Eartheater x Tony Seltzer’s “Joyride” is a throwback to the songs that pre-dated what we now can categorize as “hot girl summer” — celebrating trashy, dirty, 90’s era sex raunchiness without any of the self conscious instagram baddie perfection that we so often see in music of this type today. Alexandra Drewchin, the woman behind Eartheater, has a melodic and hypnotic voice that is as high and sweet as the summer itself. It is a lulling sound that would be right at home as the background noise behind a group smoke sesh. The video has such a vivid technicolor pallet that you can almost smell the motor oil and feel the sun and sweat on your back. It’s glam before glam became synonymous with exclusivity and wealth. This is the glam of big, wild hair and long, cherry red nails.
The thing about the sanitization of the hot girl summer is that it makes it so much less fun. In summertime what I really want to do is put in as little effort as possible. It’s hot, it’s vacation time. I want to wear skimpy clothes and let my hair get frizzy and big, the last thing I want to do is work on my contour and make sure my crop top matches my high waisted jeans. This is the kind of thing that I really miss about the 90’s which are deeply invoked in this video. That back then it was cool to be trashy, and that trashiness gave way to fearlessness. In Eartheater’s “Joyride”, I see a representation of my ideal hot girl summer.