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For Honey Revenge, everything has always existed in twos.

It’s there in the band’s name itself, pairing the sweetness with the sting. It’s there in Devin Papadol and Donny Lloyd’s often vastly opposing personalities and instincts, and in their shared devotion to making music that feels as fun as it is vulnerable.

On ‘Loving And Losing’ though, that duality is more central than ever before. Rooted in the idea that every love we experience will ultimately leave us grappling with some form of grief, it finds the California duo reckoning with the people, places and versions of themselves they’ve had to let go of throughout their lives. 

“I think ‘Retrovision’ taught us a lot about what it means to be a band,” Devin begins, reflecting on the whirlwind that followed the release of Honey Revenge’s 2023 debut.

“At the time, we thought we were putting out an EP, and it took on its own life. It became an album, and we then toured on it for three years. All the life experience we garnered between the release of ‘Retrovision’ and the conception of ‘Loving And Losing’ played a big part in what this album would become.”

Starting the process from within a cabin in the mountains of California, Devin and Donny were both hoping to spread their wings when writing on their latest project began. However, with the pair battling anxiety, pressure, and the strain of trying to grow without losing sight of themselves, they ultimately had to rework the way Honey Revenge functioned from the inside out.

“We were not getting along when we started writing this, anyone who was touring with us could tell you that,” Devin admits.

“Donny and I have a very interesting relationship in the way that we’re like siblings. I’m the older sister in my family, and Donny’s the youngest in their family, so it very much plays into our dynamic. We give each other tough love when we need it, and we egg each other on. Sometimes it makes great music, and sometimes it makes us want to tear each other’s hair out.”

A record born from reconnection, recalibration and more than a few tears, ‘Loving And Losing’ is Honey Revenge learning how to trust each other again, how to trust themselves again, and maybe, somehow, how to trust the universe too.

THE SOUND

Devin will be the first to admit that there was a certain ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ spirit colouring Honey Revenge’s debut album. It’s there not just in the lyrics, but in many of the bold, bright sounds heard across the songs on ‘Retrovision’. This time around though, things felt a little more complex.

“So much of my perspective on the first album was, ‘If I just tell myself I’m a rock star, I can be a rock star’,” she reflects.

“It got us where we needed to be, but coming into this album there wasn’t necessarily a feeling of, ‘I know what I’m doing now.’ If anything, I found out that I was more at odds with myself and what we were trying to do.”

“You have ‘Hot Commodity’, which is like, ‘I’m the shit, and you’re not going to tell me I’m not the shit because obviously what I’m doing works’,” she continues.

“Then you have songs like ‘Trust Issues’ where it’s like, ‘I can’t trust myself to do the bare minimum… Am I ever going to write a good song again?’ There’s this whole cycle, and that’s exactly how it felt. One day I’d come in and feel like no one values me enough, and the next day I’d be like, ‘Well, they say I’m valuable, but am I? Is this all a facade?’”

That push and pull runs directly through ‘Loving And Losing’, the duo sounding like the life of the party one minute before finding themselves spiralling in the bathroom five minutes later.

Sonically, that cycle led Honey Revenge back to the music that first taught Devin how to have fun and let go – the glossy dancefloor recklessness of noughties party-pop, music built for escaping your own brain for three minutes at a time.

“The only way I knew how to express that was the way I learned about partying in the first place, which was early 2000s Kesha,” Devin says.

“I felt like I was being sloppy, and for me to acknowledge that, I kind of had to step into this character a little. Naturally, I write from a very vulnerable emotional standpoint, but to write party music, you kind of have to be less vulnerable. Rather than feeling a certain way, it’s about not feeling at all. It’s very much about the numbing of everything.”

That influence is all over ‘Sunday Scaries’, a glitteringly self-aware ode to hangover-induced anxiety, but that doesn’t mean that ‘Loving And Losing’ is intended as a soundtrack to escapism without consequence. In now typical Honey Revenge style, every bright hook has something darker buried beneath it, often tangled up in avoidance, performance and the pressure of trying to keep yourself together long enough to look like you’re having the time of your life.

Still, there is real joy here too. There are the moments made to get every pair of feet moving at the band’s live shows like the sing-along-ready burst of ‘Run Your Mouth’, the nostalgic moody buzz that reverberates through ‘Poison Apple Baby’, and then… there are the love songs.

From the bright, heartfelt sentiments of ‘Technicolor’ to the softer, sincere glow of ‘Freaks Of Nature’, for Devin, those were possibly the hardest to write.

“I did not find that to come very naturally,” she admits.

“I’m typically not a person that even really enjoys love songs. I’ve always been kind of anti-love song. Even when I was writing ‘Favorite Song’ on ‘Retrovision’, I was poking holes in the idea of love. I’m saying I don’t believe in love, and it was, of course, immediately after I wrote that song, I found the person I want to be with forever.”

“I could tell my boyfriend I love him all day every day, but then I actually have to put it into words and share it with the world,” she laughs.

“There’s this aspect of embarrassment. I don’t necessarily show that ooey gooey side of me all the time when it comes to love. Everyone knows I’m a lover girl, but it’s easy to just use the word love, whereas you have to actually go into the detail of it and express what that really means and how it really makes you feel. That was a different side we tried to lean into this time.”

THE LYRICS

During the week that ‘Retrovision’ came out, Devin’s dad died suddenly.

At the very moment Honey Revenge’s life as a touring band was beginning, she lost one of the people who had helped her believe that life was possible in the first place. That grief altered the entire emotional framework of Devin’s life, forcing her to understand love and loss not as opposite forces, but as two halves of the same bittersweet whole.

“My dad was so involved in my confidence to be an artist, and he was always so supportive,” she explains.

“He was one of my favourite people on the planet, and I feel like I see so much of him in myself. That was such a life-altering thing to happen at such a pivotal point in both my life and career. I’m finally touring, making music happen for me, which is something I’ve been working toward my whole life. On top of that though, I’m losing the person who got me there.”

“So much of my process through grief was acknowledging that this is so devastating for me because I was so loved. I loved him so much, and he taught me how to love,” she continues.

“He taught me new things every single day. Now, when I go out, I recognise that I’m doing things and saying things that he taught me. So much of the person I am can only exist because I was loved by him… It changes your whole worldview.”

It makes sense then that so much of ‘Loving And Losing’ is centered on the lasting connections we have to people and things no longer physically here. There’s ‘Inevitable’, which grapples with the knowledge that nothing we love can remain untouched forever, and then there’s ‘Butterfly Effect’, exploring the strange chain reaction of events that often unfold whether we feel ready for them or not.

There are moments during the album where it feels like wandering through the dark city streets under a starlit night sky, but more often than not, there’s light and laughter to be found too, a reminder that things can’t be bleak forever.

“I didn’t want everyone to listen to ‘Loving And Losing’ and be like, ‘Oh, it’s the end of the world,’” Devin says.

“There is supposed to be this light at the end of the tunnel. There is supposed to be this comedic relief to it. It’s always about the dichotomy with us.”

The circumstances that led to the album’s creation feel even more poignant when you consider how Donny’s own life was shaped by the tragic loss of their father. At a young age, that event spurred a move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, where they ended up meeting Devin.

In that sense, there’s a strange cruelty and beauty to ‘Loving And Losing’. It doesn’t pretend that every painful experience is worth it, nor does it try to tie grief into a neat bow. It simply acknowledges that our lives are shaped by everything that happens to us, for better or for worse.

“I think just acknowledging the chain reactions of things really played into how I wanted this record to go,” Devin explains.

“That’s just how my life is shaped out to be through the good, the bad, and the ugly. The universe is just offering the next step in my life on a silver platter. Whether I’m hungry or not, dinner is served.”

THE COLLABORATIONS

Coming into album two, Donny was determined to take more ownership over their role in the guitar parts and writing process. As the guitarist puts it simply, popping in during our chat, they “wanted to accept less help this time”. That meant Honey Revenge learning how to collaborate as the people they had become, rather than the people they were when the band first began.

“I want them to have as much insight into the songs as possible,” Devin explains.

“If I wanted this to be a solo project, it would be a solo project, but it’s a duo for a reason. It’s very important to me that when it comes to the musical aspects especially, Donny feels as involved as they want to be. That was a big part of the early writing of ‘Loving And Losing’, working out how we do that now.”

Having learned a lot from the collaborative process of creating ‘Retrovision’, the pair also came into album two with a much clearer sense of what they needed from the people they chose to be in the room alongside them.

“On the first record, I learned what I liked and didn’t like about collaboration, and I learned what I would and wouldn’t let people do when writing with me,” Devin says.

“As a new band, it’s easy to let things get away from you during sessions. At some point, you realise that you’re letting people take the reins more than you would like. It happens so fast that sometimes you don’t even notice it. With this record, it was about working with people I fully trusted.”

That meant returning to some of the writers who helped shape the earliest Honey Revenge songs but also opening the door to people who could bring new textures, perspectives and emotional depth into the project. KiNG MALA became a vital presence, helping Devin write the album’s title track in one night alongside her boyfriend Kyle Roy.

“My friend Areli [Castro] is one of the most brilliant writers in her genre,” Devin says of the alt. pop artist.

“She’s someone who has been with me through the loss and through the love. She’s been with me through every romantic situation I’ve been in over the last decade, and every traumatic friendship breakup I’ve experienced in my adult life. Writing with her made it feel easy.”

Elsewhere on the album, Honey Revenge also made space for some familiar faces they knew also already understood the deepest foundations of their band, teaming up with producer Danen Reed Rector and previous collaborators including KJ Strock and Zach Jones.

“You can’t just write a whole new record that sounds nothing like what people know of Honey Revenge,” Devin explains.

“There are still songs on here that were touched by the people that helped shape the original songs of this band, but there’s a nice little merger of the new and the old.”

THE ARTWORK

Bathed in pink and purple starlight, the cover of ‘Loving And Losing’ sees Devin standing with her back to us, the album title scrawled across her skin. Around it, her birthmarks have been transformed into constellations, a dreamy, deliberate reminder that everything we experience leaves a mark on us.

“With the first album, it was all kind of a happy accident,” the vocalist explains.

“I always talk about how I thought our band was always going to be represented with darker purples and black, but as we started touring, people really liked the more pastelly, hot pink, bubbly parts of us. By the end of ‘Retrovision’… it didn’t feel like me anymore. I feel like I lost myself to everyone else’s vision of what we should be doing.”

It makes sense then that so much of this era is about reclamation, and visually that involved Devin leaning into her femininity, sexuality and confidence. Stepping out of the cutesier world that others had attached to Honey Revenge, she set out to build something darker, richer and more reflective of the person she is now.

“So much of the message of this album is the universe, and I was like, ‘How do I play into that and make that obvious in what we’re doing and wearing?’” she says.

“I’m really trying to show that my life has been impacted by the universe, and everything that’s happened to me is a product of what’s going on around me. That’s why I took my own birthmarks and turned them into constellations in the night sky. I always knew I wanted to do that with the album artwork this time around.”

Even the album’s title you see written across Devin’s back wasn’t a Photoshop trick, with her boyfriend, a tattoo artist, using a real stencil to place the words on her skin for the shoot so that they became a temporary part of her.

“I really wanted those to be embodied,” she says.

“For you to commit to something, you have to really commit, and so I wanted to show that. Those words aren’t just edited onto me; they’re actually on my skin… it’s actually me. These are all things that I’ve actually gone through, things that I’m experiencing and putting into words. It was important that they were physically there.”

THE FUTURE

After everything that went into ‘Loving And Losing’, Devin doesn’t necessarily feel like she now has all the answers about Honey Revenge’s future. In fact, that might be the point of it all.

“Now, it’s less that I have a clear idea of what’s ahead, and more that I’m open and trusting that what’s meant for me is going to be,” she says.

Rather than trying to force every door open, Devin is learning to trust that the right ones will unlock when they’re supposed to. After ‘Retrovision’ took Honey Revenge further than they ever expected, with ‘Loving And Losing’, all the duo really want is more of that. More strange, beautiful, unexpected proof that the universe is still pulling strings no matter what.

A document of love and everything it costs us, ‘Loving And Losing’ is Honey Revenge embracing every contradiction that makes them who they are. A record with no clean moral or simple resolution, it doesn’t pretend that grief will magically make you wiser, or that heartbreak becomes less humiliating the more you go through it.

It’s a dedication to not only the people we lose, but the versions of ourselves those losses can leave behind.

“I want people to be kinder and more considerate to themselves and to each other,” Devin finishes.

“We don’t have it all figured out. No one has the key, but you’ve got to figure out what’s right for you. So much of this record has been figuring out what we want and what we don’t, and that’s what life is about.”