Throughout her entire musical career Sarah Saint James has strived to build a community around music that means something and with her latest single mad at god she might’ve just achieved that. The Sydney based musician wrote this for her fifteen year old self who grew up as a plus sized queer girl in a Christian household but it only took one night for the message of the track to resonate with thousands of young people who felt the same pain she experienced. In one swift motion that community she dreamt of had become a reality.
The intimate verses bring you into her world, the deeply personal lyrics make the raw pain feel undeniably real before being launched into the visceral explosion of emphatic passion that is the chorus as James belts out the lyrics, “I’m mad at God / Cause if he exists why do I still feel like this?” The plainspoken lyrics are a highlight as it sounds like they’re coming straight from her fifteen year old self, saying all the things she was too afraid to speak of but now will happily scream them from the rooftops in a cathartic yell of relief.
It may only be February but this has to go down as one of the best pop tracks of 2021 as Sarah Saint James steps up to become one of the hottest prospects of 2021.