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.
