Review Summary: here for a good time, not a long time
Shygirl’s music has always thumped for those perilously caught up in the center of the dance floor, hiding from the normies skirting the sidelines. Even if her debut LP
Nymph ejected the grimiest, most aggressive elements of her hip-hop-centric early work, it was still a dense work more delighted with picking apart its deconstructed dance rhythms than fully grooving to them. The album’s best tracks rode that line exceptionally well, but a good portion suffered from the indecision of whether we were here to get down or not.
Thankfully, on her latest EP, there’s no question that we’re getting absolutely blasted. On
Club Shy, Shygirl dives into house music with absolute abandon, marrying wall-to-wall features to a half-dozen fidgety dance tracks. While there’s nothing as rule-breaking as “Shlut” or her Arca-collab “Come for Me,” adventurousness is still clearly the name of the game. Her brand of house is particularly restless, pulsing through pop structures to keep things moving along—and only the closer comes in at over three minutes. Each song is packed with genre detours and lush, chiming beats that can switch on a dime. Best off, it rarely stumbles into cliche. As trite as “mute”’s chorus might be, its beguiling tech-house rhythm casts it as a potent counterweight. And even as the final act flirts with the retro, “mr useless” updates aughties dance-pop with an expressly modern drive, while the relatively towering finale “thicc” soars rather than falters with its larger-than-life EDM synths.
It gels exceptionally well for all it’s trying to do, largely thanks to an immaculate flow and Shygirl’s effervescent vocal performance killing at the pop game. Even more, she makes it feel downright effortless. If
Nymph got caught up in the minutiae of pleasure, there’s no mistaking with this blitzkrieg dance EP that Shygirl is here for a good time, not a long time.
