Grabyourface : Sadgirl Mixtape (2025)
Sadgirl Mixtape album cover; courtesy of The Dark Channel
Independent Release | France
There’s something haunting about hearing a record that feels like it’s been playing somewhere deep in your subconscious for decades—like an old cassette left on the dashboard, warping under heat and memory. Sadgirl Mixtape, the newest offering from French artist grabyourface, is exactly that: a melancholic ghost of synths, skin, and sorrow that could have easily slipped from a late-night goth club in 1987 and landed unscathed in 2025.
Every track carries that exquisite decay—the slow pulse of analog despair, the romance of ruin. “Bubbles of Me” lingers like perfume and static, where her voice, ghostly and accented, slides between melody and murmured confession. It’s disarmingly intimate—like she’s singing through a vent from another room, daring you to remember what it felt like to be young and angry and beautifully lost.
“Feeling Morbid” crawls under your skin in a different way: rhythmically seductive, but emotionally scorched. It captures that quiet, exhausted rage that today’s cynics and yesterday’s night creatures both understand—the moment you stop asking the world to make sense and just dance in the ashes.
On “I Dream of a Future Without You,” the soundscape collapses inward, reverb bleeding into melancholy until only pulse and breath remain. There’s restraint here—minimalist, deliberate, and devastating. It’s grief translated into electronics. And yet, even in the despair, there’s a strange kind of pleasure. The kind only the broken ever really recognize.
Vocally, grabyourface doesn’t perform so much as she inhabits. Her tone is soft but venomous, fragile but fully aware of its power. It’s the sound of someone who’s burned out the performative anger and arrived at something truer: apathy with a heartbeat. Her delivery on “All I Have Is Love, All I Do Is Destroy” feels like an open wound whispered into a microphone.
There’s a cinematic, almost nostalgic sadness here—music to cry to in your car at night while driving to nowhere under the streetlights, as she herself describes it. For anyone who ever lived through the twilight of underground clubs and neon nihilism, it’s a return. For those discovering it for the first time, it’s a slow initiation into that beautiful darkness.
The album closes with “Je Lui Dirai Les Mots Bleus,” a French-language bonus track that adds a sensual weight to the record’s finale. Hearing her native tongue over that hazy, pulsing beat feels like eavesdropping on a private surrender.
Sadgirl Mixtape isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel—it’s more like exhuming it, polishing the bones, and giving them a new pulse. It’s self-contained, immersive, and painfully human. In a time when everything feels disposable, this album lingers. It aches. It remembers.
For those of us who once lived in black and still do, it feels like home. And after Sadgirl Mixtape left me lingering somewhere between nostalgia and surrender, I wanted to know more about the woman behind the voice — the one who turns sadness into a kind of seduction. Beneath the synths and cigarette smoke, grabyourface (Marie) speaks in the language of ghosts, heartbreak, and brutal honesty. What follows is a conversation about decay, desire, and the strange comfort we find in our own ruin.
ELEVAR: As an independent artist from France, your sound stands apart from the American industrial and darkwave scenes. How much of your environment — both cultural and emotional — shapes your music?
MARIE: I think that beyond being French, it's the fact that I live in the countryside surrounded by mountains that really has an influence on me. I can see the Pyrénées from my house and I would never give that away for anything :) this may have had an impact on me managing to write less urgent music, as I was able to reach further inwards for the deep sadness I had buried myself in for the past years. It came out as a very intimate album that you need to sit down and disconnect from the "fast life" to enjoy.
E: There’s an elegance to your sadness — almost cinematic. When you’re composing, are you thinking in imagery or emotion first?
M: It's all connected - when I have something to say, when I feel I have emotions that need exorcising, that's when I sit down to compose. It comes out however it comes out, the decision of sitting down to write something is as far as I control the process I think! But usually the end result soothes the haunting emotion I initially had and I feel a little more peaceful. That's when I know the exorcism worked :)
E: You’ve said this album was “the soundtrack you needed during the darkest moments of your life.” When did you realize it was finally time to let those songs out into the world?
M: I had been unknowingly writing this album on and off for the past 7 years. I just wrote songs here and there that were deeply sad as I was going through difficult moments in my life, but they were not connected yet. I was just putting them in a "sad folder", not knowing when would be the right time. Then last year, I put the final nails to the coffin, I wrote the final two tracks, You Will Never Be Happy and Rain On the Car Roof. That's when I knew I had completed this journey I didn't know I was on. I put them all together and I knew, this was my Sadgirl Mixtape.
E: Sadgirl Mixtape feels like it was made for long, lonely drives under flickering street lights — a soundtrack for people who still feel too much. What personal headspace were you in when these songs began to take shape?
M: For each track of this album, there's a story, each one of them was an emotion that I had no other way to overcome than to write a song about it. It was always times when I felt almost at my lowest (I can't write if I'm completely at my lowest), and I could sense them coming to me, almost like through a "divine" channel, a held out hand to help me get back up. Each song saved me a little, in its own way.
