There was a guy I spent four months trying to seduce into forgetting about his fucking ex. I’m talking new lingerie and sexy selfies. And the whole time I knew the way you always know that I was auditioning for a part that was already cast. I had decided, somewhere in the back of my brain, that being sexy enough and available enough could rewrite the ending. The performance was exhausting as hell and I kept doing it anyway. Lila’s ‘Monster’ is the song I needed during those four months and absolutely did not have.
‘Monster’ is guitar-heavy alt-pop with a grunge undercurrent. There’s tension baked into the arrangement, a slow burn that builds and leans into you, which mirrors the slow-burn jealousy Lila’s writing from. This is a real departure from her indie-pop roots and damn, the heavier sound fits what she’s actually saying in a way her earlier work was building toward. The production gives her vocals room to move, and Lila’s delivery is the kind of shit that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and actually listen.
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Okay so she opens this thing sounding way too calm for what she’s actually saying. “I’ve seen the room where you fell asleep with her head on your arm / Not normal to be this close to what’s tearing you apart” and she has BEEN in that room. Not metaphorically. She knows the layout. Then it gets worse because “Sometimes I taste her on your mouth / Sometimes I smell her on your clothes” and oh god, she is carrying this other woman around in every single interaction with him, sensing her in everything. That is a specific kind of hell. “Sometimes I wish I was around / So I’d be in control” is where she drops the romantic framing completely. She wants to be physically present because the not-knowing is what’s eating her alive and she’s honest enough to just say that shit out loud.
The chorus slinks in and suddenly we’re having a different conversation. “I feel like I sound like a monster with my / Bright red eyes and the knowledge that I’m not her” and she DOES sound unhinged and she’s telling you anyway. Then “I stumble out of bed like a 1990’s pornstar” and who can’t imagine that aesthetic? The big hair and supermodel makeup with one of those cute hot girl names like Lexi? Savannah? Ariana? Names that scream fuck me over a Britney and Christina soundtrack. That’s the performance Lila is clocking herself running. “I try and try again to be the one thing you want” is about being THE one, the singular option that makes everyone else irrelevant. “I’m turning down turned heads so I can go home and turn you on” and she has options, real ones, choosing this shit anyway. “Taking nudes I’ll never send and feeling like a moron” is the whole performance collapsing in on itself. She’s doing the work, hitting her angles, and the audience isn’t even there.
Wait because the second verse does something to me. “I’ve seen you change / Quite literally right before my eyes / Your laugh, your taste / You’re somebody I’ll always recognize” and she’s watching him become someone different in real time and staying anyway, cataloguing every shift like evidence she’ll never use. Under all the jealousy and the performance she actually knows this person. That’s what makes it so fucking brutal. “Pulling away and playing games I’ve gotta do it to get by” is her admitting she’s been running the manipulation playbook because being straight with him stopped working a long time ago. “It’s not enough to hear you say it / Fight the feeling feed the fire” and yeah, words became worthless in this situation way before she picked up a guitar.
Lila Holler is the kind of artist who didn’t wait for permission. A family friend handed her an old guitar at 14 and she taught herself to play by writing songs the way some people start journaling because she had things to say and nowhere else to put them. She sharpened those instincts at a performing arts boarding school in Michigan, walked out a 2023 National YoungArts Competition winner in singer-songwriter, which tells you everything about where the talent was already sitting. Her song ‘July’ made the semifinals of the International Songwriting Competition, which is the kind of shit that happens when you’ve spent years actually learning the craft. She’s been based in Liverpool and Charlotte, split between two worlds the way her music splits between vulnerability and confrontation, and her influences read like a playlist you’d build at 2am when you’re feeling too much: The Marias, Ani DiFranco, Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, FKA Twigs. Live performance is where she’s most herself, and if ‘Monster’ is any indication, getting her in a room is going to wreck you in the best possible way.
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Here’s where she stops performing even for herself. “I try and try again to be effortless and nuanced” is the whole exhausting con in one line, the full-time job of making desperation look like confidence. “And I’m 15 again like every time I sense that you’re off / Trying on my mother’s heels I’m stuffing them with old socks” is gut-wrenching regression, all that manufactured cool dissolving the second she feels him pull away. She’s been trying to fill shoes that were never her size since she was a kid and the self-awareness of knowing that changes goddamn nothing. Then “I feel like a monster / Always an imposter / I know that I’m not her” strips it all the way back. Three lines carrying the whole weight of the song.
Lila wrote ‘Monster’ from inside that specific hell of needing male validation so badly you stop recognizing yourself in the mirror. She’s talked about feeling trapped in sexuality as performance, going through the motions of being desirable without it ever feeling like her own. That whole damn thing she gives us of stuffing her mother’s heels with old socks? Playing dress-up in someone else’s version of sexy and hoping nobody notices the socks.
I stopped seeing that guy in October. I just got tired of performing for a goddamned audience that had already left. I deleted the photos and kept the lingerie. Looking back now I can see I was doing exactly what Lila describes, stuffing shoes that were never mine to begin with, trying to fill a shape I invented out of desperation. Some experiences don’t get resolved, they get documented, and Lila documented this one perfectly. These days I’m stumbling out of bed like a 1990s pornstar for men who earned the show.
