On September 9, the teen indie-pop artist Brye released an evolved version of her song “LEMONS” in a collaboration with Cavetown, aka Robin Skinner, another popular indie artist.
The original demo of “LEMONS” gained popularity on TikTok when Brye released a teaser of the song. People made hundreds of thousands of videos using the audio, rapidly increasing its popularity.
Brye explained in a TikTok back in April her experience with bullying. She wrote this song “to cope” with the bullying she experienced in her sophomore year of high school and sees her song as a way to “take the power back from these controlling and manipulative men.”
However, her new duet version adds the perspective of the aforementioned bully figure through Cavetown’s lines. In these new lyrics, he creates a narrative of a boy unable to deal with his emotions and consequently ending up taking them out on others.
In addition to the relatable message of the song and the captivating rhythm of the song, the lyrics encompass all of the anger and exasperation she feels in a strikingly savage way. She reduces her bully to “a sour little boy with a fragile masculinity,” “a coward,” and part of a bunch of “insecure babies who think that they’re men.” The song plays off a twisted version of the saying “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” instead saying “when life gives you lemons, you don’t make lemonade you use them to make girls cry.”
There’s also a music video to go along with the song which follows a pretty simple concept and continuously shifts between the two perspectives of Brye and Cavetown as they sing.
There are moments when both singers harmonize, showing the overlap between the two perspectives. In the outro, both sides want to put down the other, vowing to do anything in their power to hurt them. Like she said, her reaction after being treated poorly for so long is to take away power from those people by putting them down in a similar way they put her down, but this time it’s well-deserved.
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