If you’re looking to fill the Lana Del Rey shaped hole in your heart with someone earthy, less problematic, but equally as mesmerizing and beautifully haunting, Red Ribbon is 1000% for you. On “Renegade”, the first single off her forthcoming debut record Planet X, Red Ribbon (aka Emma Danner) tries to escape her own worst enemy — herself. Set in a surreal, southwest landscape, the video, directed by Ambar Navarro, shows Danner on the run. To where? We’re unsure. But with a serene intensity, Danner goes deeper into the desert and into battle.
Danner’s vocals coo hypnotically over the chorus. You can sense there’s a folk influence to the timbre and style as well, with the way her voice scoops and lilts along the way. The instrumentation dreamily carries the listener along as if they too were in a fast car on an open road going nowhere. It would be easy to drift away, completely enraptured with the music and quality of Danner’s voice without paying too much attention to what she’s actually singing, but the context makes the track that much more impactful. We get a look at who Danner is at her core. How she views herself, her feelings, her emotions. One could argue that to Danner’s point, the intoxication of fighting oneself, the heightened emotional state, the inner turmoil, is too powerful a pull to ignore, even if you know it’s in your best intentions to do so. Are we all prone to self destruction? Does our self awareness of our inclination to be drawn to those tendencies do anything in part to stop us from giving into them? It’s hard to say. With the last lines of the track, Danner seems to give us her perspective though. It’s a battle of control. If that is your only desire, you’ll be blind to what is actually good for you.
‘Planet X’ comes out June 11th. Keep up with Red Ribbon on Instagram and Spotify.
