I actually have drinks with friends tonight, and I’ve been cycling through the same three lip glosses trying to decide which one screams “I have my shit together” when I absolutely don’t. My roommate walked in, took one look at me standing there half-dressed with makeup scattered everywhere, and said “you’re spiraling.” She’s right. I’m always performing some version of myself that I think people want to see, and I’m fucking exhausted. Then TULLE’s ‘Devour / The Performer’ came on, and I had to sit down on my bathroom floor because someone finally put that feeling into sound.
This track is dark cinema wrapped in pop sensibility, and it hits like watching yourself in an arthouse film you didn’t audition for. TULLE’s voice comes in over these noir-tinged synths, and the whole thing feels like a beautiful nightmare unfolding in slow motion. The production swells and contracts like breathing, punctuated by these keyboard stabs that feel like reality checking in to remind you this isn’t going to end well.
Here’s what makes this track so goddamn brilliant: it’s actually two songs in one. “Devour” bleeds into “The Performer,” this haunting outro that TULLE wrote months earlier. She explains it perfectly: “I wanted it to feel like a sad clown in the dressing room at the back of a circus, all alone.” That image alone makes my chest tight. She took that song to her producer Truls and told him she wanted it at the end of something really big, and that’s how “Devour” was born.
The whole thing is about performing, about constantly trying your best and wanting people to notice, and always falling flat. About slowly going mad over it. Fuck, if that isn’t the most relatable thing I’ve heard all year.
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Let’s talk about what TULLE is actually saying here, because these lyrics cut deep. “Oh I can wake up in grief / Dress up and show all my teeth / I’ll be the girl of your dreams” opens the track, and already we’re in that space between what we feel and what we show. She’s bleeding but keeps stepping through her routine “just like a well oiled machine,” and that mechanical imagery against human pain hits different.
The chorus is where this thing really digs in: “Look at me! / How I present myself so perfectly / Just like a modern God / You keep your eyes on me / Devour me.” There’s this desperate need for validation wrapped up in religious imagery, this idea that if she performs well enough, presents perfectly enough, maybe she’ll finally get what she’s craving. Before that chorus hits though, she’s already breaking down: “Come on, please / My heart’s in pieces / Kick and scream / I’m left defeated / I want to be / The thing you needed.” The begging in that pre-chorus is raw as hell. She’s not even pretending to have it together anymore—she’s just asking, pleading for someone to need her the way she needs to be needed. The repetition of “look at me” throughout the track feels increasingly unhinged, which is exactly the point.
The specificity of “How I keep going after everyone leaves / Just like a prodigy / So sacrificially” is the loneliness of performance right there. When the crowd goes home and you’re still there, still doing the thing, still hoping someone will notice the effort.
Then we hit the bridge, and TULLE shifts perspective. “I’ll be trapped here forever / Waiting for their devotion / I’ll never get what I want.” She’s acknowledging the futility of it all while still being unable to stop. “Oh, I am red like sin / Oh, I am heaven sent / So don’t you want me yet?” She’s packaging herself as both temptation and salvation, trying every angle, and still the answer is silence.
“Trying hard / They keep laughing / But I’ll keep dancing / At least they notice / If I keep going / Then they might love me” might be the most devastating part. That “at least they notice” line? That’s rock bottom pretending to be progress. That’s the compromise we make when we’re desperate for any kind of attention, even the wrong kind.
And then TULLE really goes for the throat with “The Performer” section. She switches to third person, creating distance from her own story like she’s narrating someone else’s tragedy: “What a bitter little lady / She only wanted sweetness / What a curse / She’ll never learn.” The self-awareness is painful. “So she’s forced into the circus / Performs to find a purpose / How sad / To watch her go mad.”
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But here’s the twisted part that makes this so brilliant: “But she looks so good in her makeup / And she moves so good with her body / You can’t blame me for staring / She’s so good when she’s not talking.” TULLE is embodying the audience here, the people who consume the performance but never see the person. They love the show precisely because it’s not real, because they don’t have to deal with her humanity.
The production matches this descent perfectly. Those synthesizers create this expansive, cinematic space that feels both enormous and claustrophobic. The track swells like it’s trying to fill something that can’t be filled, and when it contracts, you feel the emptiness. At just over four minutes, it takes its time unraveling, letting you sit in the discomfort.
TULLE’s whole artistic vision is built around this concept of the circus clown, constantly performing but never understood. She writes with this morbid curiosity about human purpose, drawing from folklore and horror and religion. Her tagline “Your silly little clown loves you” is both heartbreaking and defiant. She’s claiming the role she’s been forced into while also pointing out how fucked up it is that this is what’s expected of her.
What makes ‘Devour / The Performer’ so potent is that it doesn’t offer resolution. TULLE doesn’t suddenly realize her worth or walk away from the circus. She’s trapped in the cycle, going mad, and the song ends with us watching. We’re complicit. We’re the audience she’s performing for, the ones who will devour her performance and then go home, leaving her alone in that dressing room.
‘Devour / The Performer’ is apocalyptic-pop doing what it does best—dragging you into the dark and making you sit there. TULLE gets it, and she’s not going to make you feel better about it. She’s just going to make you feel less alone in the madness.
