Abjectly punk with a touch of innocence and vulnerability from going down the hard road: Spike Fuck is a beautifully honest revival of 90’s anti-fashion in all its forms.
Her music poetically unravels note by note, lyric to feeling like a nostalgic punk lullaby. Just like the rockstars she grew up with in the grunge era, Spike Fuck explores the low brow culture of 70s post-punk and the 80s new wave, developing a style that she calls “Smackwave,” which is also the title of her 3-track EP.
Spike Fuck’s style is somewhat influenced by her past addiction to heroin, and her being glazed in androgyny as a transgender female. These characteristics culture her music, although they don’t completely define it. She explores universal themes such as love, obsession, and addiction that could be attributed to even the most common persona. You could listen to her music and sense a coming-of-age and self-deprecation that could only be attributed to someone who has lived multiple lives and states of mind. And you get the sense that it’s just this – a multi-dimensional transition to finding herself.
She also seems to have broken through the music industry bubble with an unexpected fan base. As a Triple J Unearthed artist based in Melbourne, she has recently attracted the acclaim of fashion icon Rick Owens, who has an affinity for the mysterious obscurities of everyday life. He compliments her highly on her narrative as an artist:
“Youth and beauty in peril is an eternally classic and alluring motif.. and when this story is told well it’s irresistible.”
No doubt that Spike Fuck caught his eye with the art she found in feeling displaced:
”I guess I kinda fit into a lot of places, but at the same time don’t fit into any.”
Through her track “Tomorrow We Get Healthy,” she exemplifies her affinity with what she describes as a “Las Vegas Ballroom karaoke vocal style”. The lo-fi kick drum and over-layered, simplistic and delicate synthesizer, accentuate the melancholic subject matter of her lyrics. She fluctuates between a third person encounter of her narrative and an ownership of her story. As a lyricist, the song demonstrates how these two binaries are in actual fact the voices in her head, trying to talk herself into recovery, hence the collective ‘we’ in the song’s title and not ‘I’.
The video of “Tomorrow We Get Healthy” is hard to watch towards the end as she battles with her own image in the mirror, abjectly pulling the skin off her face and dropping blood and skin into the sink. It is reminiscent of memorable grunge icons such as The Pixies who notoriously appropriated Salvador Dali’s surrealist film “Un Chien Andalou” with the figurative imagery of “Slicing Up Eyeballs” in their album Dolittle.
Having listened to her older brother’s rock albums in the 90’s, she narrows down her prerequisites for favored musicians as being “a) country singer, b) failed band and subsequent solo career and c) a dysfunctional personality/mental illness and/or drug problem,” resembling a remarkable light-heartedness.
Whatever inspires her creative output, despite now being clean and sober, she brandishes Smackwave with a tragically beautiful homage to her own out-of-body-experiences, while grappling with addiction. Her honesty is refreshing as candid openness is important to her as an artist:
“As hard as it may be sometimes, it’s ultimately rewarding because i think it helps me in a cathartic way to sing and dance about all the bullshit you go through when you’re a junkie and a closeted trans girl.”
Her current sonic process, she states, is more about her sense of “recovery” though, so expect to see a whole new state of mind from Spike Fuck in the future.
You can see designer Rick Owens in Fashion Industry Broadcast’s MASTERS OF FASHION Vol 39 “Renegades” By Charlie O’Brien. Available globally on Amazon.
And you can also see the FIB 5 Minute Web-Doco on Rick Owens on YouTube.
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