White Lung’s "Kiss Me When I Bleed" Is Named Best New Track
White Lung have never pretended to be pure. The quartet are banshees, pummeling their demons with speeds and screams so loud and fast that masochism matures into pleasure. Despite this, in between soberingly honest anecdotes regarding body dysmorphia, substance abuse, and trauma, White Lung are romantic. In this style, “Kiss Me When I Bleed” explores the inherent relationship between desire and disgust. The result is like if the lawless, drug-addled characters in a Harmony Korine film decided to adapt Romeo and Juliet. “But he’ll chew through the lies for me/ He’ll suck out your eyes for me/ And I do the same,” Mish Barber-Way sings, offering stronger descriptions of passion than your typical Nicholas Sparks fare. Ultimately, love, with its unexplainable grip, is horrifying.
Barber-Way has said that to escape her place of mental content, half of White Lung’s fourth record, Paradise, is written from the viewpoint of other people. In an interview with Annie Clark, she explained that “Kiss Me When I Bleed” is about a rich girl “who falls in love with a garbage man who lives in a trailer park.” Her love is tenacious, as is her willingness to transform her lifestyle. Visceral, unsettling images about giving birth and huffing gas in a trailer become a picture of routine domesticity. It’s difficult not to read the song as an allegory for Barber-Way herself, as she was recently married. Whatever the meaning, “Kiss Me When I Bleed” is full of bliss and hope, an atypical fairytale that digs into devotion with raised fists.
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