Elise Trouw has always been interested in control. Her earlier work – looping setups, multi-instrumental performances, precise vocal takes – was defined by an almost surgical exactness. But with The Diary of Elon Lust, control becomes performance. It becomes costume. It becomes a mask you can’t take off.
“All You Need Is Lust,” the first single from her new concept album, is a provocation. The track itself is spare but sinister: a hypnotic rhythm loops beneath a deadpan male voice that sounds both seductive and satirically hollow. That voice is Elon Lust, Trouw’s invented alter ego, built from fragments of male speech and behavior. Elon doesn’t speak to you – he performs at you, around you, over you.
But it’s the video that truly reframes the work. Directed by Trouw, it’s a Boschian tableau of fleshy surrealism: breast costumes, red cherries, soft body horror, and slow, deliberate choreography. The iconography is deliberate and claustrophobic. Pleasure becomes grotesque. Erotic symbols become plastic. The body becomes exaggerated, fractured, repeated.
This is Trouw’s most ambitious project to date – not in terms of scale, but in conceptual coherence. She’s using music as an entry point into performance art. The discomfort is the goal. The project has more in common with Cindy Sherman or Kara Walker than it does with her fellow pop artists.
The tracklist alone – “(I Like My Women) Shaved,” “You’re More Fun When You’re Drunk,” “The Butt Is the Face of the Back” – reads like a list of Tinder red flags. But instead of moralizing, Trouw reanimates them with a strange, haunting humor. She’s not making fun of men. She’s making a museum of them.
The Diary of Elon Lust will be released on February 13 via Midtopia, and it will be available on vinyl through the Buy Before You Stream initiative – an apt pairing for a project that resists the ephemeral nature of digital media. This is a body of work you’re supposed to sit with. To be puzzled by. To maybe not even enjoy.
And that’s kind of the point.
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