We’ve been following Mima Good, the alter-ego of NYC-based anti-pop songwriter Raechel Rosen, from the start, covering her debut Good Girl EP and last year’s one-off track “Holly Golightly.” She returns to the ever-evolving project with single “Sad Club Night,” off her imminent full-length debut Hydra.
Rosen describes her Mima Good character as a “dramatized version” of herself: braver, more performative, more extroverted and aggressive. “I think she’s the woman I dreamt of becoming when I was a child,” Rosen admits. This dramatization allows for a narrative arc to Rosen’s songwriting; when we met Mima Good on the Good Girl EP, she was emerging from the ashes of an abusive relationship. Rosen says that letting go of that baggage “clear[ed] space for me to face more universal demons” – no longer is she getting over one boy, one toxic relationship. Now she’s taking on the entire system that subjugates women as less than, but with a higher BPM and a greater sense of apocalyptic doom: “more Trinity from The Matrix than Powerpuff Girl,” she describes.
She wrote “Sad Club Night” last year after a night out that felt particularly apocalyptic. “I felt like we were all dancing waiting for the world to end,” she remembers. Layered under wobble bass, Rosen’s vocals sound almost playful as she recounts a late night dancing with friends, “beautiful people covered in black garments and red eyeliner that made them look kind of ill.” The visceral imagery led her to consider the aestheticization of depression, how we’re living in a society so devastating that we perform our despair almost as a trend. This becomes all the more relevant as we collectively face the present circumstances, how we no longer even have the release of a night out with loved ones.
The new album itself is named for an ancient monster, a “10-song quest inspired by the story of Hercules versus Hydra.” In the myth, Hercules tries to defeat Hydra by chopping off its head, only to have two more grow in its place. Things grow more dire each day now it seems, as overwhelming as Hydra’s many heads, but Rosen emphasizes the importance of taking it one day at a time. Though she’s pausing preparations for the tour she had planned for the fall in light of current uncertainty, she’s still writing music and practicing her craft. “My mental health struggles are not really unique to me, [but] in my album at least, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I wrote victory into the game.”
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