pseudo-antigone breaks down every track on her new album 'Melancholic Melodrama'!

Pseudo-antigone

Earlier this month, Edmonton-based pseudo-antigone (the experimental pop project of philosopher and interdisciplinary artist Simone Atenea Medina Polo), released her excellent fourth album Melancholic Melodrama. Throughout fourteen tracks, pseudo-antigone tracks the rise and fall of the Popstar, an artist who gives up her humanity to make it big, with incredibly visual lyrics, superb vocal delivery, and extremely danceable beats.

The album is a culmination of years of creative output, from the enhanced production to the crafting of the songs. Since the release of her debut album Into the Void of Infinite Sadness in 2021, a lot has happened in pseudo-antigone’s life and Melancholic Melodrama draws on those experiences to find catharsis. Speaking about how the album came about, pseudo-antigone said,

"Towards the end of 2021, I had already a draft far along the way for what would become the self-titled album I released in 2024. There was a stark gap in time between releases as, to put it discreetly, I ended up in a harsh living environment where I was discouraged from pursuing music endeavours. As I came out from this situation and started putting stuff out again, I felt like I missed my chance and lost any momentum the project had. The self-titled didn’t get much attention — which is really fine with me, I just wanted to finish that project that sat in limbo for several years. But since I am a one gal operation doing all the music and PR, it felt personally bad at times.

Leading up to the release earlier in 2025 of lovers (confusing and messy is what i am here for), I was feeling dejected about the project. Basically just asking the question: does anyone care or even like what I do? I was feeling depressed and anxious, overwhelming myself by trying to bolster and push the release as much as possible. I had just started therapy again back in September 2024, so I ended up discussing much of this with my therapist. My therapist and girlfriend at the time helped me greatly throughout that whole span of time in the process of recovery from the survival mode I was once in, and along the way I learned just how much pressure I put on myself. I had to learn to discern the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations around making music. I also had to relearn that music was something I did to take care of myself and my immediate relations first and foremost.

Melancholic Melodrama was conceived and built out of the anxieties and concerns I plagued myself with whenever I tried to force a creative vision out. I felt like I missed my chance to develop the momentum I had with the project back in 2021. I was recovering from trauma throughout a good portion of 2024. I overwhelmed myself with all these expectations I placed on myself, possibly out of the traumatic immigrant inclination to have to only rely on yourself to hustle your way into any place. I was crashing out before I released lovers. I actually rushed its release so I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

The story in Melancholic Melodrama is a fictionalization of the tension between these anxieties and the fantasy of becoming The Popstar through the exaggeration of my character and ambitions in this project. The story of an insecure artist who gave up her humanity in a Faustian pact to become this inhuman Idol was a way in which I confronted my own artistic practice and vision. I’ve described this project to my peers in the academic psychoanalytic world that the story is about traversing the fantasy of becoming a Popstar which occludes these anxieties that point towards something unsettlingly real. And in that traversal, the protagonist undergoes what we call “subjective destitution” by assuming her contrived contradictions and tensions as her own rather than obsessively fixating over this rigid ideal. This album could only happen in the backdrop of this personal context.”

We also caught up with pseudo-antigone to hear what went into each of the fourteen tracks on the album. Listen to Melancholic Melodrama and read the track-by-track breakdown below!

Melancholic Melodrama Track-By-Track Breakdown

1. Thesis

This sole instrumental track was one of the last things that I put together for the album. It is exactly what it says it is: a statement about the theme of the album, what it is trying to explore and lean into. It is basically a crescendo of musical melodies over a pulsating rhythm, building up to a drop where the sample of Siri reading the album’s thesis lets you know what you are in for. It introduces the maximalist approach to the album’s production, leaning into the heavier side of things as opposed to lovers, which leaned into softer sounds more often.

2. When Things Go And Set You Back

This track was retroactively appropriated into the concept of the album (same thing with track 3). This song was made at a time where my therapist and my ex-girlfriend were basically teaming up to encourage me to explore feelings of anger, or the more aggressive palette of emotions, since I had just come out the year before from a living situation where there was a kind of monopoly of aggression that rendered me anxiously passive and overaccommodating. Ironically, this song came from a place of frustration at my ex-girlfriend, whom I am grateful to be able to have very earnest and caring conversations about things like this still.

The song is about watching someone struggle with the anxieties of unrealized potential and inhibited joy, the worries that it brings along with the seeking of reassurances. Narratively, this song was appropriated to set the anxious artist into dialogue with this Ideal Popstar who she keeps getting drawn to and looking for something grounding in her. Musically, I was obsessed with FKA twigs’ release of Eusexua and Koreless’ production on “Drums of Death”, so that influenced the vocal chopping as well as stripped-down drum and crunchy bass instrumental.

3. Faust’s Wager

Welp, this track was also appropriated from these early explorations of expressing frustration and anger. I remember thinking about this song as a dark version of Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold.” I was frustrated that I kept facing wavering commitments in my relationship and feeling uncertain over where things stood every other month. I think the realest thing I intimated in this song is the second verse, where there is this inner conflict between being short with someone out of frustration and losing patience while also fearing their rejection and loss — it felt uncomfortable but honest to put this part of myself out there.

In the narrative context of the album, I see it as the artist wavering over whether she wants to do this Faustian bargain or not, while also being seduced by this Ideal presented to her. In making this song, I think a couple of my influences were still FKA twigs, along with Devours’ latest album Sports Car Era, and some of Arca’s production throughout her Kick series of albums.

4. It Girl for All Seasons

In many ways, this track is a personal favourite of mine. Between the narrative focus of this dark night of the soul where the artist is about to try to be the “It-Girl” and the wide-ranging musical production, I keep being drawn to it — specifically the outro part with the overproduced vocals that feel emotionally distant due to its chain of effects while having an instrumental fade between different tracks that make all of these elements show what they have to offer in a dynamic way.

This song focuses heavily on this sense of feeling behind and trying to catch up to some supposed measure of achievement, or where I presume I should be at by now. In the quiet break in the middle of the song, there is this confessional, almost Broadway-inspired section where the crescendo to washed-out vocals still gets me.

5. Melodrama

Okay, this is one of the titular songs for a reason. First off, I am so committed to the absolute banger that it is. And thematically, I think it really becomes the initial statement of who this Popstar figure really is, as the bravado that characterizes most of the album takes hold. This is a figure of seduction, excess, and drama with vague references to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive.

In a way, here I was thinking a lot about the work of an incredible psychoanalyst and writer, Patricia Gherovici, who, in her book Transgender Psychoanalysis, connects this concept to a drive to beauty that forbids access to a fundamental horror. I suppose the horror is what the anxiety of the artist is so preoccupied with and what the fantasy of the Popstar tries to manage. The fantasy is callous and cutting, willing to get caught up in her sublimity as an act of self-destruction, nonetheless reassuring the Popstar of her inhuman indestructibility. I think here I was influenced by Lady Gaga’s “Disease” and Charli xcx’s “Von Dutch.”

6. You Can’t Go On Ignoring Me

This song is probably one of the more playful ones in the whole bunch, with the whole skit of me talking to Siri about a fictional party I was throwing (sorry to iPhone users everywhere) and the tongue-and-cheek lyricism. Like, wow, yeah, I guess I am the new bad girl in town, but you really have to risk it all to figure out how bad I really am. The Popstar basks in the attention in a quasi-mystical way.

The song focuses on the idealism propping up the Popstar into “a perversion of religious life” facilitated through capitalist commodification. In some ways, this song is pretty upfront about things better theorized by the likes of Karl Marx when he describes “the mystical character of commodities” in Capital, Vol. I as something that arises from the (newly developed then) commodity-form itself as a kind of structural cheat code where capitalism is able to commodify the very labour that produces commodities — at risk of sounding cringe to some fellow Marxists, I think the Popstar here is an publicized exaggeration of what workers go through ordinarily fed back to them as a commodity, there is one for every season and they are always replaceable at convenience.

7. Downtown (Figure It Out)

Let’s get the cat out of the bag, I just really wanted to make a horny hardcore gothy rave song and “downtown” is absolutely an euphemism. Looking back at it, the concept behind it is pretty robust, with the whole framing being the feminine masquerade / femme fatale narrative that is self-aware of its commodification. I drop allusions to the Madonna-whore complex. And at its core, there is a whole thing about Sadean perversions in the precise psychoanalytic sense of trying to find the pure thing that desire chases after. The Popstar is like the perfect indestructible Sadean victim, where she can be torn to pieces to try to isolate whatever this obscure thing is that we fetishize her for — lines like, “you wish you could make me bleed” and “something precious to defile” really stress that for me.

On top of it all, the song ends in indiscernible vocals where the Popstar is starting to be aware of her own alienation at the point of the song’s breakdown. I think lyrically and in some instrumental ways Shygirl was someone I kept referring to in terms of making horny club music.

8. Consumable for Your Entertainment

This is definitely one of the key singles to the album. It was deeply influenced by The Dare’s production of Charli xcx’s “Guess.” At this point in the album, the Popstar is starting to be plagued by the baggage of her own stardom and the anticipations of her inevitable demise. I’ve been trying to build some lore about the album’s character outside the music by trying to do little bits where people gossip about me or I get fake-cancelled for something. Along the way, I asked my pals Sunny Daydream and Taliesin Jones to jump in the track for some voiceovers, gossiping about the scandals the Popstar was caught in, only for her to be unrepentant. It is just a fun track, it is polished, and I love the club/dance section at the very end.

9. Public Enemy

From the get-go, I have to explain that one of the bits I did on social media was pretending that I was under investigation for the Pope’s death, which led to a “YouTube apology” video — where I was also just unapologetic and basically told people to expect me to do even worse next time. Same thing with the DUI narrative, I pretended to get arrested in New York after getting in a brawl at the Alligator Lounge featured in Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal because I was trying to find Nathan to do body shots from his “sweet, supple body.” I took some photos with bruise makeup I did myself and made myself look as dishevelled as possible. This is all to say, this is the crash-out song.

10. Doubt

The instrumental for this was made before most of the album as part of some beats that I’ve been messing around with for a different style of live performance relying more so on live producing and mixing loops rather than singing over my backing tracks. The production in track was very much influenced by the likes of Arca, Amnesia Scanner, Sega Bodega, FKA twigs, and whatnot to achieve this esoteric electronic groove. The starker and darker sound was something I leaned on to convey the state of paranoia and dehumanization that The Popstar is starting to find herself in.

11. To The Lighthouse

I have a confession to make: I’ve never read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and admittedly, I was trying to lean on the whole Lost Generation longing vibe described in novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway that I used to be attached to when I was younger and actually read fiction. I think I was thinking a lot of The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby keeps trying to peacock his way back into Daisy Buchanan’s life through flaunting wealth and an exuberant lifestyle. The Popstar is experiencing the real weight of her sacrifices in everyone she pushed away, starting to bargain with the loss she is about to experience in a Gatsby-esque fashion.

12. The Hardest Part (For Her)

This track is considerably more personal. I had just gone through a break-up with an incredible person that I am thankful to still get along with — but that didn’t make it any easier, of course. It was sad but compassionate and caring. Now, I have to humble myself to explain how this song even happened. My ex and I broke up. After she left, I texted with some of my friends about it (shout out to Ricky for always being there in my time of need). When I texted my pal B.G., they urged me not to watch the video they had just sent me on Instagram. I kid you not, it was Trans Lesbian Peter Griffin covering FKA twigs’ “Cellophane.” So, of course, I listened and cried uncontrollably to it, then listened to the original one and fixated on it. In the week between the break-up and giving each other’s stuff back, I wrote this song inspired by the FKA twigs track.

Jokes aside, it was a really hard song to write. I kept crying the whole time, even in my vocal takes, which you might be able to tell if you listen close enough. It was very raw at the time, I felt like I couldn’t let myself stop writing this song and a goodbye letter for her, because it felt like it would be really over the moment I ceased. This was such a strong feeling that I included in the lyrics, “All the things I write, I don’t want to end / They are my way to try my best to keep you close.” When I saw her to exchange things, we hung out the whole day. It was actually really nice, even though it was sad. We laughed a bunch, which is kind of beautiful to me. AND YES, I definitely told her about the Trans Lesbian Peter Griffin to writing this break up song pipeline — we had a good laugh about it and she was definitely affectionately unsurprised.

13. Melancholia

This is the other titular song and another song that was appropriated into this album’s narrative. Originally, I made this at the tail end of lovers, so it makes this song technically the first song written for this album. When I started therapy again, it was because I was dealing with a mental breakdown — it's probably the most depressed I’ve been since the last breakdown I had, which led to my gender transition in 2020.

The song is precisely about melancholic depression, kind of leaning on Freud’s description of it in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia”: mourning is certainly the experience of a loss that is able to find ways to cope moving forward with life, whereas melancholia entails getting lost in one’s loss. I focused a lot lyrically on language, meaning, and poeticization because these are symbolic supports of the human psyche that start to fail in the melancholic abjection. If you’ve ever experienced a profound loss, you may be acquainted with the feeling that no words suffice when it comes to trying to express it. It can make you feel alone in the senselessness you end up siloed in.

14. Lonesome Kind of Disease

This closing track of the album takes a very different approach to the sonic palette it tries to paint, aiming more for the kind of bedroom pop and dream pop sounds from Into the Void of Infinite Sadness, albeit far more fleshed out. I figured this return to beginnings was a way to explore how the Popstar had to come to terms with the anxious artist who is her truth when she is stripped out of her sublime pretext. Following psychoanalytic insights from Freud, the Popstar is both the repression and the return of the repressed for the anxious artist. The lush synths and breathy vocals give this song a more indie rock feel with lyricism that tries to talk back to the listener to ask them if they’ve ever felt this way too. And in line with being back at the beginning, the track ends with the thesis sample from the opening track.

If I were to say what the titular lonesome kind of disease is, I would say it is the irreducible existential restlessness sometimes characterized by psychoanalysts like D.W. Winnicott and Christopher as “essential aloneness.” For me, this theme is essentially a continuation of lovers and my academic research on love, where I define love not so much as an attempt to overcome this fundamental separation or becoming one with another person, but rather as the vulnerable sharing of this constitutive failure and what we don’t have. In a roundabout way, it is only through our partial and essential aloneness that we can relate and care for each other, and the Popstar tried to hide that.