From the start of its grungy guitar and seemingly deliberate overindulged production, “Scroll” from Emily Ronna has quickly become a gem of the 2021 music landscape for a variety of reasons. Ronna has always been a brutally uncompromising performer, combining sounds of pop, punk, rock and even dabbling in the technicolor nightmare fantasy that is “Hyper Pop”, but she turns her ear to this kind of catchy nihilistic banger.
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“Scroll” is very transparently a condemnation of the “doom scroll” world we live in. For those unaware of the term, Doom Scrolling is basically the feeling of scrolling through your various social media to be met with constant bad news, but it almost feeds this negative pit of wanting more. Ronna has always sung openly about her mental health and here it’s front and center as the backing track almost masks the deeply insecure and painful feelings of living in the digital age with the pop punk mid 2000s aura that makes it a delightful if not deceptive ear worm. The arrangement is wildly artificial, but that’s be design allowing each instrument to strike a chord of almost robotic perfection.
The guitar riff is catchy, the snaps, clicks and claps adding to this kind of faux party vibe as Ronna sings about her growing disengagement with the world around her and how much easier it is to slip into just aimlessly scrolling. It’s the kind of song I can see speaking heavily to people who feel trapped, and with the rise of things like the *shudders* “Meta-verse”, these existential dreads aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon. “Don’t feel myself right now/Rabbit hole going down” might seem a little on the nose, but as time goes on with our dependency on technology, subtly has had its day.
Ronna’s voice is chaotic and exotic as she almost becomes more pleading in her words as she declares that she doesn’t know why she’s doing what she is, and the way it pushes us and her through is wildly relatable. There’s a real art form to the “song that sounds happy, but isn’t” and Ronna walks that perfect balance here. In the latter end when we take a reprise of the chorus, stripped down and raw, it’s like we can hear Ronna holding her own beating heart as she asks herself why continues down this harmful path, and when the backtrack kicks back in, it almost feels nefarious, like Ronna is losing a battle with herself and all she can do is resign and smile and do it all over again.
This is a stellar and once again deceptive track tackling dense feelings with a shockingly sparse, but effective toolkit. I’ve listened to it multiple times and it feels like a song cut from a different world, a pre Internet world and that nostalgic sound goes perfectly with the ennui for better days before finding yourself trapped in the scrolling cycle. Emily Ronna has crafted a certified banger, and it’s not something you’ll want to scroll past.
Chadwick Easton