Please Don't Hate Me with Saoirse Dream, Shygirl, GFOTY & Food House: Rapid Fire Reviews

For the first rapid fire review segment of 2025 I wanted to take a look at some hyperpop records that have been garnering a lot of attention, or that we've been covering over on Ringtone Magazine.

saoirse dream - saoirse dream

Let's start with the easy one. I like this Saoirse Dream record quite a bit and you should listen to it. She combines the digital sounds of contemporary hyperpop with flavors of 90s rock like grunge and shoegaze into a genre she calls Wizard Sleaze. I know all of that because I interviewed Catherine, the girl behind Saoirse Dream about the album for Ringtone Magazine and caught a ripping live show from her the week the album dropped. For that reason I'm not going into detail to try and pick the record apart track by track, instead I'll just give it a certified Lavender seal of approval and encourage you to try the record out yourself. 7.5/10

Club Shy Room 2 EP - Shygirl

Despite never being a massive fan of Shygirl's first few albums, I went into her Club Shy album last year with high hopes based on a really solid single in "tell me." What resulted was probably her best set of tracks to date and I even mentioned in my review at the time that I'd have no issue if she stayed in this lane and kept making club songs. That's why I fully expected to enjoy the second EP in this series after hearing the absolute earworm of a lead single "F*me." But ultimately, while Club Shy Room 2 isn't bad, it doesn't quite hit the same way as its predecessor. 

One issue is the features, which pretty consistently let down compared to Shygirl herself despite pulling some big names. "Flex" is probably the most forgettable song on the record save for one moment where Shygirl rushes in with the start of a strong verse, though it doesn't really go anywhere. The song also comes squeezed in between opener "Je M'applle" and the Saweetie featuring "Immaculate." Both of those tracks have pretty compelling verses and Saweetie mostly holds her own even as she starts to lose her flow completely right at the end. But both songs also have incredibly annoying and flat choruses that you really have to sit through to get to the good stuff. 

Thankfully I think the second half of the EP is a lot better. Maybe that's just Stockholm Syndrome from how much I've heard "True Religion" since it dropped as a single but it's definitely grown on me. There's also "Wifey Riddim" which features one of the best beats on the record and every time Shygirl pops up she's just cutthroat every moment she appears and it's great. So yeah, this EP is definitely a mixed bag and a step down from its predecessor, but even then Shygirl remains infectious with a mic in her hand. Perhaps more importantly, her batting average is still much higher making club jams than any other style she's dabbled in so far. 6/10

INFLUENZER - GFOTY

GFOTY was always an oddball, even by PC Music standards. She has a sort of similar style to her contemporaries sonically, but had a highly conceptual vision that even seeped into her real life persona. This meant that you really couldn't be sure what you were going to get going into one of her projects and for every delightful surprise, there was a confusing and jagged whiff. But in a post PC Music landscape she's been pretty quiet with her last album dropping back in 2021. The rollout for INFLUENZER began last year with a pair of singles that did a mixed job at projecting just how bizarre the record is capable of being. 

"CONGRATS" is a pummeling, club jam? It has brief moments of punk instrumentation but for the most part it's GFOTY angrily firing off about always being a girlfriend and never a wife. It's definitely jarring and bizarre at first but the song has a weird allure that won me over a bit eventually. "YOU CARE" is an ever so slightly more conventional effort. It's a hyperpop-flavored love song, or rather a song lamenting the lack of love in a way that manages to feel pretty genuine despite the synthetic veneer stretched over it. Alongside these two tracks at the start of the record, there's also "love me," a down the line pop song that's one of the catchiest things I've heard GFOTY release in a long time, and I like it a lot. 

Then shit gets fucking wild. "GRWM" is a drum and bass song where GFOTY deploys some, frankly incredibly annoying, spoken word to tell the story of a bad date she went on. It goes to some extremely bizarre places but never really stops sounding like someone trying to make an experimental version of "#SELFIE" by The Chainsmokers. Surely there are some fans that will love this for how unique it is, but I can't really stand it. That leads into "Gap Year" which flirts with being an early 2000s throwback in a way that I find extremely garish. It's so unsettled as it jumps at completely random points between sounds in a fully nonsensical way, which unsurprisingly never really adds up to anything. The backslide continues onto "spin song" where GFOTY promises she will write a song and then "bang to it like Donkey Kong," sure whatever, fuck it, not even the weirdest thing she says on the song. 

So yeah what the hell. I guess INFLUENZER is an album that makes you ask "what the hell?" I was surprised by how many moments on the record I liked a lot and also surprised by how many of its experiments were genuinely awful to listen to. Where does that leave us? Right around the same place it always feels like we do with GFOTY. 5/10

two house - food house

food house is the duo of Fraxiom and Gupi, both of whom have carved out their own lanes in the increasingly indefinable worlds of hyperpop, digicore, and the nebulous "internet music." But their most acclaimed moment came while working together with the 2020 debut food house album. The record has remained a beloved favorite for many hyperpop fans, and it has numerous enduring, adored tracks. They've also remained a beloved live act where I've seen both artists separately and the pair together as food house, all of which were delightful. Speaking of delightful, I've crossed paths personally with both Frax and Gupi multiple times and I can genuinely say they're wonderful to be around and couldn't possibly be any nicer. If you only take one thing away from this review, it should be that Frax and Gupi are both great people. 

… Okay so I thought food house was a joke. 

And I mean they kind of are a joke right? They occupy a "bad on purpose" style of music with rudimentary beats, nonsensically slathered-on vocal effects, and lyrics that feel like first draft freestyles. They're also in the business of being as cringey as possible on purpose, packing their songs with hokey white girl raps, dated references, and brain-rotted internet slang. And that's kind of the whole appeal right. It's cringe furry transsexual music made by cringe furry transsexuals for cringe furry transsexuals, which is awesome. But I thought of the music from that debut album like I would any other internet meme. It's funny at first, but jokes wear out and as the context fades, I thought the songs would too. 

That's why the endearing love for food house has blown my mind. I caught thmn live last year headlining a warehouse party and they absolutely killed it. Then when the announcement of this record hit my entire timeline blew up with people whose music taste I genuinely admire falling over themselves with excitement. It's not the kind of hype that's drummed up for a sequel to a joke record that sounds bad on purpose, people genuinely love food house. And that makes me VERY nervous for this review. 

two house comes five years after their debut album and expands the tracklist to 17 songs that span more than 50 entire minutes of food house. And if I could describe the experience of listening to it in a single word, exhausting. The exact same issues I had with their first record are here in spades, sometimes even worse. 

I tweeted last week that the flows on food house songs sound like woke Lil Darkie and WOW was that joke actually predictive. Take "now 2" for example, which has the flow of one of those awful joke freestyles filmed in a middle school math class that pop up on Instagram reels sometimes. Or "dancing on your grave" which feels like the pair challenging themselves to load a song up with so much annoying internet lingo that it's intolerable to listen to, and they hit it out of the park. 

While the rapping is bad throughout the record, the sung refrains are occasionally better. At least when they aren't undercut by the dizzying production that seems to pull instrumentation across stylistic barriers completely at random and mash it into garish Frankenstein abominations like "computerpunk." "special" dropped as a single and does have some authentically catchy refrains. But the hook is completely smothered by awful sounding vocal effects that prevent it from soaring the way it needs to. 

All of that culminates in the worst fucking song I've ever heard "jumpin the cacc." This almost feels like the food house event horizon where they know their fans are willing to tolerate annoying songs so they challenged themselves to make the most genuinely awful thing imaginable just to see if they could get away with it. It's so bad it's almost an artistic statement, if 100 years from now this song is the Fountain of bad media I somehow wouldn't even be surprised. 

And make no mistake, I could go on. While I've highlighted the very worst excesses of the album I should make it clear that those issues pop up on EVERY song, even the ones I like. Speaking of which, I want to be fair and point out the record's highlights. "credit card knife" dropped as a single and it's incredibly hooky. Neither the exhausting repetition nor the bad vocal effects really ruined the experience of listening to it for me. 

The record is at its best when it's at its most confessional and to credit the pair they hold nothing back emotionally. "nono" is a "hurt people hurt people" style of song that concludes with a more forgiving note than feels warranted, which I like a lot. And even though the lyricism is shockingly blunt and literal, I think "everybody's eyes" achieves a compelling level of vulnerability in its pseudo tribute to someone who helps you hold onto your sanity. 

The album also had a pretty great finale with "dumb ways to die." It actually manages to build in a really compelling way around dramatic confessions of interacting with weird fans, beefing with other artists, and yearning for a time when everything was simpler. Its noisy finale is an astoundingly well-earned moment that usually prevented my most negative urges when reflecting on the album immediately after listening to it. 

And even though none of those songs will sniff my best tracks of the year list in 9 months, I love them deeply. That's because they serve as shining beacons in the painful darkness of crawling through this 54-minute album. Here's what I think. Somehow, I fell for the joke. By calling music that's bad on purpose bad, I'm putting on my metaphorical dunce cap. After all, food house fans will be the first to tell you they love it BECAUSE it's bad and in the lyrics of this very album Frax and Gupi confess to their love of bad music. So this is me, the village idiot who apparently can't turn her brain off enough to sit down and listen to the equivalent of an endurance challenge for nearly an hour. So I'm owning it. I like Frax and Gupi a lot and I'll continue to listen to and cover their music and enjoy myself at their excellent live shows. And you know what? The next time food house drops I'll be right there at the front of the line, dunce cap in hand. 3/10