LA Women Trade Status Culture Anxiety with New EP ‘Control’
Written as a direct response to hustle culture and the chase for status, Control is LA Women’s new independent EP, and their most dancefloor-ready record yet. Across five tracks it plays out like one long night – spiraling from paranoia into chaos, chasing a high, coming down hard, then finally coming up for air. Four of the five tracks are built squarely for the floor: dopamine-rush synth breakdowns, propulsive basslines and four-on-the-floor grooves, Daft Punk and French house filtered through Parcels, Justice and Jungle. The fifth is the EP’s one exhale.
The EP opens with Hell Of A Night, a drunk phone call curdling into paranoia and hallucination (“hearing voices inside my head… did I forget my medications?”). It was the project’s first single, released back in 2023, and marked a new direction for LA Women toward songs built to be played loud, live and on a festival stage – a shift that got them invited to play alongside indie-pop act Balu Brigada at a live show in Auckland NZ. Produced and co-written by Joe Faris, and mixed by Simon Gooding, whose engineering work spans P!nk, Drax Project, sessions on Neil Finn’s Seven Worlds Collide at Roundhead Studios, and Radiohead’s Phil Selway.
The title track, Control, is the EP’s centrepiece and its clearest statement – a takedown of the hustle aimed at anyone chasing a name on the door over anything real: “You got the motive, make your way to the top / keep pushing numbers, living life on the clock.” Also produced, mixed and co-written with Joe Faris.
BYOD turns the chaos up further – a dark, cinematic dash through one increasingly out-of-hand night out. It’s co-written with Joe Faris and Alex Stacey, the pop songwriter behind OneRepublic’s Start Again.
Moneypenny is the comedown – colder and more wounded, its Bond-referencing title dressed over a relationship burning out in real time (“Shoot shoot, bang bang, I’m down down / it’s lose lose, goddamn, I’m goin’ on down”).
Closing the EP is We Want the Sun, the record’s one chill moment. Where the rest of Control chases a high, this one waits for daylight – a wistful, seasonal ache for love and light that hasn’t arrived yet, ending on “we all make it back somehow.” Produced, mixed and co-written by LA-based Joel Jones, whose credits include Balu Brigada, Will Swinton, & Borderline.
