Olivia Royal Gets Deliciously Dark on New Single “Gimme”

Love songs have spent decades promising hearts, souls, and forever. Olivia Royal takes things a little further on “Gimme,” turning all-consuming desire into something much more literal.

“Gimme” is the centerpiece single from Olivia Royal’s upcoming album, Songs for Eros. The Chicago-based vocalist, songwriter, and producer blends funk-inspired pop and R&B with a darker fantasy edge, building the track around pounding drums, driving bass, horns, keytar, and Olivia Royal’s rich alto vocals.

At the center of “Gimme” is a wildly effective metaphor: cannibalism as the final form of consuming love. It is eerie, playful, absurd, and strangely romantic, tapping into the centuries-old connection between appetite and desire while refusing to take itself too seriously.

That idea ultimately became the foundation for Songs for Eros, an album tracing the increasingly intense stages of falling in love. The story begins with narcissism and complete self-sufficiency before spiraling toward the feeling of wanting another person so badly you could quite literally eat them.

After writing her share of sad love songs, Olivia Royal wanted to have some fun. “Gimme” sounds like exactly that: a twisted, theatrical love song with enough groove to make the darkness feel dangerously inviting.

“Gimme” takes the idea of all-consuming love and pushes it all the way into cannibalism. What made you realize that metaphor could carry an entire song?

When I write, I like to have a strong thesis statement because it gives me direction for the song. Otherwise, it's easy to repeat the same love song platitudes over and over. Some songs have more obvious metaphors than others, but I think it's always important to have a central theme and point of view. And since there's such a long history of people equating love with food, I knew that our language for love is really ripe with metaphors to play with.

You’ve said “Gimme” ultimately inspired Songs for Eros. What was it about writing this track that unlocked the larger world and story of the album?

Gimme is the song that inspired the album because it gave me a place to go. You don't start with cannibalism; it's so extreme it feels more like something you fall into. So then the question becomes: where do you fall from? If I'm using cannibalism as a metaphor for closeness, then an opposite song would be about holding people at a distance. And then the album gets to explore the descent between the two extremes.

The album moves from narcissism and not needing anyone to wanting someone so intensely you could “eat” them. How did you build t

I'd love to come back to this question when the album is out next February. I'd love for people to listen to the project in its entirety and feel the emotional progression themselves. That said, I think of the emotions in this album as similar to temperature. We start the project ice-cold, and hopefully Gimme feels like the boiling point.

Your work pulls fantasy, mythology, romance, and pop music into the same universe. How much world-building happens before you write the music, and how much reveals itself through the songs?

At this point, I've done so much world-building between my projects that I can just add on top of what was already built. For example, I've already played with the idea of being a siren in a song of mine called Under from my mixtape PSYCHE and also in my novel The Diviner Sisters through one of my characters. Sirens are alluring, but they're also deadly; so with Gimme, I didn't feel like I had to start from scratch. I already had ongoing themes that I could play with. Another example is that Psyche is the wife of the god of love, Eros. When I was thinking about what to name this next project, given that my last project was called PSYCHE and it was about me and my identity, it felt like a no-brainer to make the next project Songs for Eros.

You’ve written plenty of sad love songs in the past, but “Gimme” embraces humor, absurdity, and darkness. Did allowing yourself to have more fun change the way you approach songwriting?

The difference between writing a sad love song and a song like Gimme is that it allows me to look forward to the performance a lot more. When I write sad love songs, it’s because I’m feeling sad, so I’m trying to release some emotions. Those songs can sound great right away because they're so raw, but I don't always love performing them because it means I have to keep going back to that feeling I had when I was writing.

With more fun songs like Gimme, I can get really excited about how this song could be experienced live and how I want people to feel when they hear it. But there are a lot of months of work to do to close the gap between my vision and the demo, so it requires more patience to get the payoff of the fun, explosive sound I’m looking for. I think both kinds of songs have their pros and cons. I'm happy to have all of it in my catalog.