#9: weekend - VÉRITÉ
we're the new kids waiting on the edge and we're ready to go
if you’ve known me at any point between now and 2017, you’ve probably heard me talk about VÉRITÉ, kelsey byrne’s pop project. over the years, her work has varied from darker, synthy worlds to lighter, brighter sounds, always maintaining a very solid pop sensibility. whether she’s totally lost or she’s happy, she’s been my favorite artist since i randomly found her debut album “somewhere in between” on spotify while i was sitting in a starbucks in north charleston (yes, i remember exactly where i was).
i’m constantly shocked she hasn’t gotten bigger than she has, but the smallness of v’s fanbase allows her to actually talk to us. she runs a discord server where she chats it up with fans (this week, she revealed in the discord that the new album is underway as we speak) and she makes a habit of interacting with us on social. i don’t know the inner workings, but since she’s independent and seems to support herself financially through her projects, i assume she must be successful enough despite how intimate her world feels. it’s cool to feel like an artist is your little secret but know that she’s actually bigger than that.
there’s so much more i could say about v’s body of work, but today, we are here to discuss her 2014 banger “weekend” (which she did release a reimagined version of in 2024 — really brought a new life to the song). it’s hard to pick, but this is my favorite song by v (and she knows that with the amount of times i’ve @ed her on social asking her to play it live). it is frenetic as all hell with a crazy percussive drumline, chugging guitars, and bold vocals, and it illustrates a manic booze-laden love affair that presumably happens all over a weekend, obviously.
well, it’s not so obvious what this song means, actually. once somewhere on social (probably during one of the IG lives during quarantine), v told us that “weekend” is actually about drugs. all the themes of this obsessive love that is dragging the main character down into the depressive mania palpable in the sound of the song are actually related to drugs. it makes more sense when you think about other info she once revealed to us, which is that she’s sober.
side note: it is so cool to have kelsey byrne as one of my sober inspirations. despite my sobriety, i still bump my favorite songs about addiction and remember how far i’ve come. other side note: i once dedicated this song to a girl on a playlist when we were, like, not even official yet. it was after that went down in flames and i lost a little piece of my favorite song that i realized it is for MARRIAGE only going forward. MARRIAGE!