Softee (the stage name of actress and rising DIY pop creator Nina Grollman, she/they) has shared new single “Red Light Green Light” via City Slang Records.
“The birth of this song actually came from a beat that a friend Namir Blade made that sampled a moment in Squid Game. I loved the show so much and the beat was so intoxicating, I wanted to do something with it. I wrote most of the lyrics as a response to Squid Game,” said Softee. “The song is a tirade against nepotism and elitist thinking. What makes me so different from someone who has a trust fund other than their proximity to wealth? These questions swirl around in the song, but subversively, because it’s so danceable I don’t think you really hear the lyrics unless you’re paying close attention. That is my favorite kind of pop music– the kind where you have to look up the lyrics and it gives the song a whole new meaning.”
The video, also out today (co-directed by Softee with Charlie Cole, with creative direction by Machel Ross) is a powerful yet cheeky statement in itself, finding Softee inhabiting the character of a businessman going out on the town and indulging in his own bravado and lavishness.
Speaking on the video, which was shot with a DIY approach on the streets of New York, she comments: “We went into the shoot with a solid plan, but we left plenty of room for spontaneity within that framework. We were constantly pushing what we could get away with filming in public places.”
Machel Ross added: “When I’m thinking of building a world for a music video, I like to listen to a song on repeat and see the way that the song scores the randomness of life. I was listening to Red Light Green Light on the train and I saw this incredibly glamorous woman in her 70’s across the platform wearing a fur coat. The song’s interrogation of the 1% perfectly scored the gaudiness of her aesthetic against the grittiness of the subway.”
Listen to “Red Light Green Light” and watch the video for it below: