I have a thing about drive-throughs at 2am and it goes like this: you pull up, you order something unhinged, and for approximately four minutes nothing that happened today actually matters. NESYA understood that assignment on a level that should make other artists feel genuinely nervous about what they’ve been turning in, and ‘Put The Fries In The Bag’ is the fucking proof.
NESYA opens this thing like she’s conducting a séance and honestly she’s not wrong to. The first half of ‘Put The Fries In The Bag’ is full-on dark feminine mysticism, the kind where pain doesn’t make you a victim, it makes you something feral and uncontainable. Every scar gets reframed as sacred, every bruise as a christening, and the language is so ritualistically committed that you start to believe her. She took the trauma and turned it into something feral and weaponized, building the whole brutal mythology of what happened to her into proof that she was built for something bigger than whoever tried to break her. That’s a specific kind of power and it’s fucking intoxicating to be inside it.
Advertisement
Then the floor drops out and that’s where NESYA does the thing nobody else is brave enough to do. The fast food section arrives with the same deadpan authority as everything that came before it, and the genius is that she doesn’t wink at you about it. The ranch, the Diet, the broke bitches, all of it delivered with the same goddamn energy as the prophecy language. She contains both registers and she will not be made coherent for your comfort, and that refusal to differentiate between the sacred and the absurd is the whole thesis of this thing. Shadows moving like secrets in the static and an order of fries live in the same brain, the same body, the same song, because that’s actually how grief and survival work when you stop performing them neatly.
Here’s what makes this shit genuinely brilliant. NESYA wrote it during a messy divorce and betrayal, and she said “the song turned that chaos into something fun” and that “it’s proof that the ‘dumbest’ idea can be the thing that makes you want to dance again.” The fast food bit is a deliberate exit ramp out of a grief spiral she refused to drown in. She could have written a devastation ballad. She wrote something she could move to instead, and that is a creative decision about what healing looks like when you’re done letting the narrative own you. I’m not okay about how smart that is. The reckoning she keeps circling back to is this: everything that tried to finish her ended up in the song, and she’d absolutely do it again.
Kill Dave’s industrial and alternative production is the final piece that makes all of it work, and it deserves its fucking flowers. The sonic bed is heavy and chaotic enough to hold the mystical weight, and then it doesn’t flinch when the fast food commands start rolling in. Everything gets treated with the same sonic seriousness, which is how you make an absurd joke feel like something bigger than a joke. NESYA is uncontainable and she knew it while she was making this.
Advertisement
NESYA is what happens when a preacher’s daughter with a goth heart and zero outlet decides she’s done surviving quietly. Born in Nebraska and raised in the church, she spent her whole childhood hiding a goth heart nobody around her was going to tolerate, moving to Sacramento at 12 and finding the alternative and darkwave scenes waiting for her like they’d been holding her spot. She recorded her first projects on a kitty pillow in a closet using Apple headphones and free YouTube beats, building a cult following of weird alternative girls while working as an assistant teacher on the side. Then “Delulu” hit 38 million streams, scaled the Billboard charts, and soundtracked global brands, all while NESYA was privately navigating a traumatic marriage to a much older man who turned out to be a goddamn fugitive. She got out, fought her way off a label that never understood her, and landed as the flagship artist for Double Down, Evan Lipschutz’s new venture with Virgin Music. Now she’s in her Vampire Siren era, darkwave meets trap-pop, bipolar and battle-tested, one of the few Black alternative artists in the industry who can make you cry and move your ass in the same three minutes. She’s not here to be palatable. She’s the reckoning and she’s been building to it her whole damn life.
NESYA took the worst order of her life, a marriage to a goddamn fugitive and a label that completely misread her, and turned it into the most chaotic, committed thing you’ll hear all year. The fries are in the bag and she didn’t ask a single person for their order.
