Is there an album title better suited for 2025 than City of Clowns, the latest from Marie Davidson? Just this week, Meta dropped some Instagram users into a new level of doomscroll hell, Jeff Bezos decided that WaPo’s opinion page would push “personal liberties and free markets,” and I can’t even keep up with the New Adventures of Trump and Musk. These dudes are a bunch of fucking clowns with far too much power over our daily lives.
But, enough about politics, let’s get the music, right? Sorry, that’s not going to happen with City of Clowns. Influenced by Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the not-so-subtle theme throughout Marie Davidson’s new album is the control that Big Tech wields over us. Take “Demolition” as an example, when Davidson whispers, “I want your data” in a flirtatious voice, like the platform that’s going to seduce you into handing over the details of your life that you don’t even share with your closest confidantes.
In a newsletter sent out this morning, Davidson noted that the one conscious musical reference she made on the record was to Serge Gainsbourg. “There is this one idea I won’t deny, I did purposely use the same technique Serge Gainsbourg used for Love On The Beat, but this time I used my own moans and screams not to implicate coitus, rather to image surveillance capitalism fucking you big time,” she writes. “No, no, not fucking with you, baby. Fucking you.”
It’s a smart reference, not just because of the humor, but because that’s essentially been Big Tech’s M.O., make these things so alluring that we use them more than we should and give them more than we should. We swoon, “this algorithm really gets me” and ignore the red flags that the apps are now controlling us. Now we’re living to serve the algorithm, growing more frustrated when the platforms enshittify and we can no satisfy these beasts that want our constant attention. It’s the toxic relationship that we can’t extricate ourselves from even when we are aware of what’s happening.
The song that, lyrically, made the biggest impact on me is “Y.A.A.M.,” which was released as a single last year. It’s clearly a reaction to the pressure to maintain the kind of online presence that brands like (“fake positivity is as cringe as it gets”), culminating with the chorus, “give me passion, give me more, I want your ass on the floor.”
Davidson produced the album in collaboration with Pierre Guerineau (Essaie Pas) and David and Stephen Dewaele (Soulwax) and, overall, the sound of City of Clowns is techno-leaning dark synth that’s both club-friendly and ominous. There are a plenty of potential bangers on here, all of which serve a purpose to say that you can dance through a shitty timeline.