The Singles Jukebox

She’s also a powerful song.

[Video][Website]
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Micha Cavaseno: Since I got introduced to the songs under the Empress Of banner last year, I’ve been taken by how impressive they are despite a ‘busy/stressful’ energy underpinning them. More and more, songs appear to play with irregular rhythms to jarr the listener, a possible effort to stand out in a world where the monotony of pulse is a growing and growing sea. There’s an extra trick though, where Lorely Rodriguez is fueled by a specific kind of unease where her seismic music can only complement the state of her world. “Woman is a Word” has a deep house swoon disrupted by a mix of Latin percussion and her siren vocals scything through. As a tune, “Woman is a Word” is lean to the point of slight, but as a sum of its parts its further examples of a particular sort of vision this will get only clearer or foggier in its focus.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: In which a woman asserts herself against the slinkiest limousine-disco this side of 2016. But too short, and something I might approve of more than like.
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Cassy Gress: The son’s got a four-chord progression looped endlessly, and each verse has phrases duplicated two or three times. I can’t even hear the bass in this unless I turn up the sound way louder than I’m comfortable with, so the song ends up turning into a hazy drone. I understand what she was going for, the sort of primal love or desire that becomes a truism, but “repetitive” is a word too.
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Claire Biddles: “Woman is a Word” is ethereal, a term which usually makes me roll my eyes when used to describe music by women, mainly because of its laziness — it has the same patronising tone as “earthy” or “tribal.” The term also usually signifies a certain brand of stylistic ethereality that’s hugely popular, but just isn’t my thing. Empress Of possesses the strange kind of ethereality, as opposed to the typical Florence Welch kind — she’s genuinely supernatural, not just dressed up as a mythical thing. During the song, she’s dispersed through the atmosphere, flying around you and taking every shape. “Only a woman if woman is a word.” She’s not soft or light, and her unpredictability is her weapon.
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Iain Mew: Lorely Rodriguez zeroes in on the feeling of the best, angriest and most intimate moments from her album, over a pared-down backing which doesn’t express anything as openly but circles like a pressure that won’t go away. If her performance was anything less than captivating there wouldn’t be enough here. There is.
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Megan Harrington: I’m used to the sort of subversive that sneaks raunch in with a pop melody or makes slithering under your skin sound sexy. Empress Of eschews the covert, stating her ideas plainly and arranging “Woman is a Word” without superfluous detail. Simply put, she won’t be confined — by ideas, by standards, by biology. 
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Juana Giaimo: “Woman is a Word” is the kind of protest song that is more powerful for the music than for the words themselves. Consisting mainly of the repetitions of the same lines, it’s how she sings these lines what transmits her desperation to liberate herself from such an abstract and arbitrary mold as a word.
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