Bitch

This song is built on a contradiction and it knows it — a driving, distorted guitar riff with just enough pop sheen to keep it from tipping into pure aggression, propelling a lyric that catalogs every version of a woman the world wants to simplify into one. Meredith Brooks delivers it with a voice that's both melodic and combative, warm in the verses and serrated at the edges when the chorus hits, as if the anger and the softness are equally real and she's done choosing between them. The production sits squarely in mid-90s alt-rock: bright, compressed, arena-ready without being slick, the kind of sound that filled radio between grunge's exhale and pop-punk's inhale. The song's core insistence is that multiplicity isn't instability — that being many things at once is the actual truth of a person, not a flaw to be diagnosed. It arrived at exactly the moment that felt necessary, riding a cultural conversation about what women were allowed to claim as theirs. You put this on when you're tired of being summarized, when you've spent a day being one thing for someone else's comfort and need three and a half minutes that refuses that demand entirely.