B-Side Guys

ILUKA constructs mythology from marginalization. Across fourteen tracks and fifty minutes, the Australian alt-pop artist transforms the experience of being cast out—from small-town Texas to Hollywood’s machinery—into an origin story for a new kind of heroine. This is music for the girls who got called weird, who left home, who refused to play small. Where many artists gesture toward empowerment through platitudes, ILUKA builds hers through specificity: wine-stained dresses under blood red moons, fake IDs at rock shows, cigarettes in hotel rooms in Mexico. The album reads like a manifesto written in vignettes, each song a chapter in the ongoing work of taking up space.

The production varies wildly in approach. “Witch Girls” opens with pop hooks that stick immediately, its chorus built for mass singalongs even as the lyrics celebrate the outliers. “Solo” churns with vindictive satisfaction, the countdown to walking out delivered with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they’re worth. But “Wings” strips back to let the anger breathe—the references to Mary Magdalene and caged ballerinas land harder without production flourishes competing for attention. The album moves fluidly between these modes, never settling into a predictable sound palette.

What makes this work compelling is ILUKA’s refusal to separate the personal from the political. “Cry Evil!” traces a direct line from Eve in the garden to contemporary gender-based violence, the phrase “cover stretch marks and laugh at the jokes” sitting adjacent to “they lit those fires and they burned us down.” She understands that misogyny operates simultaneously at the intimate and systemic levels, that being told to be quiet and being denied bodily autonomy are points on the same continuum. When she sings “hell hath no fury like the woman you scorned / she took your fire and turned it to a storm,” the cliché becomes literal—she’s talking about actual rage as a transformative force.

The album’s examination of feminine archetypes proves particularly sharp. “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” doesn’t just reject the trope; it dissects how it functions, exposing the machinery that reduces women to supporting players in male narratives. Lines like “faked an orgasm too / ’cause boy, it was only about you” cut through any romantic gloss. “American Beauty” flips the script entirely, creating a legend around a woman who remains unknowable—some say she’s on the run, some say she settled in California, some say Tokyo. The mystery becomes the point. She was almost famous, always free, and that’s enough.

Romantically, ILUKA writes with clear eyes. “Thoughts & Prayers” drips with sarcasm as she sends well wishes to an ex who lied compulsively, while “California Boys” catalogs a specific type with precision: punk rock posturing, whiskey breath, talking about themselves at the Chateau. “Hard to Love Me” breaks the pattern, acknowledging the difficulty of loving someone perpetually in motion, chasing glory across continents and time zones. The vulnerability there feels earned because she’s spent the rest of the album proving she doesn’t need saving.

The religious imagery recurs throughout—crucifixion, prayer, Mary Magdalene, plastic dashboard Jesuses—but ILUKA wields it as cultural critique rather than faith statement. “Crucify Me” uses Christian symbolism to talk about public scrutiny and cancel culture, the way young women in particular get built up and torn down for consumption. “They hammer their nails and I bear my teeth” captures both the violence directed at women and the refusal to submit to it quietly. “Haunted One” employs spiritual language to explore darker psychological territory, the plea for release carrying weight beyond any single interpretation.

Geographically, the album maps escape routes: from small-town America to LA, through Mexico, across the Pacific to Tokyo, always moving. “Girl on the Run” makes this explicit—white dress gone black and frayed, storms to chase, never letting fools make you cry. “Wild West” complicates the narrative slightly, finding temporary harbor in LA with someone who shares her desire for escape, acknowledging that constant motion carries costs even as she commits to staying in transit. The concrete becomes home precisely because she survived it.

At fifty minutes, some thematic repetition becomes inevitable. The album hammers certain points—refusing to be saved, rejecting conventional femininity, escaping confinement—with enough frequency that the message occasionally overwhelms the individual song. Yet the specificity of detail keeps most tracks feeling distinct. The difference between the witch girl in Texas with her baby blue Chevy and the girl on the run with her black wedding dress matters, even when both are fleeing similar constraints.

ILUKA’s vision crystallizes most powerfully when anger and analysis work in tandem. “Woman Gone Mad” connects Ozempic culture to restrictive legislation to environmental collapse to celebrity destruction, threading them together as manifestations of the same forces. The chorus—”one woman gone mad, but millions more”—transforms individual rage into collective uprising. She understands that being called crazy is often a response to refusing subordination, that madness can be clarity misread by those invested in maintaining control.

the wild, the innocent, & the raging functions as both personal and communal statement. ILUKA built these songs from her own experiences of not fitting in, of being too much or too loud or too weird, then scaled them up to speak for everyone still finding their way out. The album title itself stakes the claim: wildness, innocence, and rage can coexist, and women don’t have to choose between rebellion and vulnerability. They’re entitled to the full range, unedited and unapologetic. This is music for the outliers who refuse to come in from the cold, who know the wilderness suits them fine.