Irony is a capricious genre. Many people know how to use it; few truly master it. The difference between the two is roughly the same as the difference between someone who knows how to hold a knife and a head chef: technically, both are cutting, but the results exist on different planets. Irony in music is especially difficult, because it has no facial expression to carry it. It has only sound, tempo, voice, and text — and if all four are pulling in different directions, it falls apart mid-stride. That is precisely why so few artists dare to build an entire album on it. Elise Trouw dared.

Moreover, she built on irony a conceptual framework of fourteen tracks written from the perspective of a character named Elon Lust. This character is not an archetype invented in a vacuum, but a specific compilation: phrases that real men had actually said to Trouw herself, collected, sorted, and delivered through the voice of an imaginary heartbreaker. This is a crucial detail — one that, incidentally, is easy to miss. Because it changes the nature of the entire album: this is not a brightly covered little book on male psychology sitting in a shop window display; it is documentary work dressed in a genre wrapper of blues, dance, and electronics. The distinction is fundamental. When an artist says “I invented this,” the listener engages with imagination. When an artist says “I heard this and wrote it down,” the engagement becomes something else entirely. Sharper, more uncomfortable, more precise.

photo by Elise Trouw

Trouw herself is a singer and multi-instrumentalist, and that fact shapes how the album sounds. A person who can handle several instruments simultaneously hears music differently than one who specializes in a single one. They are not searching for perfect balance within a single instrument — they hear how different voices interact in space, which one needs to step forward at a given moment and which needs to pull back. The Diary of Elon Lust spans roughly three genres, and all of them carry semantic weight. Blues carries honesty and rawness; dance carries physicality and impulse; electronics carry distance and control. Elon Lust exists at the intersection of all three, and Trouw does not allow any single one to claim the entire territory.

Critics have described this album as a breakthrough in her career — and I cannot disagree. Long-time fans of Trouw, according to available accounts and social media reactions, simply did not recognize her in this material. And that is genuinely exciting.

All You Need Is Lust opens the album with anxiety hidden beneath spring light. The voice here is slightly hoarse — warm on the inside, cold on the outside — and this sense of conflict between two states holds throughout the entire track. A parody of a spring mood is the most accurate description for it. The track ends unexpectedly. That choice is not an oversight but rather a statement: the first diary entry should not offer answers.

The Perfect Girl is a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Celebration, momentum, moving forward without looking back. The track functions as a counterargument to the previous one: if All You Need Is Lust is a warning, then The Perfect Girl is the moment when the warning is ignored. She Was Naked — playful, cooling, with goosebumps.

BJE is the peak point of tension on the album. The voice is split, muffled, working at its limit. Breath becomes its own instrument. The provocation here reaches the stage where words recede and sound speaks directly. The track exists in 18+ territory — there is nothing forbidden in it, but the emotional temperature demands a certain maturity of perception.

18 is one of two tracks on the album without vocals. Short, dancefloor-ready, with the feeling of a transition. The boundary between two states — childhood safety and adult freedom — is expressed here through rhythm. It is the right call: some thresholds do not need words.

Beta Male operates through the energy of urgency. Bells, an accelerating tempo, the sensation of a chase. This is one of the most genre-pure dance tracks on the album, and its placement in the tracklist is precise: it arrives exactly when passivity has already exhausted itself.

Because You Are Hot closes the album on a triumphant, pulsating note. Staccato, with a neon aftertaste. Trouw hands the final word over entirely to the character — Elon Lust triumphs, and that triumph sounds exactly as it sounds in reality: loud, self-satisfied, with a complete absence of self-irony. A better conclusion for this diary would be difficult to imagine.

photo by Jenny Baumert

Male psychology is a subject that musical artists have approached countless times, and almost always through the lens of disappointment, anger, or sardonic detachment. The result is predictable and therefore of little interest. Trouw chose a different route: she stepped inside, climbed into the male skin. Expected an album about men? She wrote an album from the perspective of a man — using his own words, his own logic, his own internal monologue.

Fourteen tracks maintain that position steadily. Trouw‘s voice balances between tenderness and fracture depending on what emotional temperature the character requires at any given moment, and this command of timbre is one of the album’s greatest strengths.

If anything on the album warrants cautious discussion, it is the volume. Fourteen tracks in a genre that sustains itself on irony demands concentration from the listener. Irony tires before other instruments do, and in a few places on the album there is a sense that the material was asking for more dynamic range within individual tracks. But this reads more as a request for the next step than as a complaint about the current one.

Even so, The Diary of Elon Lust is essential listening, and there are three reasons for that. The first: the concept works. The second: Trouw maintains her distance precisely where others would have started to lecture. She keeps the diary in the character’s voice — and allows the listener to draw their own conclusions from what is written there. The third, and perhaps the most important: the album functions simultaneously as a warning and as a dance record. That is a rare combination — when the layer of meaning does not weigh down the pleasure of listening but coexists with it. Trouw‘s voice — tender where it needs to be tender, fractured where it needs to be something else — holds both registers without visible effort. The breakthrough everyone is talking about right now is not that she did something for the first time. The breakthrough is that she did it convincingly.

All information provided is prepared in accordance with editorial standards and is intended to offer useful insights for readers. Please note that the opinions, interpretations, and evaluations expressed by the author may substantially differ from the viewpoints of our readers or the general public at large, and we respect the diversity of opinions.