Nicole Dollanganger's Natural Born Losers Turns 10

When I’m Good, I’m Very Good: Natural Born Losers Turns 10

When you think of literature written with young women in mind, you might think of bestsellers like the Twilight saga or the sixteen Pretty Little Liars novels, the latter of which spawned one of ABC Family’s most enduring 21st-century teen dramas. Both series are rich texts, featuring young girls in extraordinary circumstances dealing with secrets they can’t fathom and adults who are, at best, of no help. They have some scandal to them, but their transgressions pale in comparison to V. C. Andrews’ first Dollanganger novel, Flowers in the Attic. Decried as “deranged swill” in a contemporaneous Guardian review, Andrews’ 1979 debut recounts the story of a family in freefall.

Christopher and Corrine Dollanganger are the perfect parents to their four kids (Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory) in verdant Pennsylvania until Christopher dies in a car wreck, leaving Corrine and the kids penniless and desperate. Corrine brings the kids to her onetime home of Virginia to try and get on her father’s good graces once again, since he disapproved of her marriage. At the sprawling Foxworth Hall manor, Corrine’s religious zealot mother conceals the kids in a spare room with attic access, as Corinne’s father must not know of their existence. What turns into a temporary arrangement turns into three years of captivity, laced with malnutrition, homicide, and incest between teenage siblings that may not have been consensual, initially. It’s an outrageous novel, deploying the Southern gothic’s already salacious preferred tropes in service of something that reads like a pulp novel.

That’s why it works, especially with young audiences: It’s a harrowing story of young people in transition, haunted by the desiccated, oppressive system from which their mother came, with the spectre of taboo lording over them at all times, practically begging Chris and Cathy to break all the rules. Their world is one where the adults are spiteful sinners, and teenagers make for better providers for themselves and their siblings. Transgressive desires don’t look so bad when the ones who set the rules are the most craven. It’s no coincidence that Nicole Bell, the Toronto singer-songwriter and visual artist who records under the name Nicole Dollanganger, owned two collectible copies of Flowers in the Attic. Like Andrews, Bell’s writings are seeped in backwoods figures who embrace each other but aren’t supposed to, inflicting harm upon themselves just as often as they give and receive love. Cathy and Chris break all the rules for each other and the good of their siblings, and even when the adults break all the rules to destroy them, they remain as resolute as possible. It’s grotesque, and it’s romantic. Bell’s work comes from an appreciation of these stories as fantasies while contrasting them with the more grim and unpredictable realities of the world as we have it today.

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Grotesque romance is all over Natural Born Losers, the first Nicole Dollanganger studio album but fifth overall. The previous four Dollanganger albums were homemade, minimalist songwriting exercises designed to support her uncanny soprano. She mused on the carnal, the gory, and the fringes of youth experience with special care for the literary and cinematic figures she held dear. One might’ve compared her pre-Natural Born Losers output to that of KatieJane Garside’s work as Lalleshwari, or to Gregory and The Hawk, but Dollanganger’s lyrical entanglement with Southern gothic culture, disordered eating, and violent sex renders those comparisons mostly aesthetic. Natural Born Losers amped it up with more vivid storytelling and an electrified production that placed her haunted pop in conversation with the nascent punk-shoegaze revival, which turned out to be a perfect vehicle for her innocent yet resounding voice. Slow, cinematic pop from the likes of Ethel Cain or even Midwife, who’ve amassed cult followings over the last five years especially, wouldn’t be as legible to these audiences without Dollanganger’s initial contribution. At ten years old, Natural Born Losers still feels as immediate and progressive as it did when it was first released.

Nicole Dollanganger’s star emerged well before Natural Born Losers came out, though. From her bedroom in the rural Toronto exurbs, Bell shared her music and visual art with niche communities across several platforms, but Tumblr most of all. There, she could congregate with fans of horror films, vintage photography, and confessional poetry who egged each other on in their pursuit of a media-oriented community where people shared common, hyper-specific interests. Her antique dolls, decorative guns, and rare editions of Flowers in the Attic are aesthetic statements that should resonate with anyone who spent their teenage years scrolling through the parts of Tumblr less concerned with Doctor Who or Supernatural and more concerned with profound adolescent melancholy. They’re part of the Gothic margins of the soft grunge ecosystem, where an overwhelmingly girls-and-gays network built an aesthetic around reviving and revamping alt fashions of the nineties for the Obama era.

I lived for this stuff. What I remember from soft grunge’s early 2010s era was listening to Lana Del Rey and the 1975 while emulating Sky Ferreira’s fashion sense. As a catch-all for alternative femininities that borrowed from imagery associated with a grimier, more authentic past, it could go all over the place. Courtney Love worship and Sylvia Plath readings were mandatory. Bell herself was posting from a perspective so specific and, often, edgier than soft grunge writ large, but her music and her visuals as Nicole Dollanganger made sense in this world. Under the sub-genre’s broad umbrella, we sought alternative visions of ourselves and confronted taboos around body horror, violence against others and ourselves, sex, and drug use just as much as we streamed the latest offerings from the nascent indie-pop world. It could get ugly because we felt ugly and directed that energy all around, but in no direction more than toward ourselves.

When Natural Born Losers came to me, I was entering college, freshly out of the closet, and living full-time as a young gay man. However, I was also desperately afraid of men. Even before I knew why I was different, I could sense that my male peers could already tell. Keeping my differences under wraps was an existential mission; even when I came out, men scared me. I was scared of dying at the hands of a hateful straight man; I was scared of dying at the hands of a queer man who purported to be my lover. Part of it was the growing feminist consciousness of the time that made gender-based violence a daily talking point even before #MeToo, and part of it was garden variety self-reflexive homophobia.

As preoccupied with fear as I was, I couldn’t erase my desires. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want to be with men, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want a man who’d break all the rules for me, even if that meant putting myself at risk of grave bodily harm. With Natural Born Losers, I had a framework for understanding my co-constitutive fears and desires. I wanted men, and I wanted my safety, but I was ready to put myself in harm’s way to be with a man. I was ready to endure pain to satiate my desires; I might have even craved it. The lyrics of “Mean” feel like the most direct representation of my issue: “I like it when it hurts like hell / There’s nothing you can do to me / I wouldn’t do to myself.” There’s also “American Tradition,” where Bell exsanguinates for her man: “We play the knife game on the table / I bleed to death, it doesn’t matter / ‘Cause my baby, he’s still the winner.” If this is what it took to be with men, I was going to make myself ready for it.

Beyond the lurid content of Natural Born Losers’ lyrics, what drew me to the album was the sound. Nicole Dollanganger’s prior albums had a stark beauty all their own, but the minimalist, grime-y slowcore of Natural Born Losers supercharges Bell’s spectral vocals with haunting guitar howls and undulations that have become signature to Matthew Tomasi’s productions. In her teens, Bell was a fixture at Ontario hardcore gigs, and even if her early material doesn’t sound immediately hardcore, the content and the atmosphere are definitely similar to what you’ll find at a quality basement show. Hardcore is a genre, but it’s also a posture. In hardcore, your willingness to brush up against norms matters: Are you willing to deliver aggressive lyrics? Are you willing to address taboos through the redeployment of violence for redeeming ends? Are you working with the guitar in nontraditional methods? You’ll find all of these on Natural Born Losers, but they’ll sound different than your typical fast-paced hardcore show. The attitude and atmosphere are compatible, and it helps that the album’s limited personnel had social connections to hardcore that would eventually lead Dollanganger to collaborate with Code Orange and 100 gecs. Tomasi played in and recorded with a variety of Ontario hardcore and shoegaze bands at the moment when the punk and shoegaze crossover was growing into an era-defining movement (think Nothing, Cloakroom, and Whirr).

Bell and Tomasi’s creative chemistry comes from the recognition that hardcore, as an aesthetic movement, is transferable. Tomasi’s touch is electrifying but minimal; the guitars on “American Tradition” cry out, but the rhythm is simple, repetitive, and falls away when it’s time for Bell to take the lead. On “You’re So Cool,” the guitars either wail overhead or sigh beneath Bell while the drums mostly just keep the beat. “White Trashing” largely keeps the acoustic melody as a foundation, but flourishes of electric chords cut like a knife. Just like with her bedroom recordings, Bell is clearly the star of the show, but introducing heavier production cloaks every word with a metallic heft that makes every word feel extra sincere. Every word cuts deeper. The relative sparseness makes every song feel like it’s being delivered by a spirit trapped in a dark, wet basement, using only what tools she can muster to deliver her haunting balladry.

In the years since Natural Born Losers, Tomasi has grown from the secret weapon of Ontario DIY to a high-profile figure in his own right, producing Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter while opening her shows with his own shoegaze band, 9Million. It is my firm belief that Preacher’s Daughter could not have become a totemic cultural artifact without Natural Born Losers preceding it, and not just because it’s where Tomasi refined a heavy, sludge-y pop sound that he and Bell chased after. Natural Born Losers is less diaristic than the material that preceded it. Curdled Milk, Flowers of Flesh and Blood, Ode to Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs, and Observatory Mansions were home-recorded and assembled during and immediately following a long period of bedrest, mandated as part of a lengthy recovery from eating disorders, which inform songs as confrontational and devastating as “Please Eat.” “Dog Teeth” zeroes in on Bell’s experience of being raped; “Angels of Porn II,” originally released on 2014’s Observatory Mansions, links bulimia, digital penetration, and Satan together across three-and-a-half minutes of punishing guitar and lullabies, and it’s one of the most harrowing songs I’ve ever heard. But, it’s one of relatively few confessional songs on Natural Born Losers.

Preacher’s Daughter is the furthest thing from confessional; it’s a concept album about a fictional character breaking the rules of her day and paying the ultimate price for that. Interwoven through both Cain’s breakthrough debut and Natural Born Losers is a fixation on religion, sexuality, and transgression, with imagery drawn from film and literature, from Natural Born Killers to Gummo. Dollanganger has carried this through to this day with 2023’s Married in Mount Airy, which reduces but does not eschew graphic lyricism in favor of more meditation on the rotting vision of the American Dream, exemplified in the now-dilapidated honeymoon resorts of the Poconos. Ethel Cain’s follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter is its prequel, Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You, a similarly over-the-top, slow-paced examination of teenage romance under harsh skies. Writing and performing about personal experiences with these matters is one thing; to intensify those experiences into fantastical representations is to continue the tradition of V. C. Andrews. Draped in stark, pensive production that ranges from dark folk to doom, Dollanganger and Cain’s works place magnifying glasses on taboos without sugarcoating transgression, shining light on the depraved underbelly undergirding our social mores while recapturing nonmetropolitan stories and soundscapes for ends that have more liberating potential.

In its time, Natural Born Losers might’ve best been understood as the seedy alt-pop variant that made the major-label transgressors like Halsey or Melanie Martinez look more digestible. Critics from Pitchfork to Spin approached the album with tepid approval, recognizing Dollanganger’s clear difference from big-name dark pop, but unsure if the project had more to offer than minimalist rock production and shocking lyrics. Pitchfork was even less forgiving to Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter. In all fairness, Cain’s album is much longer than Dollanganger’s, though there’s variety in the songs if you’re willing to look closely. They’re both narrative-first songwriters, and Tomasi’s production is designed to electrify but not outshine.

Natural Born Losers’s extended ruminating on execution or on loving the bad, truly evil boy feel like they flirt so closely with teenage fantasies of love against all odds, of revenge, and of transcending embodiment that they feel designed to disturb to the point of emotional regression. Preacher’s Daughter puts similar emotions on display in a concept-album structure spread out over even longer time-stamps. I’d argue that these neutral-to-negative critical responses stem from a combination of the emotional nakedness with the idiosyncrasies of their production, designed more to stun and awe rather than to fit into a tradition. Both albums are wanton with their genre influences for perfectly valid reasons, and if the production doesn’t have enough meat or variety, it’s to give legroom to the songwriters, whose willingness to go for broke on emotional and violent lyrics shows a stark interest in getting a point across at all costs.

Natural Born Losers also got a lot of attention because it received a massive co-sign from Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, after she and Bell shared a stage with Lana Del Rey. Boucher and her then-partner Jaime Brooks co-founded a label, Eerie Organization, specifically to give Natural Born Losers a proper release, and it didn’t hurt to have one of the world’s buzziest alternative pop artists throwing her name behind Bell’s project. Eerie Organization itself never grew into a massive operation; after Natural Born Losers, the label offered Canada-specific visuals for Grimes’ Art Angels and released Bell’s 2018 Nicole Dollanganger album, Heart Shaped Bed, before going dormant.

What really made Natural Born Losers stand out and become a cult favorite was only well understood by those who’d been following her for years prior, but its impact has grown more obvious in the decade since, as stars like Ethel Cain have sold out their tours and Dollanganger herself turned heads at Roadburn, the Coachella of the alternative heavy music scene. Provocative lyrics, rural settings, and cascading guitar do not make for traditional pop success, but they speak better to the intensity of the internal contradictions we endure every day in order to keep ourselves together in a violent, stratified world. When listening to Natural Born Losers, you can give yourself over to those contradictions, follow them to their extremes, and center the pleasure and the pain that come with modern desire. It’s never easy, but it’s always worth it.

Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He can be found on social media, sometimes.

When I’m Good, I’m Very Good: Natural Born Losers Turns 10

Released this week in 2015, Nicole Dollanganger’s fifth album examines Southern gothic culture, disordered eating, and violent sex, in vivid storytelling and an electrified production that placed her haunted pop in conversation with a then-nascent punk-shoegaze revival.