Miya Folick - Erotica Veronica review
Miya Folick climbs out of the primordial soup in the cover of Erotica Veronica.
[Revised 5/22/25]
Miya Folick has always searched for bliss. 2016’s Strange Darling EP to 2023’s Roach traced her journey: coaxing anxiety into a corner of her mind and clearing space for wild pleasure. She’s discovered that it helps to scream fear out loud rather than letting it fester; to lose yourself in dance when you feel a sense of dazzling clarity. Folick’s newest album Erotica Veronica is again a record of discoveries, albeit written from a more balanced place. Folick is still searching for bliss. But this time, she’s trying to find something that will stick around.
In early September 2024, Folick released the album’s first teaser: a short clip featuring the lyrics, “Got a woman on my mind now / And a man waiting at home.” On Instagram, she wrote that the song was for “everyone still figuring out what makes them happy, fulfilled, fully expressed,” before adding, “but mostly… it’s for the bis.” That first single, “La Da Da”—with its 90s alt-rock sound and Cranberries-esque vocal inflections—sets the emotional tone for Erotica Veronica. It also introduces a narrative that seems to run through the album: the exploration of one’s queerness from within a committed, heterosexual relationship.
It’s not easy to tackle the universal human experience of living with dissatisfaction. The consequences of risky and unusually honest confession unfold across the album, both in reality and fantasy. Folick first tries to negotiate with her partner’s reaction in “Erotica”—also about desiring a woman—inviting them to talk to her if her openness about her “sensual proclivities fuel [their] anxiety.” On “Alaska,” she imagines coming home to find that her partner has packed up and left. “I could lose you,” she sings. Each repetition of the line adds nuance: there’s a desire to hold on, and an equal desire for freedom.
A desire for release continues into the next song, “Felicity”: a particular highlight of the album. The lilting flute sounds like birds chirping, and the song as a whole feels like lying in a meadow under the sun. The hopeful melody, however, belies the intensity of the lyrical content. Folick has often begged her companion for a kind of violent honesty in song (2017’s “Give it To Me” and 2018’s “Thingamajig” come to mind), and here she wishes for an “anger I can understand.” Could an actual honest reaction to a partner’s behavior be to “punch me in the viscera”? Whatever helps to get it out—however you achieve true release, no matter how spectacularly messy—this is Folick’s idea of “felicity”.
On “Fist”, Folick follows this thread of violence all the way down. Overwhelmed and unraveling, she struggles to find the release she needs within her relationship. In brutally honest terms, she describes herself as liable to hit herself “in the face with [her] own little fist” before collapsing into her companion, spent of all emotion. It might not be the most flattering portrait, but this ability to capture the lowest moments of a relationship is a particular strength of Folick’s songwriting.
Throughout the album runs an undercurrent of radical acceptance: both for her “sensual proclivities” and for the less flattering elements of her personality. On “Hate Me”, Folick explores just how much she has sacrificed to be loveable: “It took me so long to ask for what I need/Cause I was so afraid you’d hate me/Now you hate me, but it didn’t kill me.” Honesty may be brutal, nearly impossible, and potentially damaging. But it’s also the only way to be free.
Folick discovers moments of grace in the chaos. On “Prism of Light”, Folick embraces pleasure and plainly makes a request for more: to be complimented—told when she’s shining. In “Hypergiant”—reminiscent of the haunting interlude “Cockroach” from Roach, albeit with a much gentler tone— an angelic choir transforms the very mundane lyrical observations of a beautiful Sunday morning in bed into a tiny revelation. Devotion to someone can be a kind of holiness. Even a small happiness can feel overwhelming.
And what of fiery passion—the stuff of most love songs? In the stunning “Love Wants Me Dead” it’s a fairy tale villain. Love is a beautiful witch beckoning from her candy house, luring you in with desire and then tearing into your belly with a starving, wolfish brutality. That’s the love we’re taught to want, isn’t it? Can we ever relearn to crave another, more gentle kind?
This album came out when I was struggling with this very question. A longterm, loving, stable relationship of my own had recently ended. In its immediate aftermath, I found myself desperate for passion: for the kind of love that ultimately wanted me dead. I realize, in retrospect, how much I struggled with achieving a balance between stability and ferality. I wonder how my own course might have changed had this album come out a year earlier, as Folick seems to be a couple of years ahead of me in her realizations. (This is why I need her to release music with some consistency.)
“Love Wants Me Dead” is the climax and heart of the album. What appears to finally satisfy our basal, carnal desires ultimately leads to destruction. But Erotica Veronica suggests that there can be satisfaction in dissatisfaction. That it might be possible to remain in a committed, longterm relationship while keeping intact the outlines that make you yourself, though it will never be easy.
On the final track, “Light Through the Linen”, Folick has finally found her freedom. She’s with someone who isn’t dangerous to love. Someone who sees her and accepts her for who she truly is, and encourages her to be it, as fully and as loudly as she can. She can be the butterfly: flying abandonedly into the sun, or returning, as she likes. The album, in many ways, is a celebration of this kind of relationship: one that survives and flourishes in real, even painful honesty.
Miya called making Erotica Veronica “a profound experience of trust.” The album’s sonic consistency, emotional honesty, and faith that the listener will relate and understand make it a masterwork of vulnerability. I’ve been waiting for Miya Folick to make an album like this one. It’s her best album yet.
