By Paddy Kinsella

I was hooked on Lancaster songwriter, Grace Monaco, from the moment I heard her savage character assassination of a fictional, yet, oh too real Karen – you’ve seen the meme right?! ‘Live, laugh, love / plastered in her hallway / slimming world every other Tuesday / She goes to Thailand once and thinks that she is cultured / because she stroked an elephant,’ she sings in what is easily the most accurate summation of how I’d imagine a real life Karen to be – absolutely hilarious too. The video shows Monaco in a Gail Platt-like wig, dressing rosary beads around a shrine to Katie Hopkins.

On new single, Pedigree, taken from an EP of the same name that’s also out now, Monaco has lost none of that humour. The self-penned press release ends with the cliffhanger, ‘As Grace releases Pedigree, will she for much longer be able to evade the Sisters of Perpetual Grudge and avoid being sent back to finishing school?!’ That final sentence is as good as any introduction to the world of Monaco; how she entirely inhabits characters of her own making, how she effortlessly interweaves humour and fiction, and how she has you hanging on her every word.

A song about Grammar School boys, it has her excising that acidic tongue yet again, this time over a wonderfully lethargic beat. Though Monaco accepts that the boy in question has ‘first rate biology,’ she also notes, ‘if he was a curry / he’d be something mild.’ The self-directed video is equally hilarious. It switches between two characters. The first lying in a dog kennel, bobbing her head subserviently to the beat. The second, a lady of luxury flouncing around her opulent staircase. At the end, we see the real Grace, with a wry smile portraying that she’d been holding in a laugh – something that we hadn’t been able to contain all along. The grammar school boy of Pedigree couldn’t keep pace with Monaco, and if she continues like this, we suspect not many others will either.

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