Streetwise EP by Pretty Sick, A Sonic Evolution

Sprinting down a street, ripping torn jeans to oblivion, and letting the city lights blur your vision as your melancholy wells—that’s how it feels to be Pretty Sick. What acts as a shield for that melancholy is being streetwise: being on your toes, filled with charm, and ready to handle spontaneity smartly. Lead singer, bassist, and model Sabrina Fuentes is no stranger to it.

After self-releasing two EPs and a full-length album under the London-based label Dirty Hit, Fuentes brings the agony of youth in her songwriting into a new electronic and ambient soundscape while keeping her heels pressed into the essence of grunge. Founded in New York City when she was only 13, Pretty Sick’s commitment to reviving '90s grunge has been shelved for a new dreamy world. Pretty Sick’s latest EP, Streetwise, demonstrates Fuentes’s maturation as an artist while maintaining her core themes of youthful agony and existential reflection.

Growing up in New York City and cursed by “mature-for-your-age” syndrome, Fuentes defaults to melancholia as an outlook on her youth. Previous work, such as their debut album Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile, saw the lead singer world-building New York City as a backdrop to her internal crisis with finding solace in her younger self. In this six-track collection, Fuentes reaches closer to that solace by putting a blanket of humility across her usual narratives with existentialism. With the help of electronic producer Woesum, Fuentes successfully hatches the cocoon of teenage bleakness and enters a new maturation on covering youth—recontextualizing it as an electronic tirade of past feelings. It’s a welcomed departure, an open invitation to new fans, and a fresh genre bend that creates a new world for Fuentes to play in.

Ring, ring. “You make me fucking sick!” A voice message starts the meta titular track Streetwise, the first single and last track on the EP. Fuentes sings, “City is a playground and I wanna explore.” An ironic, confident narration about Fuentes’s self-awareness of her upbringing and current point of view on her artistry. With a blasé vocal tone, Fuentes utilizes the single as a meta-statement of her self-discovery and transformation as an artist. “Cities are like people, and people always change.” Pretty Sick has utilized New York as a geographic mental map for their sulking grunge, but after moving to London for three years and shooting the music video in Tokyo, New York, and London, the city Fuentes yells about in Streetwise sheds sulky existentialism for a celebration of youthfulness. A fingering hair twirl and arms-crossed song structure poke at the angst of being streetwise. Fuentes wants to dance, have fun, and be charming and sly. “Half-joking/Half drunk/Half crazy/What didn’t kill me just/made me snakey.”

It’s a coming-of-age anthem about the treble of holding on to youth for too long. In the bridge, Fuentes sings about someone too cool to sing a love song because of their streetwise mind, which could be poking fun at her past self for being a “mature teenager.” The self-awareness ends the EP with “Got the whole crowd asking/Are you gonna play Dumb?” a reference to Pretty Sick’s most famous song. Fuentes knows what her fan base expects, but what they don’t know is that Fuentes likes to keep her fans streetwise like her, on their toes, charming them with genre experimentation and smartly keeping the band’s core themes in mind throughout her artistic evolution. It’s Pretty Sick at its most playful.

The agony of youth is a staple theme in Pretty Sick’s discography, yet Fuentes describes the band as “colorful, accepting, chaotic, benevolent, and fun.” Over the years, the band has fallen into naked imitations of Hole, Nirvana, and other '90s grunge bands. Fuentes said in an interview that she “has a bad habit of anything she listens to starting to sound mirrored in her music.” However, Fuentes trudged through rock influences and therapizing her music to get to where she is now. Shameless of sounding like anything else, Fuentes sets herself apart by candidly speaking on how artistry starts with influence before writing your own story. Fuentes shows no interest in the fear of unconscious imitation because her ode to past legends opened doors for her to soar into uniqueness.

That’s Headliner. It’s the most experimental track on the album and a standout in Pretty Sick’s discography. It opens on a glitchy beat emulating someone beatboxing into an iPhone speaker and sets us on an adventurous, erotic dream-pop paradise. The first verse describes Fuentes rising out of a car, topless, opening her heart and chest, and letting the streets stare at her breasts. With every line, we levitate with Fuentes out of the car and into ethereality. The chorus repeats “I master bass lines on the track” as a double entendre for Fuentes’s self-liberation and self-indulgence. The song explodes into a dream outro with Fuentes asking, “Is it true? Does your heart beat for me?” while whispering “sex” and “ecstasy” in between. This track propels the melancholia of Pretty Sick into that new, surreal playground.

On Tried and True, a punk-tinged chant bathed in electronic grunge that thumps like a city strut. “Make me so happy, touch me, fill me up with joy, joy.” Immediately, the listener plunges into a stomp-plea that Fuentes sets up like a delinquent preacher. The agony in her writing reads like a childish vent and becomes more materialized in the stuttering chorus. “D-d-don’t you think about me” and “Y-y-you’re my tried and true” play out like a nervous confession, reflecting Fuentes’s commentary on struggles with self-expression. It’s a new outlook on obsession for Fuentes to explore with an electronic stuttering backdrop that creates an atmosphere of innocence to the longing lyrics, successfully recontextualizing Fuentes’s approach to her vision of youthfulness.

If the last track was a strut to the party, Violet is who we are five hours into it. On this track, Fuentes and Woesum create a soundscape that encapsulates the feeling of finally sitting down on a musty couch at a party, staring at visions of ecstasy around you, and being clueless about the fact that your knees have been bleeding the whole time. Fuentes starts the track with a slurry vocal to introduce Violet as a “sexy bitch.” Violet is an under-the-influence version of Fuentes who invites the listener to be a part of her trance because it is magic. “See the magic, smell the magic, feel the magic, dance the magic,” Fuentes repeats in a cyclical chorus accompanied by vocal chops of inhales and breaths and a siren sound effect that acts like a club light scanning the room instead of strobing it. Violet is the montage of being high before the come-down, ecstasy hyperventilation, all from the musty couch. However, once that electronic magic runs out and the blood dries, Violet becomes Sabrina again, and we are now in Miami.

A come-down from all the energy and back into the classic melancholia of Pretty Sick, Miami acts as the morning after Violet, awakening off the couch and limping home with pondering thoughts. “I've already been/A million different people/So what could I be like when I'm sober?” The track expresses the hangxiety that comes from Fuentes's version of Violet. It’s a self-reflection on substance and Fuentes’s identity. The word “maybe” is used at the beginning of multiple lines as a pondering tool for how unsure the singer is of the version of themselves they need to be. The ambient production floats the singer off the arms of grunge expression. Still, it plays back into her past diary-entry songwriting as a moment to sulk before hoping everyone enjoyed whatever version Fuentes was or became. Fans can approach this track and the other slow track, “With You,” as a wink from Fuentes, knowing her sad-core existentialism still breathes through any change in her sound direction.

A seventeen-minute whiplash of ethereal youthfulness, Streetwise delivers a compelling artistic succession for Pretty Sick that bridges the raw essence of '90s grunge with a modern, electronic twist. Sabrina Fuentes shifts tone from her earlier work, embracing a new soundscape while retaining the band’s core themes of youthful angst and existential introspection. Streetwise is not just a departure from their past but a thoughtful reimagining, inviting fans and new listeners to trust the essence of Pretty Sick’s introspective and streetwise charm. So, ditch crying that river in your room and sprint down your city like it’s your playground, blasting this short, sweet, angsty dream.