“I feel like bittersweet is our vibe,” Louise Macphail – one half of indie-pop pairing Prima Queen – surmises when talking about debut album, ‘The Prize’.
A follow-up to their February ‘Oats (Ain’t Gonna Beg)’ EP, it is an exploration of human interaction. A collection of twelve songs that swirl through heartfelt acoustic folk, crunchy guitar bangers, and 1970s-esque psychedelic pop, it is a record that is as much a celebration of soulmates as it is a carefree alt-pop masterstroke.
Vulnerability is clearly at the core of the album, delving back into the spiralling emotions that come with relationship breakdowns, but equally acknowledging that, in the end, you’ll probably be ok. This is where title-track ‘The Prize’ came from. Representing the universal contradiction of reminding a friend of their self-worth whilst subsequently ignoring your own, it acts as a place for the girls to re-centre when they don’t quite feel like themselves.
“It was such a great song to record,” Louise remembers, “it’s a celebration of friendship and the respect and love we have for each other. I think of the newer songs as letters to our older selves; if we’re ever in a fix, we can listen to them and know that we can get out of it.”
Kristin McFadden – the other half of Prima Queen, obvs – nods: “It was the same with ‘Oats’; it’s just so boring to be sad all the time! With those songs I was thinking of Lizzo or Chappell Roan, artists that write songs to remind you to be happy in yourself. We were just like, ‘We don’t wanna be sad anymore!’, so we thought we’d make fun of that feeling – it seems so deep in the moment, but, in reality, it’s so silly.”
She continues: “We had the album recorded before that song existed. We were struggling with a title and, to be honest, panicking a little bit. We knew we wanted the theme of empowerment to be at the centre of the record, so when we wrote ‘The Prize’ we knew it had to be the title.”
“If you think one of the songs is about you, maybe it was at one point, but it’s not anymore”
‘The Prize’ (the album) symbolises empowerment through shared experience, through the knowledge that, to truly understand what being empowered is, you need to have been in situations that have left you feeling completely untethered from your own self.
For this reason, the duo never felt tied to the specific events of a situation, choosing instead to highlight the nuanced waves of emotion that make you feel like you’re drowning, before you learn to tread water and ultimately swim back to shore, creating a record that feels intensely human in its portrayal of real-world emotion. Sure, they might exaggerate and embellish the devastation of a trip to McDonald’s (‘More Credit’), or place a rose-coloured tint on the first rays of a sun shining through a pint pot after a depressingly grey winter (‘Sunshine Song’), but who can honestly say they haven’t retrospectively added sentimentality and drama to a seemingly mundane experience when in the throes of heartbreak?
To do this once on a record would be difficult enough for most people, but Prima Queen relished the chance to drop a façade and be real with both each other and themselves. That’s not to say that it’s an easy process, but it’s one that was made easier by their enviably close friendship with not only each other but also their super-producer and new best friend Steph Marziano – coincidentally, Louise and Kristin are on their way to meet her right after this chat.
“She’s amazing,” Louise gushes, “she understood our relationship and how we work together so easily, because it can be hard having two singers and songwriters. She makes the studio a safe space, which is so important when we’re trying to be vulnerable and write an album like ‘The Prize’.”
Kristin smiles: “She courted us for a long time; it was like we were dating! We went to an Arsenal Women’s football game, we spent Valentine’s Day together, and we went for Sunday lunch at her and her husband’s place; she’s like the third member of the band.
“It was nice to have girly energy in the studio, too, watching rom-coms, doing facemasks, drinking hot chocolate; it just made it such an enjoyable experience.”
Louise continues: “Recording the album was a really healing experience because the three of us would spend an hour chatting before getting started, so we had that intimacy that allowed us to get vulnerable. We’re writing about experiences that maybe we’d shelved, so when we come to record, it brings it all back, and it was nice to know you were comfortable and safe in those moments.”
For many people, a job is a job; you turn a laptop on, stare blankly at emails for eight hours, then go home and desperately try to think of ways to call in sick the next day. For Prima Queen, and many bands like them who musically thrive on soul-searching and revealing their deepest insecurities, it’s not quite that simple.
“I think it’s Maggie Rogers who said we’re in ‘the business of emotion’, which is a really weird place to be,” Kristin admits. “It’s weird to be at work and talk so freely about super personal, introspective stuff; they’re difficult emotions to have in a professional environment. Sometimes, you have to just go to the bathroom and re-centre. It’s still really healing and cathartic; it’s a good way to release emotion and sometimes get closure.”
It’s often the case that the best debut albums are those that both allow the listener to get a grasp on the person behind the microphone whilst also letting the band learn about themselves in a more intimate, vital way. ‘The Prize’ does this effortlessly, journeying through all the stages of grief in a more realistic, rollercoaster-y sense, again underlining Prima Queen’s understanding that healing isn’t a linear process.
‘The Prize’ ebbs and flows from fan-favourite ‘Mexico’, which documents someone deep in their pyjamas and ice cream phase of a break-up, into ‘Oats (Ain’t Gonna Beg)’, a tale of placing your own self-worth above anybody else’s. Elsewhere, ‘Meryl Streep’ ponders whether moving on is ever truly possible, before ‘Spaceship’ resigns itself to the knowledge that you’re holding on for an “I love you” that’s never going to arrive. The back-and-forth between hurting and healing culminates in ‘More Credit’, a track that acts almost as a full-circle moment.
“There’s a real childlike essence to that song,” Kristin reminisces, “which is where the analogy of sitting in a McDonalds ball-pit eating ice cream comes from; it’s about learning and healing. There’s a rock-bottom aspect to tracks like ‘Mexico’ and how you’ve been treated, but ‘More Credit’ is a realisation that actually, I’ve been that person too; I’ve had more love than I thought and let someone go instead of letting those feelings in.”
“I love that the last line of that song is the last line of the album,” Louise continues, “‘I think it’s better to forget than I remember’ sums up the album, really. We might not give the exact situation in the right order because the truth is in what we were feeling at that time; it’s about the emotion, not the person who was there at the time. I guess I’m saying that if you think one of the songs is about you, maybe it was at one point, but it’s not anymore.”
Whilst there may not be one key theme to ‘The Prize’, the idea of healing permeates through every inch of the record, something that worked its way into the idea for the video for the title-track: a trip to an ice rink which sees Louise revivify a childhood dream.
“When I grew up, I always said I wanted to be an ice-skating guitarist. In this industry, people take it upon themselves to tell you if you’re successful or not, so I thought if I could have a music video where I was living that dream of being in a band and ice skating, my child-self would look at that and say ‘wow, you’ve made it’, so it was sort of giving something back to my inner child.”
On the idea of success, Kristin adds: “It’s so strange that people feel like they can so openly be like ‘well I’ve never heard of you, so you can’t be that good’; I’d never tell somebody they weren’t successful at their job! Like, we might’ve just come off a headline tour, and someone can make you feel like it was nothing and you’ve not made it.”
Louise agrees: “Yeah, I mean, obviously, it’s such a privilege to make music, and we’re so happy to be doing it, but the music industry is made to make you feel small so that you keep working at it. I think people don’t understand that what they say affects us. It’s like if you were a chiropractor, you would never say, ‘Ok, but when are you going to be the best chiropractor? When are you going to win an award?’”
In spite of the external pressures, the expectations of strangers and the microaggressions that knock you back, Kristin and Louise are still as passionate and full of creativity as ever, using every lever at their disposal to create a universe that allows them to remain focussed on their end goal: to be happy and healthy. In this way, the sporty theme of their music videos feeds back into the self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘The Prize’.
“I really wanted to create an album that has a whole world around it, a bit like Kacey Musgraves’ latest record,” Kristin states. “The idea of sports obviously fitted with ‘The Prize’ as a title, but it was more of a physical manifestation of the feelings we were trying to get across; it was the physical side of the emotional journey on the record. It’s versatile but connecting; it’s about fun, feeling powerful, feeling strong.”
At that moment, Kristin gets a text from her mum: “Oh yeah, I forgot to say! My mom texted me earlier and was like, ‘Just a thought, you guys should do exercise videos for your songs – a great idea, in my opinion’; we could do a collaboration with Joe Wicks, maybe.” Louise giggles, “We could do an Instagram Live with Davina McCall on release day!”
The sheer delight that the pair have when talking about every part of this album is a testament to where they are as musicians and as people. Evidence of that is ‘Flying Ant Day’, a track which finds itself bang in the middle of the tracklist. When talking about that track, it’s obvious that it symbolises that, even if this album was written about tough times, Prima Queen are now at the height of their powers.
“I think ‘Flying Ant Day’ is really special to me because it’s a timestamp of pure happiness,” Louise remembers. “It can be quite hard to sit in an emotion and just focus on that positivity, so it was nice to channel the feeling before it went sour.”
For now, Louise and Kristin are more than happy to accentuate the positives – after all, they’ve been a long time coming – but if they look a little bit further ahead, what is it they’re dreaming of?
Kristin pauses: “To be honest, I think the main goal is to have inner peace. We just want to be happy.”
In many ways, that’s the real prize, isn’t it?
Taken from the May 2025 issue of Dork. Prima Queen’s album ‘The Prize’ is out 25th April.
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