Evie Joy employs the fantastical to get super real with herself.
Her haunting new single, Whole, sees layers of sharply poetic diction expanding throughout the song like a sponge in warm water; a nonetheless deadly serious ballad that soaks in its messages and somehow grows huge despite its gravity. Joy sings to herself like she’s lovingly reanimating her own corpse, and “Whole” plays out like one of many therapeutic journal entries asking why she can so easily accept the flaws of others, but not her own.
To that end, the song’s accompanying music video is emphatic and visceral. Her past selves lay in three different coffins: the Evie Joy in the first coffin has a prom dress and a hairbrush; in the second, a red cocktail dress and electric guitar; in the third, a wedding dress and a clock – loss of naïveté, loss of sanity, and loss of time, respectively. “The beat’s already mute enough, ever since you left me loveless,” she sings at the beginning, holding her literal heart in her hands and burying it – later, she puts her heart back in, stitches the hole in her chest, and plucks her own heartstrings in tune with fingerpicked ukulele, now singing “I’ve been looking for love from somebody’s shelf, but I need to start with loving myself.”
