I walked into a plastic surgeon’s office at twenty-five for a little preventative Botox, the kind half the girls I shoot with already get, no big deal. Here’s the part that makes it funny in a bleak way: I model. My face is already how I pay my rent, so when this man clocked that, the consultation stopped being about a few units and turned into a sales pitch about protecting my investment, the lines he swore would set if I waited, the whole menu he could get ahead of now while I was young. And I sat there nodding, half-terrified and half-flattered that he was paying this much attention to me. I booked the bigger consultation before I’d even left the building. Canceled it three days later when the spell wore off and I clocked that he’d sold me a fear and called it a career move. women who work built an entire song out of that exact chair, that exact spell, and ‘Surgeon’s Pet’ is the most unsettling goddamn thing I’ve heard all year because it never once lets you feel safe.
The whole track is dressed up as a cosmetic consultation and it works like a slow horror film shot under fluorescent lighting. Sophie Payten, the doctor-slash-musician behind this project, knows the clinical world from the inside, and you can feel it in how precisely she weaponizes the medical vocabulary. This is dark alt-pop that examines beauty maintenance as survival, where getting older feels like vanishing and optimizing yourself becomes its own twisted romance. The production is polished to a cold shine, and that gloss is the point. Everything about this sounds expensive and a little wrong, like a fucking waiting room that’s too quiet.
Advertisement
She opens by handing this man a power he absolutely should not have. She sings “You made me feel just like high school / If you were back in me now, I’d be so cool / What’s it been? / Ten months, now / I see you lost some hair, / took some vows / Sorry about calling / The other night / Tell her I’m no other woman / Just a woman tryna get it right / Remember when you said, / ‘They’re all doing it'” and the whole thing curdles in your stomach. She’s regressed to a teenager around him, tracking his hairline and his wedding ring, apologizing for a drunk phone call, swearing to his wife she’s not a threat. That “they’re all doing it” is the oldest manipulation in the book, the pressure dressed as reassurance, and she’s still quoting that shit back to herself like scripture.
Then the chorus tells you what she’s actually become. She lays it out with “I didn’t mean to be surgeon’s pet / Blinders on my mission to be the best / Looking right, looking left, writing checks / Baby, you said never let the lines set / Standing there in your white coat / Begging me not to be the girl who missed the boat / Now my face is a financial asset / Baby, you said never let the lines set.” The pet of it. The leash of it. She’s writing checks with blinders on while he stands over her in that white coat playing on her deepest fear of being left behind, and the gut punch is “now my face is a financial asset,” because that is what he’s done. He turned her own fucking face into a recurring invoice. The way she keeps returning to his little commandment about the lines is how you know he’s living rent free in her head, and not in the cute way.
The bridge is where the relationship shows its real teeth. She asks “Did we not have some laughs, / something real? / I’d say that’s too many jabs / You say: it’s a three for one deal / then your email said I’m art, not a robot / You cut me off, / Now you’re breaking my heart.” She’s grasping for intimacy that was never there, calling it real while he answers with a bulk discount. A three for one deal. That’s his idea of romance. And then the man calls her art in a follow-up email, which is the most clinical sweet-nothing imaginable, before he cuts her off entirely and she has the audacity to feel heartbroken about it. She fell for the surgeon. That’s the horror, full stop. He sold her a fear and she mistook the transaction for love.
Advertisement
She ends on the line that should be stitched onto the wall of every waiting room in the country – “I’m not crazy / I’m just surviving.” And hell, the most chilling part is that she’s right. In a world that treats a woman’s aging face like a problem to be billed for, this kind of dependence really can feel like survival. Payten doesn’t hand you a tidy escape or a girlboss reclamation. She leaves her woman in the chair, still half in love with the knife. It’s a braver and darker ending than this genre usually has the stomach for.
women who work is a NYC-based alt-pop band building a stylish little universe out of retro glamour, female character work, and modern unease. Fronted by Malorie Cunningham, a musician and editor based in New York, the project introduced itself with ‘H0t Secrets,’ a sax-laced debut with a taste for secrecy and theatrical pop detail and are now pushing deeper into darker territory with ‘Surgeon’s Pet,’ a sleek alt-pop track that turns beauty culture, control, and self-reinvention into something sharp enough to draw blood. The track gives the band a deliciously unsettling edge.
I didn’t go back for my follow-up. The guy with the clipboard probably sold the same damn fear to the next woman in the chair an hour later, and she probably booked. women who work nailed the thing I felt sitting under those lights, that strange grateful terror, and then she went somewhere I wasn’t brave enough to go and stayed in it. I got out because the spell broke. Her woman is still inside it, still calling it surviving. The difference between us is luck and a canceled appointment, and ‘Surgeon’s Pet’ knows it.
