Shitty Hits

Katie Von Schleicher - Shitty Hits

On her debut full-length, Von Schleicher strikes again on the magic that comes from her warped and uncompromising sound. Shitty Hits odes to the bright, sunny radio burners of the 1970’s, songs you drive to, carefree, and songs you can cry to.


From start to finish, Shitty Hits confronts feelings of isolation and powerlessness. Opener ‘The Image’ (named for Daniel Boorstein’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America) finds Von Schleicher at bottom, struggling for perspective: “The image runs and runs together / I’m glancing at it on a screen / I can’t tell you how I feel / It runs and runs together / I’m standing beneath it.” Overheated vocals, distorted drums and unwieldy guitars push back, unrelenting. Von Schleicher fights to get out of her head the way Springsteen tries beating it out of town. Shitty Hits doesn’t tackle grandiosity, but mediocrity; the struggle of being deeply flawed and unmistakably human.


Conjuring the home recorded sound of Paul McCartney's McCartney or Jeff Buckley’s Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk, Shitty Hits was created on a Tascam 488 tape machine in Von Schleicher's childhood home in Maryland. Where Bleaksploitation courted a kind of sonic nihilism, Shitty Hits shows confidence and growth. It ends in unflinching self-realization, as Von Schleicher sings “Where is everything I hold to be true? / When you feel like you’re a door they’re knocking on / Or worse, that no one passes through / Do I hold my life? / No one’s gonna sell it back / Over my head.” Words form the questions, answers are given in sound.

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