With her elfin voice and palpable ache, Scarlet Rae has a way of making listeners feel like she’s working through emotions in real time. Her confessional songs and lyrics, cocooned protectively inside distorted electric and razor-wire acoustic guitar, are the makings of a dark grunge-pop dream.
One of two daughters of concert photographer Meegan Hodges and guitarist Mark Knight, Rae was playing guitar by age eight and, as a high schooler, opening for her father in San Fernando Valley bars. After fronting local indie favorites Rose Dorn, Rae initiated a creative reset by moving to Brooklyn at age 18 during the pandemic. Her self-produced style of thorny instrumentation and wavy, submerged vocal melodies coalesced into a 2024 debut single, “Bleu,” on Bayonet Records, and earned her comparisons to singer-songwriter Alex G.
“Bleu” was also intensely personal, a response to the suicide earlier that year of her older sister, Lucy-Bleu Knight, a personal loss that also shook the tight-knit Los Angeles music community into which Rae was born. (Her stepfather is guitarist Slash of Guns N Roses.)
Her 2025 EP, No Heavy Goodbyes, found her continuing to process grief through five haunting but accessible tracks. Aided by producer Jordan Lawlor of M83, Rae opened the EP with “A World Where She Left Me Out,” a lament for the loss of a “shoulder to cry on” that also asks,“Where’s the self compassion? / When did you start undressing? / There’s a black cloud / Over surrounding a world where she left me out / By myself / To be by myself.”
As she tours this fall with Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, a newer track, “Best Waitress,” on her Bandcamp, contemplates a way forward with a mixture of sadness, determination and rueful counsel: “Do one thing that scares you / Everyday until you die / That’s how you break the chain-loop / But who am I to give advice?”
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Scarlet Rae opens for Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy 6pm Saturday, Oct. 17 at Lincoln’s Beard Brewing & Cocktails in Miami. scarletrae.bandcamp.com ~ Olivia Feldman
