Queen Anne Turns Emotional Chaos Into a Glamorous Meltdown on “Baby Girl (likes to lie)”

There’s something deeply unhinged in the best way about Queen Anne’s “Baby Girl (likes to lie).” The track doesn’t try to clean up its emotions or package heartbreak into something digestible. Instead, the Los Angeles indie duo lean directly into manipulation, rage, vanity, obsession, and the weird little ways people convince themselves they’re still winning while everything around them is actively falling apart.

Built around shimmering alt-pop textures, sharp-edged guitars, and a dark post-punk pulse, “Baby Girl (likes to lie)” feels like a glitter-covered emotional spiral happening in real time. Lead singer Katie Silverman delivers every lyric with the kind of detached coolness that somehow makes the emotional wreckage underneath feel even louder. One second, the song feels playful and sarcastic; the next, it sounds genuinely dangerous.

Queen Anne’s ability to blend dreamy indie-pop with gritty alt-rock instincts gives the track a personality that feels refreshingly unpredictable. There are traces of ‘80s new wave and modern indie sleaze running through the production, but nothing about the song feels overly nostalgic or forced. It feels current because the emotions are current. Everyone knows someone who weaponizes charm, bends reality, and leaves destruction behind while pretending they’re innocent.

What makes the release even stronger is that the band never tries to moralize the chaos. They embrace it. The song’s references to ice cream, emotional manipulation, and the Mt. Baldy Wilderness Preserve somehow coexist naturally inside the same universe, which says a lot about Queen Anne’s writing style. It’s cinematic, messy, self-aware, and weirdly addictive.

“Baby Girl (likes to lie)” sounds like getting ready for a night out while your life quietly implodes in the background. And honestly, that’s probably why it works so well.

Fans can catch The Viper Room on July 17, where Queen Anne promises jokes, embarrassing secrets, and what will probably be a beautifully chaotic live set.

“Baby Girl (likes to lie)” feels emotionally chaotic yet weirdly empowering. Was it important for the song to feel unresolved instead of offering closure?

I've always been a sucker for an unresolved ending. I sang in a chorus for years growing up, and I remember pestering the director to cut the last chord out of our arrangements, to just let the tension hang in the air. I'm also big on cutting off the endings of our songs now, because I personally love when things feel a little incomplete. Especially for a song like "Baby Girl," I think whatever details people fill in are going to be more interesting, and obviously more specific to them, than anything I could add if I had one more verse that was like, "By the way, here's what the song's about."

The track balances dark emotions with sarcastic humor and almost glamorous imagery. How do you personally navigate that line between pain and performance?

For me, they fuel each other. I think of songs almost like dreams—it's probably about what happened to me that day, on some level, but the symbols are universal. And so music allows me to express things that I wouldn't necessarily be able to put into words.

You reference real places and oddly specific details like ice cream flavors throughout the song. Why are those grounded details important to your songwriting?

Almost everything I know about songwriting I learned from Stew (who wrote the musical Passing Strange). I've taken four of his classes in college, and one thing he always says is that in songwriting, there are no shirts. There are red shirts, and stained shirts, and crisp shirts, but never just shirts. I think of it almost like how fortune-tellers will throw out a bunch of really specific details, so people will cling to the one that's weirdly accurate to them. I'm basically betting that if I have associations with these objects and images, other people might, too—or at least feel connected to the specificity of it.

Your sound pulls from indie-pop, post-punk, alt-rock, and even alt-country textures without feeling disconnected. How did you develop Queen Anne’s sonic identity?

One of the coolest things about working with Sandy is that we both have very eclectic tastes in music. We never sat down and decided to "do" a genre; we've sort of just pulled what we like from different musical worlds. And so it's been very fun for us as well to hear ourselves leaning more toward alt-country on one track and post-punk on another because we're not thinking in terms of those labels when we're writing at all.

You said, “winning is a mindset,” even when life is messy. Do you think modern culture puts too much pressure on artists to appear emotionally polished all the time?

Not just artists—everyone. One thing that is so unprecedented is the access people have to artists now, in terms of expecting to see content from their daily lives, but everyone also feels entitled to see what everyone they know is wearing and where they are and what they ate today. There are people I haven't spoken to in over a year, but I can see their location, or I'm on their "Close Friends" story where they posted that they were really constipated. I think where this becomes a problem for artists is that there's so much pressure to have a fairly one-dimensional brand, so if you're "messy" or "real," you should be posting "messy" content all day, every day, but if you're "sexy" and "cool," you should also be able to keep that up without missing a beat. I understand that predictability sells, but I personally don't have the attention span to keep that up. I don't want to bamboozle people into thinking I'm an abstract concept that releases "content" into the world. I'm a human person who will feel and behave in various ways, and ideally will be consistent in the sound and the feel of the music I make, and my "audience" is going to be people who connect with that.