King of Foxes - Hall of Shame
Crystal Baby Music
Released on September 4th, 2025
In the past decade and a half, there has been a proliferation of energetic indie rock band acts that have received the cheeky label of “sad girl indie.” You know the kind: Mitski, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, Japanese Breakfast, Soccer Mommy, among many other incredible artists with this rough-around-the-edges vulnerability and rawness that often plunges into the midst of an emotional explosion whether it is actually sad or not. Themes about queer desire, longing, melancholia, trauma, emotional complexity, and self-actualization are some among the many features of this peculiar indie sound.
I bring this context up because I’d like to place the latest album by King of Foxes in this musical constellation. King of Foxes is an Edmonton-based indie rock band led by singer-songwriter Olivia Street, who along with Brandon Baker, Zach Zanardo, Jordan Circosta, and Max Trefler put together this new record. King of Foxes as an act has covered ground as far as its sonic palette and genre orientations are concerned from the critically acclaimed debut album Golden Armour (2016) all the way to Twilight of the Empire (2022). Oftentimes the project has leaned into rock sounds that I personally associate more with 90s, 80s, and late 70s pop rock music. And in this respect, I find that Hall of Shame is an album that changes King of Foxes’ sound into something that is more aligned with the “sad girl indie” label from more recent indie rock music.
Since its announcement through singles, Street has leaned into a bratty and punky way of presenting the release through social media. I particularly took notice of this when the single “FMLU” was teased with playful posts saying things like “Did I ruin your life or just your night?” or “For anyone who’s ever blown up their own life just to feel something.” I find this later quote states the mission statement of Hall of Shame.
As soon as the album kicks off, the titular track which lyrically jumps into the contradictions and spirals of self-consciousness as the track switches from a soft guitar instrumental to a full pop punk arrangement getting things really going. The intensity of this track shows off what King of Foxes is about in this album with its midwestern pop punk sensibilities and expressive intensity. “Dynamo” continues this theme of trying to be your best self with a song that focuses on this sense of losing oneself — or at least the coolest version of yourself that did all these exciting things. This song has an incredibly catchy chorus and bridge as well as some fun instrumental choices like the short noisy intro and outro.
“Not Good Enough” takes this theme from the angle of longing for something else, the classic question: is this all there is to life? When the titular lyric hits, we find this compositional punctuation from the verses’ groove over to yet another lively chorus, which eventually fades into heavily low-cut repetition of the chorus’ main refrain over the verses’ instrumental. This kind of arrangement (plus the solo section) really keeps this track flowing. “FMLU” takes the pace down to a pop rock song with a swinging instrumental with a chorus that states out loud this urge to self-destruct that is recurring through the album. One of the coolest mixing choices in the album comes in the bridge where you might notice a modulated and filtered drum solo fading in until the track returns to the chorus (definitely took me a couple of listens to figure out what was going on).
“Bad News” takes us into an introspective look at wanting to date someone who is just red flags all around. But rather than just leaving things at that, the song is more so about the tensions of the desire to lean into these red flags well knowing them for what they are, eventually stating a cutting remark that “If I tried to fix you, I think I’d miss you” which places this in the context of the album’s appetite for self-destruction. Interestingly enough, the album ends with the softest take in the album with “Still Think of You.” Both the lyrics and instrumental hit this changed demeanor, with the sense of emotional complication coming in with a more resolute gentleness even if looking back at the end of a love.
I know that Street sent me the media release for this album, she was interested in the philosophical commentary that often finds its way into my reviews. I am happy to indulge her by saying that this album feels like the true embodiment of “the feminine urge” meme that was going around sometime ago. Reminiscent of something like the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive — where the impulse for compulsive and repetitive self-destruction is nonetheless something that can become a creative affirmation of life — Hall of Shame is an album embodying expressions of obstinate and uncompromising desire even at the cost of blowing up one’s life, modernizing something like Sophecles’ Antigone. For this, I leave Street a couple of quotes from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s seventh seminar:
“…it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidating us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us… It is when passing through that zone that the beam of desire is both reflected and refracted till it ends up giving us that most strange and most profound of effects, which is the effect of beauty on desire.”
