Amira Elfeky’s been on the Agenda's radar for a while now, catapulting her way onto our Search for the Next Deftones feature on the strength of her brilliant Skin to Skin EP, released in March of last year. On that release, the Connecticut native walked a fine line between impeccable pop songwriting and unabashed melodrama. Take early Evanescence and post-Diamond Eyes Deftones, put them in a blender, and add a hefty-serving of emotionally intense lyrical hooks, and you end up with an incredibly convincing release that could easily slide into a playlist alongside contemporaries like Spiritbox or Sleep Token. Our expectations were high for the follow-up, and we finally have it with Surrender, which dropped on the last Friday of March.
Surrender opens strong out the gate with “Take Me Under,” a bounce riff-enabled masterclass in pop songwriting reminiscent of nu-glam acts like Cassyette, which ultimately collapses into a wildly heavy breakdown punctuated with some surprising chopped-up guitar sweeps. Lead single “Will You Love Me When I’m Dead” follows the same formula, ending in yet another neck-snapping breakdown. It’s pretty apparent pretty quickly that this is a much heavier outing than Skin to Skin, and Elfeky continues to soar over these arrangements while trying out new tricks, including some convincing spoken word sections over the breakdown at the center of “Forever Overdose.”
Amira Elfeky’s always been a dramatic lyricist–one of the absolute highlights of Skin to Skin single “A Dozen Roses” was the sheer brinkmanship of the chorus, “You’re the love of my life / Don’t leave me here to die.” It’s the emotional maximalism of lines like this, delivered full-throated with maybe a hint of a wink, that firmly assert the singer’s place in the nu metal canon. And Surrender has plenty of those lines–only Elfeky could pull an infectiously catchy chorus out of “Loving you is suicide / Baby you’re the death of me / I would die a thousand times / Just to have you next to me.” Slide some bounce riffs into the bridge after that chorus and you’ve got a winner.
It’s no secret that I got into nu metal in the first place while grappling with the emotional fallout of a puberty I didn’t want, only to fall in love with it again years later while trying to patch up the damage with the customary cocktail of estradiol and spiro, and Surrender perfectly captures the emotional turbulence of those periods of transition pretty much all of us have been through at some point or another. There’s a reason we keep coming back to this subgenre like codependent lovers: it’s just too damn fun.
With her second EP, Elfeky’s giving us something less Deftones 2 and something more Amira Elfeky. I personally can’t wait to see what she does with a full-length.
Surrender is available now through Anemoia Records.
