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Rachel Grae‘s new song was years in the making. “I wrote this song actually in 2021,” she tells HollywoodLife about “You Suck,” the new single she released today (June 23) to kick off Mad Girl Summer. A surging bop of pop vocals spiked with a punk attitude, “You Suck” is a song for those who are done being sad with heartbreak and are ready to move on to the next phases: anger, revenge, and happiness. The song, Rachel tells HL, was born out of her own pain. “I walked into my session, and I filled my co-writer in. She’s also my great friend, so I tell her about my love life. She’s like, “Oh, how is so-and-so doing?” And I was like, “No, we’re not talking about that.’”
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“And she was like, ‘Okay, I have one question,’” says Rachel, who insisted that they weren’t going to write about her breakup. “She was like, ‘Okay, one question: What would you say to him if you saw him right now? Just across the street, what would you say?’ And I was like, “I don’t know. I’d probably just be like, ‘You suck,’ and just move on with my day.’ And she was like, ‘Okay, we’re writing a song called ‘You Suck.’ ‘You know what? Okay, let’s do it.’ So, it was a really playful thing to begin with. And then, it stemmed from a lot of emotion clearly throughout it.”
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“It’s really the lyrics that I wrote in the chorus of, “I never even needed closure, made it too easy to get over you,’” she says, explaining how “You Suck” is not a sad song. “It’s more of not needing somebody in your life to feel happy and giving yourself all the love back instead of giving it to them. Allowing yourself to close the door, I think, is what Mad Girl Summer should be becoming rather than Sad Girl Summer.”
Rachel wasn’t the only one who had a lot to get off her chest with “You Suck.” Ahead of the song’s release, she put out a hotline for fans to call and hear a preview of “You Suck,” and leave an anonymous voicemail telling her about the person in their life that just sucks. For those who also pre-saved the single, they received a “You Suck” zine and were entered in a custom iPod giveaway, decorated by Rachel herself.
“When I was going through the whole creative process with this song and thinking about how I’m going to promote it and all that stuff, and when I was showing my friends, everybody had the same reaction of, ‘Oh my god, yes, Rachel, this is me,’” she tells HL. Rachel discovered that there was this community of grievances, of how everyone had at least one person in their life that sucks. “Whether it’s a friendship, a family member, a relationship, whatever it is, there’s one person in our life that has done us dirty in some sort of way.”
When conceptualizing the song’s promotion and music video, Rachel said she thought up about Mean Girls, and the Burn Book in the movie. “When I wrote the song, it felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. So, I was like, ‘Let me make a book for everybody to just write it out, leave it anonymous. We don’t even call them out, but write it out, get it off your chest.’”
“I make music in order to do that, or I write down my feelings in a journal. So, I wanted a community journal where nobody feels alone,” she adds. “Everybody knows that they’ve gone through it, but it’s also something to look back on with.”
Providing the hotline and anonymous public journal was a way for her fans/friends to connect and see that they weren’t alone in their feelings. “Use the hotline, yell about it, scream about it, tell the story, laugh at it. Whatever emotion you want, write it down, send it out. And just be able to read everybody else’s at the same time, I thought it would just be a really cool community thing that everybody would love,” she says.
Rachel also says she hopes that “You Suck” helps those recenter themselves when going through the end of a relationship or a situationship or any kind of -ship they find themselves on. “I feel like there are always phases,” she says, “where first you go through the heartbreak part, where you’re really upset, and you go through the anger, then you go through the withdrawal of them or the needing of them and that kind of thing.”
“So, I feel like in this exact moment of my life, I have exited the phase of the really sad and missing someone,” she adds. “[I’m] looking at how bad I actually was treated and how little they made me feel in it, where I’m like, ‘Wait, no. They don’t deserve another cry song.’ This is more of a ‘you truly suck, and I wish you the best. I didn’t need your closure. You’re good to go. Just know that you’re awful, really, and that I’m moving on.’”
(Daniel Alexander Harris)
This isn’t to say that Rachel is anti-sad. “I’m really not an angry person,” she tells HL. “But, I think more for me now,t he anger is more of wanting to get my power back rather than giving it to them.”
“I think a lot of people chase closure after a relationship ends,” she adds, “and they chase that validation that they need back from that person in order to close the chapter. So, it was more of a thing where it was like, ‘I don’t think we need closure anymore. I think everybody knows what happened and how it happened and what they should do.’
“It’s harder said than done,” she concludes, “but if this song can allow somebody to close the door quicker just by actually understanding that it is their loss, and you don’t need closure for every relationship you go through, then I’ve 100% succeeded with this song. So, that’s the message that I wanted to mainly get across with it.”
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