Model/Actriz – Cinderella

Brooklyn-based noisemakers Model/Actriz return with “Cinderella,” the lead single from their upcoming sophomore album Pirouette, which will be released May 2 via Dirty Hit Records.

The track combines industrial, noise, rave, and punk influences into a hyperkinetic composition driven by pounding percussion and intensely delivered guitar chords. Vocalist Cole Haden’s evocative performance alternates between crooning and pleading over this relentless soundscape.

“’Cinderella’ distills within it many of the objectives that would become the lifeblood of Pirouette,” Haden explains. “The song switches between moments of tension and fluidity, dissonance and harmony: we aimed to write something with an inherent brightness that differed anything we had made before, and the light that shines through the song was made not through removing darkness, but through upping the contrast.”

Lyrically, the song uses the fairy tale as a framework for narrative, drawing from Haden’s childhood memory of wanting a Cinderella-themed birthday party. “The lyrics were written in response to that canvas, and give voice to an inner dialogue I once had while on a date with a beautiful man. It’s a song about the realization that there was shame and pain I carried long after it had become obsolete.”