The Off Beat: promqueen’s Dark Fairytale

promqueen’s rap theatrics get dark on new LP szn two (courtesy of promqueen)

The Front Festival, Future Front Texas’ annual Labor Day weekend shindig, has everything: a film showcase and a concert, both highlighting the work of women and LGBTQ+ creatives, plus two bookending pool parties to beat the heat. The event returns to the LINE Austin, the Contemporary Austin-Laguna Gloria, and Cheer Up Charlies Aug. 29 to Sept. 1, with a portion of ticket sales benefiting the organization’s Creative Future of Texas Fund.

Taylor Swift has her eras; Adele names her albums after her ages. For promqueen, serialized projects arrive more like seasons of a television show. While 2023’s szn one debuted the rapper’s theatrical project with a bright coral album cover and a cheeky “liteweight” flow, June follow-up szn two – as its black and gray artwork suggests – goes darker.

“szn one is the promqueen sampler platter to showcase what [my] world is about,” the artist explains. “szn two shifts deeper into the story – the fairy tale, if you will – and goes into deeper thematic topics, [including] colonization, some of my family members’ experiences as immigrants, domestic violence, inner racism, [and] perseverance.”

With a background in acting and a love for famous worldbuilders like Doja Cat and Childish Gambino, promqueen views herself as a storyteller. She slips in and out of a Valley girl accent in new track “pov,” a nod to her experience in code-switching growing up in majority-white North Texas, and references some of the U.S.’s most well-known fables with song titles like “big bad wolf” and “white rabbit.”

“I love playing with different voices and characters,” the artist says. “Being an only child, I just kind of talked to myself, so this is the place where it comes out.”

More than a childhood pastime, channeling different perspectives has allowed promqueen to work through generational trauma. “number on me,” which the rapper confirms is her most “aggressive, intense” song, references the French colonization of Vietnam, which she learned through her mother that her great-grandmother experienced firsthand.

“Whenever the French were coming in, in order to prevent your grandmother from being sexually harmed, she actually put clay and dirt on [her] face so that she would look ugly,” the artist recalls her mother explaining. promqueen channels that ugliness in the track, repeating its title phrase with increasing fury.

“The song is about becoming enraged after being taken advantage of,” she explains. “Whether that’s being colonized or also domestic abuse, which an immediate family member of mine was going through at the time. That was how I processed it.”