Want something to upset the imbalance in music? Meet bimbocore pioneer Scene Queen, here to kick open doors, fight old attitudes, and crown herself rock’s new royalty…
Scene Queen is here to be disruptive. Sick of the demands the music industry makes of women to squeeze into a narrow box, which had begun to take a toll on her mental health, the singer – real name Hannah Collins – knew she had to rebel.
Her defiance involved creating a genre all of her own, adopting a hyper-feminine style and aesthetic, and mashing in the chalk-and-cheese sounds of pop hooks, trap beats and slashing djent guitars. She christened it bimbocore.
Her debut EP, also titled Bimbocore, was released in April, satiating the hunger of the adoring following she’d picked up on TikTok, where her songs had continually been going viral. The “Scene Queen Cinematic Universe,” as she calls it, is equal parts sassy, angry, fun and outrageous, containing a song in which she violently threatens catcallers (Pink Rover), another in which she boasts about getting laid but with a twist (Pink Panther) and one in which she moves from dusting sugar on her suicidal feelings to yelling ‘pretty pink’ into the mic (Pretty In Pink).
“I was always fighting to get in rooms, but now that this stuff has taken off, it’s so in-your-face and it’s growing so fast that it’s forcing people to pay attention,” she enthuses. “I’m now at a point where people can’t look away from it, and that has made me feel like the most badass person in the entire world. Because if there’s not a door that’s open for me, I have the full ability to kick it open.”
Scene Queen is keeping this meteoric momentum going with recent single Pink G-String, a crunky tongue-in-cheek nostalgia trip back to Y2K. “The song was extremely, if not entirely, based off the series The Simple Life,” she says. “Paris Hilton is one of the most fascinating women in the world to me, because she made an entire brand for herself playing off the fact that people think she’s dumb when she’s actually extremely intelligent, which is like my entire brand.”
In the final song from Bimbocore, Pink Paper, Scene Queen declares, ‘I’m your queen, you fucking know it.’ Listen to anything she’s put her name to so far, and you’ll understand that she’s not mincing her words.
Scene Queen tours the UK with WARGASM this month. This interview was originally published in the autumn 2022 issue of the magazine.
