With one foot in a bucket of painfully earnest reflection, and the other in a pool of the sick, sunny oddball pop satire she does so well, Caroline Rose wrote, recorded and produced Superstar in her 10’x12’ home studio and on a portable rig she’d set up in green rooms while touring behind her 2018 album, LONER. The album’s first track finds its protagonist the recipient of an accidental call from Hollywood’s glamorous Chateau Marmont hotel, which they take as a sign to leave everything behind and pursue their star-studded destiny. What ensues is an indulgent, glistening sonic wonderland located at the crash site of innate personal aspiration and a bloated, absurd and fickle collective definition of success, fame and the artist in the era of late-capitalism. Superstar is a double-edge examination of the destructive and motivating forces of the human ego in a time and place that stokes its most aggrandizing desires, all wrapped up in brilliant, wonky modern earworms and a world as shiny as it is unsettling.