<\/p>\n
Sweetheart. Honey. Miss. Darling.<\/p>\n Every woman knows the feeling of being called those names condescendingly by a man who sees her only as an object of attraction, not as a human being.<\/p>\n For a band like Evil Felipe, made up of four young women in their late teens and early twenties, the nicknames are inescapable even backstage at shows, and that\u2019s what drove them to take one back on their newest track, \u201cDarling,\u201d released Feb. 14.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time I’ve been called ‘darling’ in my life, it has never been good,\u201d singer-guitarist Emma Bain said. \u201cEvery situation where everyone has called me ‘darling,’ it has been looking down on me and underestimating what I can do, and I took all of those experiences and pulled them together.\u201d<\/p>\n The song, in three-quarter time, is a throwback to the 2000s rock that provided an outlet for so many girls and young women.<\/p>\n \u201cDarling, you\u2019re fragile, you\u2019re paper-thin\/Stuck in a world that won\u2019t let you in\/You know you try to do this alone, but the promise of more struck through to your bones,\u201d Bain sings. \u201c\u2019Darling, you\u2019re making a mess out of things\u2019\/That\u2019s what they say when they don\u2019t want you to sing.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the pet names, and the sexist attitude they represent, are a problem all over, \u201cDarling\u201d was particularly inspired by the band members\u2019 experiences growing up in music. Evil Felipe began as a childhood project, so for the first several years of the band\u2019s existence, its oldest members were teenage girls, a chronically underestimated demographic.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing an all-girl band in this industry is hard sometimes,\u201d Bain said. \u201cI also work in the music industry and see it day-to-day. There have been shows where people assume I don’t know what I’m doing and will talk to someone else instead of me because I’m a girl, and it’s always very strange to see.\u201d<\/p>\n Bain and guitarist Ella Staltare said the song has been in the works for more than a year, and audiences at their live shows have been hearing and liking it for quite some time now. According to Staltare, though her lead guitar parts on the song evolved over that time, the lyrics have always been the same.<\/p>\n \u201cDarling, you\u2019re not really chained to the wall \u2018cause the chains that they hold weren\u2019t there at all\/Now you can see what they all try to hide\/Now you can go and leave this behind,\u201d Bain sings. \u201cDarling, you\u2019re cold, alone, and you\u2019re tired\/But they won\u2019t break you down \u2018til they put out your fire\/You’ll take back your throne and we’ll be alright\/But they won\u2019t ever change, so we’ll put up a fight.\u201d<\/p>\n Bassist Abby Rickert said she particularly likes the \u201cdark carnival\u201d vibe of the song, inspired by some of the band\u2019s stage outfits, though their use of that sound is more like \u201ca Dungeons & Dragons one-shot\u201d and less of an indication of what else they\u2019re working on.<\/p>\n Right now, she said, the band is \u201cdissecting\u201d a batch of unreleased songs and reworking them so they will \u201crepresent where we are now.\u201d<\/p>\n