Beatrix is back with her new single titled “Dead Dog.” She recalls the story of an ex cheating on her and him likening the situation to a dog dying — grossly simplifying it down to “You loved it so much and you couldn’t imagine life without it, but then you get a new dog and sort of forget about the old one.” A decade later, the misguided matter-of-factness sticks with Beatrix as she’s now returning to haunt him.
Allowing nonchalance and carelessness to turn into regret year by year, “Dead Dog” is a go-for-broke rock song on which Kasnetz breathtakingly exorcises her rage and pain. Created with just her and two collaborators, Philip Etherington and Ehren Ebbage, there is power in the tight-knit collaboration of the new single. As painful as the subject matter is, Beatrix is grateful for the metaphor it lent to her songwriting.
Discussing the multiple lives today’s song has lived, Beatrix shared, “It was originally much lower and slower. I resisted the change but it was definitely the right move. When I belt the higher parts it’s so much more powerful and angry. At one point while recording this vocal I looked up and Philip and Ehren were both filming me. Ehren said ‘in case I am witnessing a moment in rock history.’ That’s how it felt to sing it — like I was getting out all of the rage inside of me.”
In the official video for “Dead Dog” directed by Rogue Bonaventura, Beatrix refreshes the famed trope of heartbreak and revenge at the high school prom. In all her movements and facial expressions, the anguish of the song’s lyrics writhe and squirm in front of a backdrop of twinkly lights and tinsel.
Arielle Kasnetz, the LA-based singer-songwriter who goes by the moniker Beatrix, had to discover her own voice. For most of her life, she trained in classical music, spending hours practicing vocal scales and learning piano pieces. But the stories she told weren’t hers, the words and the feelings somebody else’s who had lived a long time ago. It wasn’t until the pandemic, stuck in her bedroom with an acoustic guitar that someone had gifted to her a few birthdays ago, that she began to try writing for herself.
Now, coming up on her second album and Nice Life Recording Company debut, she explores a formative relationship from her past and the reverberations that it left. With an expansive, yearning sound that combines alternative singer-songwriter influences in the form of indie rock, folk and chamber-pop, it’s the sound of a songwriter as committed to honesty and self-exploration as to constant musical progression. The songs are striking and off-kilter, full of surprising melodic turns or boldly arranged instrumentals, and careening from hushed piano numbers to loud full-band blasts. It seems fair to say that Kasnetz’s whole life led to this upcoming record; a reckoning with how the past bleeds into the present that’s moving, raw, yet perfectly crafted. It’s unmistakably Beatrix’s story, told in Beatrix’s voice.
