Partygirl’s new single “i have” has me in my emotions before the words even enter my conscious frame. The sultry percussion and gentle melodies are soothing but heartbreaking, the vocals are shared with such piercing, delicate confrontation, and everything builds in this song to a crescendo of painful triumph. The emotions it conveys all feel so deeply familiar and beautiful and painful.
Partygirl’s music is about surviving rape and sexual assault, and “Survivorship as a radical political identity and as a space for radical political action.” In her interview with The Big Takeover, Kytzidis says, “As I see it, Survivors have a lived experience; we have a language to speak to each other; we have a natural solidarity; we have a materialist consciousness.” When Kytzidis talks about a shared language of Survivorship, she’s speaking the language that none of us were taught, it was a language we learned through experience.
“i have” is about the ways we numb ourselves layer by layer after an assault, so that looking back, we ask, “but was that really me?” I’m someone else now. This song is speaking to my soul, and no matter how many times I listen to it I can’t seem to translate it for someone who doesn’t know the language. So listen to our premiere of Partygirl’s new single “i have” and feel it instead. We can’t heal what we don’t feel. Stay tuned for their EP announcement here.
‘i have’ is at its core a song about disintegration and distress. The music has a lot of influences including: guitars’ layering is inspired by Led Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley, the stacked harmonies are inspired by the Dirty Projectors & Bjork 2011 album and Moses Sumney, and the interlocking but independent instrumental parts in the chorus section are inspired by St. Vincent, Yves Tumor, and PJ Harvey.
Pagona Kytzidis
The idea for partygirl began in the early April 2021 when I [Kytzidis] had survived what amounted to my fourth sexual assault, and so I found myself reckoning with my Survivorship, or my experience as a person who has endured multiple sexual assaults, in a more visceral way than ever before. As a musician, organizer, and writer, I wanted to create a multidisciplinary project to ground Survivorship as a radical political identity and a site for radical political action. As I see it, Survivors have a lived experience; we have a language to speak to each other; we have a natural solidarity; we have a materialist consciousness. We do not have a real movement or genuine space in popular discourse. This is what partygirl seeks to begin to develop.
Pagona Kytzidis, via The Big Takeover
