About
“Squeeze Me” – a request in the colourful world of toy shops. In the warm glow of department store lights, it comes across as a delicious temptation, but behind the charming invitation of lifeless plush and plastic faces, something else might lie hidden. On Squeeze Me, the third album by Baltimore-born and Hamburg/Berlin-based Sophia Kennedy, the seemingly innocent is turned mischievously askew: Are you holding me close or squeezing me too tight, embracing or crushing me? This is the central question Kennedy pursues across ten songs with sublime and unwavering determination.
Following her self-titled debut (2017, Pampa Records), a radiant dance between the glamour of the Great American Songbook, electronic textures, and clubland influences, earning her international acclaim, Kennedy released her second album, Monsters (2021, City Slang), and delved deeper into surrealism and transcendence. Now, on Squeeze Me, Kennedy and her long-time musical collaborator and co-writer Mense Reents (Egoexpress, Die Vögel, Die Goldenen Zitronen) sketch a more disillusioned commentary on the status quo of the world at large. The complexity of interpersonal relationships, questions of power dynamics, and the quest for self-determination—longstanding themes for Kennedy—run as a cohesive narrative throughout the album.
More minimalist than her previous works, Squeeze Me brims with Kennedy’s gift for catchy melodies with a certain pop appeal and psychedelic hues: repetitive piano chords, shimmering synth basslines, strangely flickering choirs, and even a scream set the sonic stage for “Rodeo.” Along with “Imaginary Friend,” one of the album’s pop highlights, “Rodeo” poses the pressing question: “Where are we heading to?” Instead of offering an answer, Kennedy marches forward with zest and a multiplicity of voices.
The songwriting on Squeeze Me thrives in its stark simplicity, finding beauty in paring back. Over the hum of an organ and steady drum-machine beats, Kennedy casts off a stale, supposed dream state on “Imaginary Friend” with irresistible charm and effortless cool. Meanwhile, on “Runner,” which draws us to a dark dance floor, she momentarily transforms into a fly.
In the melancholic and dizzying “Closing Time,” the carousel spins out of control and finally crashes right into the unyielding stone floor of reality. Indeed, Kennedy seems more inclined to highlight contradictions on Squeeze Me rather than resolve them: Down is up, the end is the beginning, small is large, good is evil, and vice versa.
This is evident in “Feed Me”—the beating heart of the album. Here, through an exaggeratedly twisted skewed lens, biting sarcasm glimmers, and gently leads us astray. “It’s like blowing up a balloon only to pop it with a hot needle,” Kennedy explains. That’s exactly what can be heard: a balloon zipping through the room before collapsing.
This cinematic quality runs through the entire album—it’s no surprise, given Kennedy once studied film. Toward the end, on the spiky Hot Match accelerates like a fever dream, barreling across rising clouds of smoke with motor-fuelled beats and burning tires.
Rigor and beauty, humour and melancholy, fatalism and strength: Squeeze Me inverts everything about Sophia Kennedy, echoing the album cover. Either she or the rest of the world is upside down, depending on each of our perspectives. More focused and more pop than ever, Squeeze Me is Kennedy’s most cohesive album, perhaps even a kind of artistic manifesto. It’s a multilayered, self-assured statement that thrives despite—or perhaps because of—all the inner and outer crises around and across it. Squeeze Me doesn’t ignore the world outside but instead counters it with one of its own—one we somehow recognize but have never glimpsed quite this way before.