Today, Veronica Everheart — a 23-year-old musician from Phoenix, AZ who imbues her distinctive synthesis of industrial pop and digital grunge with blunt lyricism and canny self-reflection — announces the July 29 release of Lighter in the Morning (2/2). The latest in a pair of EPs created in collaboration with Junius Karr (Gordon Raphael, The Hellp), it’s an emphatic work seething with sonic ambition and barbed observation.

Lead single “NO LOLITA SHIT” serves as a knockout introduction: a confessional but coy consideration of the double-edged sword of feminine sexuality, delivered amid blistering synth-tones and jittery electronics. Listen here.

As Veronica shares: “”NO LOLITA SHIT” is a meditation on femininity and hyper-sexualization. It reckons with the choices women, including myself, make to be accepted and idolized — to be an object of lust.”

“Growing up, I resented and quietly envied the girls who seemed effortlessly feminine. I had more masculine hobbies and primarily male friends. The normative conceptions of femininity caused me to be perpetually at odds with myself — a dissonance I channeled through “NO LOLITA SHIT.””

Watch the “NO LOLITA SHIT” video — a stark black-and-white pulse directed by Zane Berry (Tall Skeleton) — here.

With Lighter in the Morning (2/2) — as well as its sister release, 2024’s Lighter in the Morning (1/2) — Veronica, in collaboration with Junius Karr, envisions a futuristic approach to singer-songwriter music, one that pairs Joni Mitchell-style lyrical emotionality with the electronic subtext of Nine Inch Nails and 21st century existence writ large.

It’s a sound that strives for, and attains, inter-dimensionality: a swirl of red-lining synthesizers, guitars mangled beyond recognition, vocal glitches, skeletal percussion, and sticky melodies. Throughout, Veronica’s songwriting exhibits a droll humor and clear-eyed perspective, never succumbing to lazy heroism or victimhood.

Veronica Everheart splits her time between Phoenix and New York, going from desert to concrete and back again. She remains an essential part of Phoenix’s local independent music scene, putting on shows and DJing club nights, as well as serving as a go-to opening act when contemporaries like The Hellp, Hannah Vu, and Slow Hollows are passing through.