Rare DM turns adult petty drama into sleek dark wave on “Mean Girled”

Erin Hoagg has a way of making spite sound oddly elegant. On the newest Attention single, “Mean Girled,” the NYC artist takes the exhausting business of being misread and folds it into an “otherworldly dark wave anthem” that lands less like a complaint than a controlled release. It is a very specific kind of adult humiliation song, one that treats petty social damage with enough distance to turn it into something glossy.

Hoagg frames the track around the kind of rumination that arrives uninvited. As she puts it, “I hate worrying about people I don’t even care about,” before explaining that the song came from “rumination against my will,” prompted by what she calls her “strong sense of justice.” That instinct runs into the phrase poisoning the well, which she notes is an informal fallacy with violent roots stretching back to the Black Death, the Middle Ages, and wartime tactics involving tainted water supplies. The historical scale is obviously far from the stakes of being “mean girled” as an adult, but that contrast is part of the song’s point: the small social wound can still feel absurdly consuming, especially when “people committed to misunderstanding you” keep at it.

The video keeps that mood intact without overcomplicating it. Self-directed and shot by Calvin Stark, the scenic clip came together after “two ferry rides and a dream,” according to Hoagg. She says they filmed it last Thursday, right after her cut and color appointment with hair bender Sean Michael Bennett, and that the boat setting made sense for a song she wrote while feeling “like a sailor lost at sea.” There’s even a little deadpan coda in her note about the East River: “Though no one can poison the well that is the east river. It’s already been done!”

Attention is out 5/29.