There’s a particular pleasure in rupture, in watching a song split itself open and refuse to resolve cleanly. On ‘Look At Me’, Jehnny Beth leans into that fracture, building a two-part composition that feels less like a duet and more like a psychological standoff.
The presence of Mike Patton is less feature than destabilising force. His voice shapeshifts across the track, slipping from croon to whisper to something closer to sermon, echoing the influence he’s long held over Beth’s approach to vocal performance. It’s a dynamic that mirrors the song’s thematic spine: persuasion, manipulation, the quiet violence of voices that promise clarity while pulling you further into the fog.
Written with longtime collaborator Johnny Hostile, ‘Look At Me’ dissects the architecture of modern self-mythology, where online arbiters of “truth” perform authority as spectacle. Beth frames it bluntly: this is a song about deceivers, about the seductive pull of certainty in an unstable world. The track doesn’t argue so much as expose, letting its dual structure embody the push and pull between control and collapse.
Visually, that tension is extended through a Taxi Driver-inspired video, where Beth channels a De Niro-style drifter, orbiting isolation until Patton’s preacher figure enters the frame. What follows is less narrative than collision, two identities bleeding into one another against a backdrop that nods to both Martin Parr’s hyperreal eye and Gregg Araki’s lurid, outsider cinema.
It’s another sharp entry point into You Heartbreaker, You, Beth’s latest solo work, a record that trades in emotional extremity without ever tipping into excess. Since emerging from Savages, she’s expanded her practice across music, film and curation, but the throughline remains the same: a fixation on intensity, on stripping back performance until something raw and unguarded remains.
‘Look At Me’ doesn’t offer catharsis. It circles something more uncomfortable, the recognition that the loudest voices are often the least trustworthy, and that the need to believe them says as much about the listener as it does the speaker.
Stream ‘Look At Me’ HERE.
