone’s character made sense to me. She’s really literal and sort of just looks at the way polite society always does things and says, ‘why are we doing that? That doesn’t make sense, let’s do it this way’.”

Pidgeon has already shared the record’s lead single, “Stone” and her latest track, “Fun.” Today, she’s back with another new track, “Easy Does It,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Easy Does It” captures Pidgeon’s ear for idiosyncratic melodies, placing her elastic vocal lines above a rubbery bass hook, and buzzing synths. Her stacked glassy vocal harmonies occasionally recall Kate Bush, but the track equally feels influenced by the offbeat art pop of the late aughts, incorporating brass-tinged instrumental breaks and wild textures as it winds onward. The results are frayed and manic, but they also are equally captivating, bringing out the weird and wiry side of Pidgeon’s music.

Pidgeonexplains of the track’s lyrics, “I was cycling to the studio space where I wrote this record (in the rain because Manchester) thinking all this when this double decker bus drove past me and completely soaked me. So I got into the space, totally wet through and I was thinking of all the times I hadn’t been drenched by an errant bus driver and I just thought ‘God, I didn’t know how good I had it back then when I was dry’. So that became the sort of core of the song, it’s all about not appreciating what you’ve got.

A lot of it came from thinking about the way I saw someone I know being treated by their partner - it just seemed very condescending and like they were being taken for granted - and I was thinking “What are you doing? They’re great just as they are, stop nagging at them to change, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!” but then kind of reflecting that back on myself because I know I’ve treated people that way in the past.”

Check out the song and video below. Life of the Party is out on January 24th via Launchpad+/EMI North.