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A year is a long time in pop. Twelve months ago, Royel Otis were being feted as indie-pop’s most lovable boys-next-door. Sweet, Aussie beach-bar tunes jangled through the Nineties grunge influences of their buoyant 2024 debut, Pratts & Pain. Their open-hearted covers of two anthems by women – Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” and The Cranberries’ “Linger” – went viral. But their second album, Hickey, lands as Royel Maddell (guitar) and Otis Pavlovic (vocals) deal with controversy around its lead single, “Moody”.
It’s a slacker-strum of a track, so Nirvana-indebted you can practically hear the sleeve of Kurt Cobain’s cardigan snagging on those saggy electric guitar strings. Over the hook, Pavlovic offloads about a girlfriend who’s “a bitch when she’s moody”. So much so, he complains, that she only focuses on the calls he doesn’t pick up and misconstrues his best intentions. “Late nights she’s always accusing,” he sings, “Her questions are loaded/ She’s cryptically coded.”
They’re lines that play into old sexist stereotypes of women as irrational nags. In response to online criticism, the band issued a sort-of-apology in May stating that the song is “written from a specific perspective, it is not intended to convey a broader view or standpoint about women in general”. It’s worth noting that “Moody” was co-written by a woman, Amy Allen (best known for her work with Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo). And if Carpenter’s able to call out her “Manchild”, should we be so aggrieved by this?
On the other hand, Royel Otis also put out a video visualiser referencing an early scene from the 1997 adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita, which certainly didn’t help quell the “Moody” criticism. Yet the song is something of an outlier on a record that skews towards pop, with Eighties synths sloshing against fretwork that emulates The Cure’s liquid sorrow. It’s chock full of choons, mostly about the aftermath of love/hate romances, which can make this duo come across as problematic exes.
Opener “I Hate This Tune” is a breakup song that finds Maddell’s watery riff rippling beneath Pavlovic’s insistence that a former lover has “no need to stand so far away… if only we could start again”. On “Good Times”, they bounce from a beat borrowed from Hall & Oates’ 1981 hit “I Can’t Go For That”, Pavlovic’s breezy layers of vocal floating above echoey percussion as he sings of apologies and dark distrust. A battered drum kit drives “Who’s Your Boyfriend”, on which Pavlovic demands the name of the guy a woman is dating: “Say his name out loud.”
The album’s love bite of a title gets a reference on the chugging single “Car”, in which the singer ends a relationship built on “cruisin’ through the streets all night/ Still bruisin’ from your chalk skin bites.” Pretty pings of guitar are scattered like refractions from a disco ball through the boppable “Dancing with Myself”, on which the lovelorn Pavlovic accepts that, post-split, he’s going to take to the dance floor alone. There’s a Fifties shoo-wop menace to “She’s Got A Gun” as Maddell swaggers in with vintage reverb. The album ends on the quirkily titled “Jazz Burger” which finds Pavlovic still full of questions: “What do you want me to say? What do you want me to be now?”
You can really relish these songs as outpourings of vulnerability, confusion and anger. They could be perfect to help lovely folk to dance away the pain of messy breakups. But you don’t have to strain too hard to hear them on the incel’s playlist either. Hickey’s a tricky one.
