I have a soft spot for pop stars who raid the fairy-tale shelf and I have watched almost all of them get it wrong. Every few years some label hands a girl a tiara metaphor and tells her to play the princess waiting in the tower for a prince to unlock her whole personality. I grew up on that garbage. Cinderella needed the shoe. Sleeping Beauty needed the kiss to even open her eyes. Snow White was basically in a coma until a man showed up uninvited. We absorbed all of it before we could spell consent, and then we wondered why half of us spent our early twenties treating mediocre men as the entrance to a more glamorous life. So when an artist actually flips one of these stories instead of dressing it up in glitter and selling it back to us, my attention goes feral. On Thunder Bae’s ‘GAY ALICE IN WONDERLAND,’ she takes the trippiest fairy tale in the canon and rebuilds the entire fucking thing around a girl who stops waiting to be rescued.
This is a glittery electronic dance-pop fairy tale that follows a queer woman shaking off the people and feelings that taught her to second-guess her own worth and then walking toward a life built around pleasure and friends who hype her up when the world has spent years trying to make her quieter. That Alice in Wonderland fantasy gives the emotional shift a neon little escape hatch full of playful chaos and wide-eyed wonder while the beat keeps it moving like Pride night after the drinks have kicked in. She is done auditioning for acceptance and ready to dance with the people who call her beautiful and fucking mean it.
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She drops us into the deep end right away with “Gay Alice lost in wonderland / Takin’ acid in her 20s 20s / draw pink stars on her silver cat / Just to know what it’s like to take somethin’.” That last line is the one that got under my ribs. The pink stars on a silver cat and the chemical curiosity give us a girl experimenting just to feel something her own way. It is that specific restlessness of being young and aching to find out who you are when nobody hands you the map. I have watched friends torch entire comfortable lives chasing that feeling, and honestly, good for them.
Then the hook arrives and the whole song tilts. “Never let a man make you feel ugly / Baby! / You´re a 10 out of 10 / All you ever needed was your bunny / Down the rabbit hole you run.” The bunny is doing filthy double duty here. On paper it is the White Rabbit leading Alice underground, sure. In this context, the bunny becomes the girl already living in Wonderland and waving from the doorway. Alice falls down the hole under her own power. She runs toward the thing that fits her and lets the trapdoor swing shut behind her. Watching a woman figure out she was the destination all along is hotter than any love story a man ever scripted for her.
Thunder Bae spends the second verse burning the old script to ash. “She thought she found it in a white man’s heart / But a boy’s only gonna love his car / She knows the way to Wonderland / But the only way to get there is with his hand.” That car line stings. We have all dated the guy whose deepest emotional relationship is with a vehicle – who gave more tenderness to a paint job than he ever gave us. She believed for a minute that his hand was the only key to the magic she wanted, and the song catches her in that lie and pulls her out of it. The fantasy was never his to grant. He was a closed door she kept mistaking for an entrance.
The final verse is where the heat actually pools, and she plays it slow on purpose. “it was a garden in a perfect square / When she kissed her in the living room chair / There were yellow flowers in her hair / And the sunlight caught it just right.” That living room chair and the afternoon light pouring over yellow flowers in someone’s hair hold the kiss she spent the whole song searching for. The scene stays intimate. Two women sit in a room where everything goes warm and gold, and the air gets thick enough to lean into. That is Wonderland. It was a girl all along.
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Thunder Bae started out recording demos alone in her bedroom, which feels right because she now makes art-pop that turns private fucking feelings into neon-lit fantasy. Based in Düsseldorf, she blends electronic production with grunge texture and cinematic drama, making emotions too big to leave in a diary. Her razor-edged voice has already appeared across Propaganda’s recent work, while her own catalog has stretched from earlier singles such as ‘Supernova’ and ‘The Otherside’ to 2025’s ‘mercybeggingboys.’ In 2026, she stepped into her album era with A WOMAN, a 14-track release that keeps pushing her sound toward something stranger and more personal. ‘GAY ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ turns her queer world feral and fucking alive.
I came in skeptical because the fairy-tale-pop pile has burned me so many times, and Thunder Bae handed me the version I needed at seven years old and never got. Alice moves through this story with the key in her own hand. She kisses the girl in the chair and leaves every prince with his boring little car idling in a driveway behind her. The princesses I grew up on stayed asleep until a man decided they were worth waking. Thunder Bae’s Alice wakes up on her own and runs hand in hand with another woman straight through the doorway laughing.
