Drag queen and indie-folk musician Trixie Mattel isn’t afraid to really feel her oats. Over the course of 1 telephone name, her self-assuredness manifests in bursts, nearly like she will be able to’t assist herself. On her upcoming album, Barbara: “I had a very clear imaginative and prescient for this.” Additionally on the album: “I knew it was going to work.” And once more: “I’m obsessive about this document. Is that okay?”
However don’t mistake hard-earned certitude for hubris. After first showing on season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race and profitable the present’s third All-Stars season, Mattel has saved herself booked and busy, bringing her troubadour-meets-maximalist-Barbie persona—all that pink, that make-up, that snigger—into households in every single place. Final 12 months alone, she starred in a fourth season of net sequence UNHhhh, launched magnificence line Trixie Cosmetics, premiered function documentary Shifting Components at the Tribeca Movie Competition, and took her “Skinny Legend” tour abroad. And someplace between all that, she turned 30, which could simply be floor zero for the radical confidence she’s bringing into a really busy 2020.
Which brings us again to Barbara, which is out Friday and is Mattel’s third studio LP. It’s the album that might solely exist on the different facet of her 20s, after three years of residing in perpetual Los Angeles sunshine and a few critical reflection on a decade of being Trixie Mattel. “The look of Trixie on Barbara is extra like my unique imaginative and prescient of Trixie, which is this tremendous tan, ’60s seashore bunny with a darkish humorousness,” she says. “So with this album, it was going again to my unique sketches of Trixie and having somewhat extra POV and expertise to redo it.”
That meant adopting a extra retro, plugged-in sound, one first hinted at in final 12 months’s summery single “Yellow Cloud.” If her earlier albums, Two Birds and One Stone, are contemplative walks via the nation outback, then Barbara—after Barbie’s full identify, clearly—is a joyride down the Pacific Coast Freeway, proper right down to the too-obviously-named lead single, “Malibu.” Alongside together with her L.A. transfer, Mattel credit a number of summers of performing in beachy homosexual mecca Provincetown for her newfound sunny disposition. Whereas breakups and introspection coloration the “sadder” sounds of her first two information, the trip life-style—and the stability of a three-year relationship—are answerable for Barbara’s breeziness.
If that every one seems like an excessive amount of of a sonic departure, don’t fret; she insists the pivot comes from a spot that’s at all times been authentically Trixie. Facet A of the album, as an example, is as a lot a throwback to her love for mid-aughts rock because it is post-Beatles pop. “In the 2000s, that music was mainly a redux of how songs had been written in the ’60s: sugar-sweet melodies with hand claps and electrical guitars,” she says. “This document is tremendous mod-looking, however you possibly can inform I used to be born in 1989 and grew up on Blink-182 and Weezer and Fountains of Wayne.”
The classic double-side format permits Mattel to extra assuredly reconcile her personas out and in of drag, extra so than in her earlier efforts. Take the track “Jesse Jesse,” which is a reference-laden ode to…Jesse Eisenberg. “Three years in the past, I wouldn’t have been safe sufficient in my imaginative and prescient for Trixie to be like, ‘Yup, I’m writing about Jesse Eisenberg,’” she says. “However I’m in a spot now the place, if my intuition that day is to put in writing a track about Jesse Eisenberg, then that’s what I’m writing about.”