Princess Goes never meant to be a band. It just sort of… happened.
"We were just trying to keep up with this thing that none of us consciously decided to do," Michael C. Hall says, laughing. "Now, here we are, still chasing it down."
"Here" is the release of Come of Age, the band’s latest sonic fever dream—a record that somehow feels both bigger and more intimate than anything they’ve done before. It’s not just that the sound is more expansive; it’s the confidence, the ease, the way it flows like a band fully in control of their weird, wonderful instincts.
Matt Katz-Bohen and Peter Yanowitz, who have spent years backing up everyone from Blondie to The Wallflowers, say this project gives them a kind of freedom they don’t always get elsewhere. "When you’re in someone else’s band, you don’t always have that same creative latitude," Katz-Bohen explains. "Here, we can chase any idea, no matter how strange, and see where it leads."
Where it leads, on Come of Age, is a mix of cinematic atmosphere, electronic grooves, and occasional moments of jagged, unhinged chaos. Take Let It Go, which opens with a sample of Terence McKenna talking about "boundary dissolution"—because of course it does. "We were just throwing things into the mix to see what stuck," Hall admits. "Peter laid that in at the beginning, and it just felt like… yeah, that’s the energy right there."
That push and pull—between the spiritual and the surreal, the heady and the visceral—runs through the entire album. Offering opens with the mantra-like refrain, "It’s all for you," setting up a record that never quite tells you what "it" is. "It means everything and nothing at the same time," Hall says. "Who is 'you'? The listener? Something divine? I don’t know. It just felt right."
And then there’s Glasswing, a hypnotic two-chord journey that might just be the best thing they’ve ever recorded. "I love two-chord songs," Katz-Bohen says. "Prince’s The Cross, M.I.A.’s Paper Planes—those are some of my favorites. There’s something about staying in one place and building off that energy."
The song, it turns out, was also an emotional turning point for the band. "Something happened around the writing of that song," Yanowitz says, pausing. "I don’t really want to go into it, but it was a difficult moment, and this song felt like a way to work through it."
Hall nods. "Yeah. It was definitely a Some Kind of Monster moment," he jokes, referencing Metallica’s infamous therapy sessions.
If Come of Age is about anything, it’s about embracing contradictions. It’s at once theatrical and cinematic, grand yet intimate, serious but never self-serious. Even when Hall is singing about butterflies (Glasswing’s first verse is literally just a list of butterfly species), there’s an underlying weight to it.
And sometimes, that weight is abruptly lifted. Case in point: Take Me Home, which ends so suddenly it feels like someone yanked the plug out of the wall. "That was intentional," Hall confirms. "Like someone pulled the rug out from under the song."
Whether in songwriting, sound, or structure, Princess Goes loves subverting expectations. The best part? Even they don’t always know where it’s going.
"We don’t plan it," Hall says. "We just follow the music and see what happens."
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
