ALBUM REVIEW: Delilah Bon – ‘Evil, Hate Filled Female’

“How could anyone not like this? Like, that just doesn’t seem reasonable. You must just be a bad person or something, right?” Well…

Here’s the thing—it is possible to like something and agree with something independently of one another. That’s a lesson that a lot of the coverage of Delilah Bon’s 2021 album didn’t seem to grasp, such is the kind of acclaim it garnered. You’ll often find a similar situation with acts like this. In these music reviews, you’ll often be hard-pressed to find much about music, instead most to compliment the artist’s own ethos amongst and around it. And in a case like Delilah Bon’s, it’s impossible to disagree with her. Women do still get harassed and abused very publicly with few—if any—repercussions to the perpetrators, and if you want to show off a blunt anger towards that, go off. It’s a perfectly valid response, especially in instances that have close or personal stakes to jumpstart the catharsis.

But even with that in mind, Evil, Hate Filled Female is fucking insufferable, almost as a rule. In fact, in might be one of the clearest-cut examples of just how much of an irritant the wave of genre-bled soloists can be, where the twin cudgels of volume and parbaked edge masquerade as anything convincingly artistic. With Delilah Bon, though, being dull would be a mercy. Instead, we’re miles past that, into the realms of ‘brat-punk’ and the unique annoyances that entails. Plastic punk and the embellished allergies to subtlety of 2000s pop girls are just the tip of the iceberg; there’s also Delilah Bon herself, maybe one of the most soul-fryingly cringeworthy personas committed to record in recent memory.

To put it simply, there’s not one single enjoyable aspect of her as a frontperson. She has the demeanour of a kids’ TV character, screaming and obnoxious, yoked up by orders of magnitude and legitimately unpleasant for it. A British artist rapping in an American accent is just the tipping point of cringe; there’s plenty more here to chronically grate. Between hyperactive grandstanding on I Am The Best (Just Ask Your Momma), unconvincing stabs at sounding hard and fierce like Finally See Me, and the occasional Aguileran trill on My Girlz, it’s a gauntlet of headache induction that never settles down. If anything, the worst is saved till last with Committed A Crime, where a cast-iron stomach is required for the barrage of voices, accents and horrible, horrible vibes.

Still, that’s what you get when you’re making music for an audience about a decade off from frontal lobe development. It’s impossibly blatant in how carefully curated for kids this feels; it’s even made outright text on Drop Dead Delilah. It’s also done in the most cynical way imaginable, where the attitude of danger is so canned that you’d never mistake it for anything properly biting. Literally the only way is if you’d never heard a single other piece of political or conscious music in your life. And with the way it’s presented, delivered and intuited in such a tryhard way, it sounds like music that Tracy Beaker would make if she’d learned to swear right this second.

For anyone else, what is there about Delilah Bon specifically that’s all that worthwhile? It’s entry-level stuff, not even with the mindset to believably hide it. For a 27-year-old, she spends an inordinate amount of time fixated on school and bullies, which makes the ploy to snag a younger audience feel a bit too desperate. There’s also how much of the commentary comes in packets of glib Twitter feminism, defaulting to ‘jealous incel’ comebacks and retributive fantasies against a borderline-caricaturish cadre of weird men. None of this is as daring or radical as it believes it is, or even all that provocative. Delilah Bon seems to have internalised a notion of guys getting offended by her success and outspokenness (the album’s title comes from a social media comment she received once, to put it into perspective), but it’s too pat and toothless—and, in a lot of cases, generic—to do anything of the sort. If you’re a man who is offended by this, you’re a gigantic loser, plain and simple.

Of course, ‘offense’ and ‘dislike’ are not the same thing, no matter how they’ll inevitably be conflated for an easy dunk. The terrible ideas are just so fundamental on Evil, Hate Filled Female that you don’t even need to engage with what’s being said. You simply have to cut into its cackling, mugging mouthpiece and the flimsiness of the sounds she’s paired with. To be fair, some of the instrumentals represent a version of Delilah Bon with promise, as a self-produced work that can skirt past the inevitable thinness and stick some form of landing. My Girlz sees the return of the Scott Storch-esque production that was head-and-shoulders the best part of Delilah Bon’s debut, and the cheapness in sound palette of The Internet and I Am The Best (Just Ask Your Momma) kind of works in their favour, in the vein of early, irreverent Eminem and its slapstick production.

And yet, just when the faintest ray of hope begins to poke through, along comes the blown-out rap-rock clanger Maverick, or the flaccid, wheezing Villain, or Committed A Crime in which every bit of musical impetus sounds seasick. Bear in mind, too, that this is a pretty long album, and with the number of botched attempts at anything, it brushes on becoming fairly excruciating more times than preferable (i.e. at all). Perhaps trying to replicate multiple famously gaudy styles and eras of music via a DIY ethos isn’t doable to this extent. It’s likely why the majority of upcoming pop acts and producers opt for smaller scales and more creative, tactile palettes within them. In other words, that’s the complete opposite of anything that Delilah Bon has ever been equipped for. As a performer, her entire modus operandi is caustic brattiness that needs something suitably big to succeed. Points for acknowledging that, then, but in an entire scene where competent mix balance is often treated like an afterthought, you’d hope that Evil, Hate Filled Female could hit harder than a wet slap.

What the whole thing brings to mind the most is Scene Queen’s Hot Singles In Your Area, and how this is a painfully inferior album to it. Even with the same quibbles in abundance, Hannah Collins had built enough of an identity and committed to the overblown absurdity of it to rack up some wins. Delilah Bon, on the other hand, finds herself sequestered in a much more restricted area, while still trying to walk the walk to the same extremes. Or rather, she believes that’s what she’s doing. In truth, Evil, Hate Filled Female is enamoured with the idea of screaming out, scandalising and pushing buttons but it never puts in the work to properly do it. It’d almost be a parody of itself if it were funny or clever, or aimed for more besides abject annoyance being its dominant trait. As lovely as it would be to have an album extolling such understandable, correct feminist virtues and felt worthwhile to get behind, this demonstrably isn’t it. Expect near-universal acclaim.

For fans of: Scene Queen, P!nk, ALT BLK ERA

‘Evil, Hate Filled Female’ by Delilah Bon is released on 13th September.

Words by Luke Nuttall