Somewhere around sixteen I figured out that the version of me people actually responded to was a construction. Not the one sitting right there in the room. The real one had inconvenient opinions, feelings that made people shift in their seats, a face that gave away everything before she opened her mouth. So I learned the performance. Smile when it’s heavy. Post the good angle. Say “I’m fine” until you can’t remember saying anything else. At some point the performance became so fluent I genuinely lost track of where it ended and I began and my therapist has strong opinions about this. I have a ring light and a very curated grid. ANIMA DOLCE’s ‘Modern Queen’ sat down across from me like someone who’d been watching the whole thing and said: I see you doing that and I’ve been doing that so let’s talk about it.
ANIMA DOLCE are a five-piece alt-pop band led by a female vocalist out of Central Switzerland and the fact that they’re not everywhere yet is a damn crime. Their sound pulls from funky pop and neo-soul and sits somewhere that feels nostalgic without being lazy about it like 10,000 Maniacs if they grew up chronically online. Each member brings a different flavor and the result has no business being as cohesive as it is. ‘Modern Queen’ is their thesis statement: seductive, lyrically surgical.
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The song opens with a direct address to a father figure and it’s arresting from the first line. “I am told to be this or that / but, dad, that’s not what I am / I’m so fly / you might deny / go in a corner and cry.” The confidence there is something else. The validation conversation is over. She already knows what she is. The dismissal of the dad who couldn’t handle her reads almost playful, which is its own kind of power move. Then she pivots into “I am told not to be sad / ’cause it used to be hard, really mad / look today it’s easy peasy / go ahead and tease me,” and the sarcasm in “easy peasy” is doing serious work. She’s performed the recovery so well that people believe it. She let them.
Then comes the chorus and it’s where the whole thing cracks open. “My therapist knows the drill / display on, that’s my comfy zone / I have a mirror, so I’m not alone / I am looking at myself like a modern queen / but have you ever seen my self-esteem?” That last question is cold water in the face. She’s the queen of the mirror, sovereign of the screen, and the self-esteem underneath all that performance? Don’t ask. ANIMA DOLCE holds you in that gap without letting you look away.
“I don’t cover my face / I don’t have one, that’s the case / I use a filter, put on some glitter / do you understand? / the happy girl, you killed her.” Full stop on that last line. The happy girl didn’t leave. She got killed. By someone specific, someone who was supposed to keep her safe. The glitter and the filter aren’t vanity, they’re scar tissue. Gorgeous, shimmery, completely functional scar tissue. Shit, I respect it.
The second verse goes deeper and gets more raw. “In beauty sleep, fully paralyzed / a new world in my head arised / they never wanted me to be a self-defining me / can I make it by myself? We will see.” The paralysis in sleep is such a specific image. The body shuts down and the mind builds an alternate reality because the waking one was never hers to design. “They never wanted me to be a self-defining me” is the most honest thing anyone has put in a pop song in a while. The audacity of just wanting to define yourself.
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Then she flips and the gloves come off. “My screen so clean / I’ve never seen reality since eighteen / my mirror on the wall / tell me, you never saw a queen before.” There is something genuinely sexy about a woman who builds her own mythology from scratch. The mirror here is ritual. She crowned herself because nobody else was going to do it. And the closer “I don’t think you will get anything like respect / if you call my number I’m busting my phone / don’t leave a message after the beep” is the whole damn point. She’s not waiting around for the people who shaped her to recognize what they broke. The number’s disconnected. The beep is the only answer they’re getting.
The title was always going to be ‘Modern Queen.’ A queen is supposed to be sovereign, self-possessed, untouchable. But “modern” is carrying the weight of the whole thing because the only place she actually gets to wear that crown is on a screen, in a filter, in a mirror she controls. The crown exists in pixels. The kingdom runs on Wi-Fi. She built her throne out of the one space nobody could take from her which also happens to be the space furthest from anything real.
I sold the ring light to my roommate eventually. Started posting unfiltered stuff on a Tuesday like a social experiment and the world did not end, which I found personally offensive. The performance loosens when you stop feeding it. ‘Modern Queen’ is for every girl who’s been so goddamn good at being okay that she fooled herself too, who built something beautiful out of the damage and called it a crown. ANIMA DOLCE isn’t making sad music here. Queens don’t do sad. They do cold, specific, and fully in control of the mirror.
