New Music: Elise Trouw – The Perfect Girl

Is body horror pop a thing? Especially when the horror arises from the expectations that society and social media place on women?

The sharp, observant, and sweetly unforgiving The Perfect Girl finds Elise Trouw’s alter ego, Elon Lust, reducing women to their parts, to be reassembled and refined at the whim of the male gaze, aided by a compliant media culture designed almost exclusively to meet that need.

What drives that message home is The Perfect Girl itself: sunny 60s Californian pop with an indie-meets-Bacharach-and-David beat. You’ll find yourself singing along and then suddenly realise what the lyrics are saying to you.

The song is from The Diary of Elon Lust, the new album from Elise Trouw, and is based on a memory from Trouw’s middle school days, when a group of boys made a “hot or not” list that ranked all the girls in class.

“It was one of the first moments I realized how girls were being seen,” she says. “It wasn’t much about who we were. It was about how we looked. That never really left me.”

The Diary of Elon Lust is out on the 13th of February 2026 via Midtopia. There will also be a vinyl edition via Buy Before You Stream; head to Elise Trouw’s Instagram and Facebook feeds for all the latest album news, and details of her upcoming US tour.