Clare Easdown’s new single, “Lipstick On My Restraints,” doesn’t arrive so much as it materializes, spitting glitter and venom in the face of polite society. This is the sound of a patient hijacking the asylum’s PA system, a furious and fiercely glamorous reclamation of a narrative. It’s a track that feels less written and more clawed into existence, forged in the friction between imposed silence and the absolute necessity of a scream.
For a moment, the central image—that vibrant slash of cosmetic defiance on a symbol of control—made me think of something I read about the besieged citizens of Sarajevo during the 1990s. How, amidst the chaos and rubble, people would still dress in their finest clothes just to fetch water, a radical act of normalcy and dignity. This song shares that same DNA. It’s the insistence on finding personal aesthetic and power in the very architecture of your confinement.
But Easdown isn’t merely surviving; she’s performing, turning a sterile institution into a stage. The song tears down the notion that trauma must be a quiet, shameful burden. Here, scars are not blemishes to be hidden but revered, almost mystical tattoos proving a battle was fought and, crucially, endured. It rejects the world’s diagnosis of “broken” and instead forms a solidarity with the wild, the misunderstood, the beautifully unconventional.
The dark, alternative-rock pulse of the track acts as a perfect vessel—a gleaming, serrated edge carrying raw, unapologetic lyrics. It’s a piece of music that looks you dead in the eye, never flinching from the brutal realities of a system that can fail the very people it’s meant to protect.
It leaves you with a question that hangs in the air long after the final chord fades. When faced with a world that wants to chain you, do you pull against it, or do you start redecorating?
