Erotica Veronica (Deluxe)

Erotica Veronica (Deluxe)

“Erotica” opens Miya Folick’s *Erotica Veronica* with a desire that is deliberately ordinary in its setting: she wants to flirt with a woman in broad daylight, on the street. That clarity is what makes the song feel so charged. The lyric moves between the tactile intimacy of a kiss and the practical facts of a life already in progress—coffee with a serial monogamist, a car, sleepiness, a relationship whose comforts she does not simply want to discard. Desire arrives not as a grand escape but as an interruption inside the familiar.

Folick’s repeated attention to softness and touch gives the song a sensual surface, while the verse keeps asking what happens when one person’s openness unsettles another. “If it’s scary / baby talk to me” offers tenderness, but it does not make the fear disappear. The narrator wants to explore a part of herself without pretending that exploration is consequence-free. That friction is more interesting than a clean coming-out narrative: the song does not resolve the competing needs it puts in the same room.

Pitchfork’s review of the album reads “Erotica” alongside “La Da Da” as the opening statement of a record about Folick’s sapphic desire while dating a man. The critic found those songs gorgeous and uncomfortable, praising their candor while noting that they give limited attention to how the other people in the triangle might feel. That tension is audible in the lyric itself. Recorded with Los Angeles musicians including Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, the album favors a more intimate, live-played scale than Folick’s earlier production-heavy work. Here, that closeness draws the listener into a thought still being worked out—not a manifesto, but a vivid, unsettled confession.