Glossy Boy’s new single, “The Girl Who Feels No Pain,” effectively drops you right into an emotional space by virtue of its pure honesty and rawness. The production is stripped back enough for the lyrics to take the lead, and it’s in them that Glossy Boy does their most damage. With tender poetry, but as sharply as a switchblade, he sketches the portrait of a woman who’s thrown up walls so high, even heartbreak can’t reach her anymore. There’s something heartfelt there that never feels like a pose or a calculation.
Each line has an almost quiet impact, an emotional punch you never see coming. Glossy Boy is a dissector, an expositor of it, and manages somehow to make it feel lovely in its brokenness. The emotional pacing of “The Girl Who Feels No Pain,” though, is what’s remarkable. It doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t scream for airplay, and that’s what’s good about it. Each of his pauses aches, each of his breaths tells a story. On Shocking Pinks, Glossy Boy succeeds in making silence as loud as his lyrics. This track is not angling to be the next anthem of the people, it is something more personal. A song for driving in a car late at night. A stare-at-the-ceiling track.
And while it might not provide “feel-good” music in the traditional sense, it’s a song that feels real, and in the end, that’s all the better. Music fans with a taste for records that wear their heart on their sleeve would be well advised not to neglect “The Girl Who Feels No Pain.” With Glossy Boy, they have been endowed with a song that dares to feel deeply, and that has us all feeling something, too. The new transmission from the blistered heart of Glossy Boy shows that sometimes the most meaningful thing an artist can do is tell the truth.