"Sea Creatures" is the title track off SOAK's (i.e. Irish 18-year old Bridie Monds-Watson) debut album. The Guardian's Kate Mossman has praised Bridie's thoughtful and poetic songwriting, describing the album as "a vivid portrait of teenage deep-thinking: intricate, ambiguous psychodramas chewed over in her distinctive Derry accent, a bit like a young Paul Brady if he were singing Joni Mitchell or reading aloud the diary of Anne Frank. Songs are generous and outward-looking: the title track captures the feeling of watching a friend suffer at school and yearning to tell her it will get better. (The name, SOAK, combines 'soul' and 'folk' - "strange", she says, "as my music is neither.")"
Bridie reminds me of Lorde when she debuted with "Royals". Both are young and refreshingly intelligent, casting themselves as an outsider (while simultaneously revealing an inner desire for intimacy and connection) as they lace their lyricism with social commentary. Bridie expresses compassion for a possibly depressive friend/love interest who is being harassed: 'I know you get it bad/ You don’t deserve thisAnd I won’t put up/ With their ignorance/ '. Its not clear who these harbingers of youthful emotional problems are (her parents? teachers? classmates?), but Bridie's lyrical persona dismisses their claims of loving her friend, poignantly laments their inability to 'understand' or 'value' love, and wishes for their mutual escape:
'And they tell youThey love youWell they don’t mean itI don’t think they know what they mean!I don’t think they know what love isThrow itaround like it’s worthless I don’t think they know what love is.I don’t get this townNeither do youWe should run awayJust me and you.Cause I don’t get the people hereThey’re curiousThey don’t really care.Sea creaturesInterfereI wish they would disappear ...'
Bridie's songwriting presents an individual drama without being overly dramatic (or heavy-handed, as Lorde sometimes is), preferring to use subtle intonations and the occasional metaphor (I think she’s just a fish!) to convey the rawness and intensity of adolescent experience - that precarious stage of growth between childhood and adulthood. There's an understated lesbian subtext here (which is made more apparent by Bridie's boyish self-presentation), but the song mainly foreground an estrangement that feels universal to everyone. As Kate Mossman notes, "if she represents anything at all, it's the potential of songwriting to show the complexity of a person's inner life. Someone once said you can never truly know your children. If they all wrote songs like this, we would".
