Look, I’ve been the devil whispering in the ears of a lot of good girls. The friend who says “text him back at 2am, what’s the worst that could happen?” The one who convinces you that you absolutely should make out with that person at the bar even though you just met them five minutes ago. I’m the voice in your head saying wear the slutty dress, order the third drink, stay out until the sun comes up because Monday morning is a problem for future you. I’ve never been the girl who plays it safe, and honestly? The view from the dark side is way fucking better. We live loud, make mistakes we’ll laugh about later, and collect stories that make our friends go “you did WHAT?” So when Vanity Fairy drops a track that translates to “Live Life” with an invitation to get loose and join this party I’m definitely going and I’m dragging all of you bitches with me.
“Vive La Vie” off her Queen of Queens EP is nu disco at its most seductive. Vanity Fairy—the solo project of Daisy Capri—has built a cult following championing disco’s return to the mainstream. Chanel loves her. BBC 6Music plays her. DIY Magazine and Clash have been shouting about her for a minute now. With this track, she’s inside the party. Disco ball spinning, door wide open, beckoning you in with one finger.
The production is fucking gorgeous. Synths that shimmer, basslines with actual groove, and Vanity Fairy’s falsetto doing this Barry Gibb meets Kate Bush thing that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. She recorded most of her debut EP at home, co-producing with Sammy Yamaha. You can hear that intimacy—it’s not polished to death. She’s letting you into her bedroom while she’s still getting ready, hair half done, makeup scattered everywhere.
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Right from the jump, she’s telling you to “enjoy the gift that god gave you girl and don’t be wasting no time.” The urgency here hits different. We all have that friend who’s been playing small, keeping quiet, waiting for the right moment that never comes (and she doesn’t either! ;) ) This song grabs you by the shoulders and says the right moment is now. Actually, it was five minutes ago, so let’s fucking go.
When she gets to “if you wanna move, wanna dance, roll the dice take a chance, sometimes to be free you must fall,” the track opens up completely. Freedom requires risk. You can’t play it safe and expect to feel alive. The production swells right here. Synths get brighter, bass gets deeper. Your hips start moving and your brain is three seconds behind trying to figure out what just happened.
Then comes that line that makes the whole thing click: “find your freak say a prayer, shake your perfect derriere.” The combination of spiritual and sexual, sacred and profane? That’s the magic. She’s blessing your ass and your soul in the same breath. It’s playful and reverent at once and that’s exactly what makes Vanity Fairy’s approach so goddamn compelling. She calls her music “sincerely sentimental.” Euphoria while you’re spiraling. The whole thing is a contradiction and somehow that makes it hit harder.
The chorus hits and we’re in full celebration mode. “Vive la vie be who you wanna be, celebrate our love, turn the dial of life to eleven baby, play it round and round.” The Spinal Tap reference is PERFECT. Turning it to eleven means excess, indulgence, refusing to moderate yourself for anyone’s comfort. And that countdown? “Vive la vie, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 plus 1 is life.” It’s mathematical and deeply playful all at once. She’s giving you an equation for living your best life. add yourself to something else and suddenly you’ve got everything. “We’ve found our paradise,” she promises, and you believe her because she sounds like she’s already there.
The second verse goes deeper. “You’ve been living so quietly, it’s time to make some real noise. You’ve been living so patiently, it’s time to throw out your toys.” This is where she calls out the performance we’ve all been doing. Being good, being patient, being quiet. Throw that shit out. Make noise. Be messy. Be loud. Be too much. I dated someone once who told me I was “a lot” and I spent six months trying to shrink myself until I realized being “a lot” was the whole fucking point. This song gets that.
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And can we talk about how she performs these songs live? She does her entire set karaoke-style. No band. Just her and a backing track. Her reasoning? Every live performance is already a cover of yourself anyway, chasing that first moment of inspiration. So she makes it explicit, gets down on her knees when the emotion hits, uses a smoke machine, really commits to the moment. She calls it “kind of like X Factor when I perform—I have a smoke machine and really try to live the moment—except without much of an audience.” That’s bold as hell and weirdly vulnerable and I’m obsessed.
But it’s the bridge that absolutely destroys me: “you need no permission baby, you are all the power you need.” THAT’S IT. We spend so much time waiting for someone to tell us it’s okay to want what we want but this track says fuck that. You already have everything.
Her influences run from Todd Rundgren to Prince to Japanese smooth jazz and yacht rock. She’s not trying to fit into one lane. She’s collecting sounds that feel good and building something that exists outside time—nu-disco for the post-everything generation, as someone once called it. There’s 70s soul in here, 80s machine funk, and obscure disco B-sides you’d find in a dusty record store basement which feels exactly right for a track that’s simultaneously sweet and seductive.
Vanity Fairy lives in this groovy universe of euphoric hedonism and “Vive La Vie” is our order to get our freaks on. “Vive La Vie is a celebration of life in all its colours, a song about embracing who we truly are, living boldly, and finding joy in the fleeting time we have on this planet,” she says. “It’s about liberation, identity, and celebrating the wild, beautiful chaos of being human!”
