Last New Year’s Eve I kissed my date at midnight, a perfectly nice man who brought me to the party and deserves credit for his punctuality. Then I turned and kissed the woman I’d been trading looks with since ten o’clock, and hers was the kiss I kept my eyes open for. I watched the whole room over her shoulder while the confetti came down, because a kiss like that in a crowd like that is a performance and I wanted my fucking reviews. I got them. Two dropped jaws by the bar and my date frozen mid-champagne with a face I still think about whenever I need a little lift. She and I closed out the night on the balcony and he found his own ride home, which everyone present agreed was the correct outcome. Being adored is lovely and being wanted is the fucking drug, and by 12:01 I had the whole room’s want in my pocket. Royal She wrote ‘I Want More’ from the inside of it, and Alison Freed sings it the way I’d confess it, three drinks in and proud.
‘I Want More’ is energetic indie pop produced by Jason Bell, whose résumé includes Lovelytheband and Robbie Williams, and it moves on a hunger that refuses to stay fed. Alison sings from the middle of a gloriously messy setup, a girl who loves her on one side and a pull she can’t ignore on the other, and everything she already has keeps losing to whatever she hasn’t tasted yet. Attention from either of them feeds the same appetite and none of it fills her up. Royal She plays that as seductive and a little fucked up, fully aware somebody may end up holding the blame while she chases the next rush. Selfish and honest at the same time, and I respect the hell out of it.
The song opens on the most dangerous kind of touch, the one that barely happens. “Our hands are barely touchin’ / But it feels like my body is on fire / A girl who loves me is sleeping / With my body by her side.” Barely touching and fully on fire is the hottest ratio in physics, and every woman who has sat too close to temptation in a crowded booth knows the math. Meanwhile a girl who loves her is asleep right there, trusting her completely, which turns the whole scene into a lit match held over everything soft in her life. Alison wrote this as a confession made in a whisper’s range, the kind you’d only say with somebody asleep next to you. The balls on this woman, honestly. This is the kind of emotional honesty that should require a permit.
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Right behind it sits the refrain that runs the song’s whole logic. “It goes one of these ways / It all ends the same / If you need somebody / Somebody to blame.” She’s already skipped ahead to the ending and priced it out. Every version of this story finishes in the same wreckage, so she volunteers as the villain in advance, which is either generous or the smoothest deflection I’ve ever heard, and honestly it’s a power move. Take the blame, keep the fun. Somebody always needs a name for the damage and she offers hers before anyone asks. That’s a woman who has done this before.
The chorus is the entire psychology in five lines. “You wanted me / I wanted more / She wanted me / I wanted more / You wanted me.” A “you” and a “she,” and neither one is enough, which tells you everything about the scale of the problem. Being wanted by two people and still coming up short is a specific kind of greed, and Alison lays it out with the certainty of a woman reading her own diagnosis out loud. That’s some brave shit to put on a record. My toxic traits stood up and applauded. The cycle spins because nobody who shows up can carry what she’s asking for.
Second verse, backseat, brutal clarity. “We’re in the back of my ride and sitting with the windows down / What a fucked-up way for me / To figure it out.” Night air moving through the car and that’s when the truth decides to show up. Of course it does. Epiphanies love terrible timing, and a parked backseat has hosted more of mine than any therapist’s couch. She names her own realization crude and true in one breath, and the blame refrain circles back underneath because the song knows the ending hasn’t moved an inch. I love that she figures it out mid-situation and stays in the car. Same.
Her outro compresses the whole operating system into two lines. “Enough is never enough / I want more.” There it is, the title as thesis, delivered after we’ve watched what it costs everybody else in the story. She could have dressed it up and she went with the blunt version, which is the sexiest fucking choice available. It’s greedy as hell and fully aware of itself, and where Tate McRae made greedy a charge to press against a man across the club, Alison turns the same word inward and wears it as perfume. Women get sold satisfaction as the finish line their whole lives, and Alison torches the finish line with a smile.
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Royal She is the Los Angeles rock duo of Belgian-American vocalist Alison Freed and guitarist Alexandria Reyes, creative partners since their San Diego days who eventually took their guitars and their nerve to the Sunset Strip. Alex has been playing guitar since she was four and builds every song riff-first, while Alison pours the emotional mess into melody and rap, a split that lets their sound straddle the lane between Paramore and Doja Cat, which is a lane I’d happily total my car in. The origin story alone tells you who these two are: Alison had stage fright so serious that Alex booked their first show without telling her, and the woman who got dragged onto that stage now writes some of the most confident shit on the West Coast. A lot of it is about women, specifically women hot enough to fuck up your judgment, and Alison writes those lines from experience rather than theory. She once joked about wanting to hook up with Dua Lipa, and like, who the fuck doesn’t?? Royal She makes rock music for girls who have survived the betrayal and kissed the wrong woman and the wrong man. Maybe both on the same day. They got hotter afterward and refuse to explain a damn thing about it.
This New Year’s Eve is already on my calendar with a note that says behave, written by a version of me I don’t consult. I’ll kiss somebody at midnight and I’ll probably watch the room again, because the scan is half the fun and I’ve stopped apologizing for my appetite to anyone including myself. Royal She understands the whole arrangement, the girl asleep on your arm and the eyes drifting anyway, and ‘I Want More’ sounds this alive because Alison has clearly lived every line of it. It goes on the getting-ready playlist effective immediately. The room should watch back.
