London’s Desperate Journalist will release their new album Maximum Sorrow! on July 2nd via Fierce Panda Records.

To coincide with the news, Desperate Journalist have also unveiled a video for their second single ‘Personality Girlfriend’. Inspired by a 90s visual aesthetic, clips of the band performing the song are layered atop imagery of each member listening to vinyl records in their respective homes.

Musically ‘Personality Girlfriend’ fuses the post-punk sound that has been a staple of Desperate Journalist along with an indie pop glazing that is brilliantly mature in sound, as well as accessible to the masses without losing the core style that made the group critically acclaimed.

‘Personality Girlfriend’ is currently out now.

Regarding the single, front woman Jo Bevan said:

“‘Personality Girlfriend’ is about my frustration with the world putting women into boxes/on pedestals (delete as applicable, but they are the same thing). The stupid idea that we are either gorgeous airheads with no inner life, or Plain Janes “with a great personality”, is exhaustingly pervasive in the way people talk about relationships, and both “categories” are negging, nasty excuses for not granting respect to the person in question.

The song is also a riposte to the tired old cultural trope that in order to be worthwhile or interesting a woman has to be incredibly strong and some kind of paragon of virtue and/or intrigue, when men are rarely held to the same standard and in fact a complex, troubled male protagonist is standard fare (in life as well as art). I had essentially had enough and wanted to just lay my flaws on the table and go “look, I am sometimes a mess and I can be difficult and confusing and I do desperately want to be loved, I’m a real person with needs and desires and interests and I fucking dare you to discount me”. It starts off sarcastic and then ends with a confession of insecurity, because I’ve never found it easy to navigate any argument without crying.”