Just pointing at words
Desperate to undo feeling this way
Your sins, brighter than the sun
Your sins, better than what came before
As darkness settles like a shroud across the calendar and headlines accumulate like ash, we grope for cracks in the facade that might lead us out. That search—futile yet unyielding—beats at the core of Princess Ugly’s new single, The Out. The song doesn’t arrive as a polished monolith, but as a fractured communiqué: a piece built from jagged edges and deliberate silences, as if assembled in dim light by trembling hands.
From Portland, Oregon, J. Christopher-Rome and Christopher Moncrieffe sculpt a vision where dance and dread coexist uneasily. Rome delivers words like a prophet tired of his own sermon: measured, bitten off, sometimes spat, sometimes swallowed. His voice hovers at the threshold between theatre and confession. Moncrieffe builds the environment around it, beats locked in angular repetition, synths stretched taut, guitars curdled into sparks of static. Together, their tension conjures a landscape that is both bare and intoxicating, something danced upon with hesitant feet.
Cat Powell-Hoffmann lends her voice, weaving through the composition with sharp clarity, a counterweight that exposes fragility beneath the structure. The interplay of voices moves like two currents clashing, each tugging the other toward a different shore. Beneath them lies a rhythm less about celebration than survival, an invitation to move even while weighed down by doubt.
The lyrics cut like inscriptions on stone, opaque existential musings that are more concerned with ritualistic ponderence than with scutibility. Phrases circle around futility, sin, decay, and power, repeating like mantras until their meaning collapses into sound. “The out” becomes less an escape and more an echo chamber, a reminder that every door swings back to where you began. There is no absolution, only a compulsion to keep looking.
“Dark days. We feel buried under endless unnerving headlines,” says the band. “We cling to past mistakes and regrets. We romanticize. We make excuses. We look for clarity and resolution, often finding neither. Even as the things we perceive as negative can sometimes light our way with an unsettling brilliance, we look away. Tear it all up. Everyone is looking for their out.”
The Out feels as if being caught in a procession: drums marking the pace, voices overlapping in dispute, steps uncertain yet compelled forward. The song bears the weight of philosophy without bowing under it, pulling abstractions into the body, into the blood. With this unsettling stomper, Princess Ugly inhabits their name fully: offering no easy glamour, only the strange beauty of unease.
Watch the video for ‘The Out” below:
Listen to The Out below and order the single here.
Princess Ugly began in 2006 as a largely solitary vision from J. Christopher-Rome, but by the following year Christopher Moncrieffe had entered the fold, turning Princess Ugly into a dialogue rather than a monologue. Together they unveiled two full-lengths: The Past, One Second At A Time (2010) and It Should Be Clear By Now (2012) before falling silent. Nearly a decade later, the silence broke. From 2021 onward the duo pressed into darker territory, releasing a run of singles and EPs that carved deeper into post-punk and goth terrain: Hunger (2021), An Individual Soul (2023), Break Every Room (2023), Death After Life (EP, 2023), and Bring the Axes (EP, 2024). Their return also carried them beyond their own catalogue, with an appearance on Belgium label Spleen+’s Resurgence (2025), a sprawling post-punk compilation box set.
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