Do Sluttony know what happened to Hazel?
Hazel is in her twenties. She is the girl you are supposed to want to be. Pretty in a way that feels algorithmically verified, clever but not sharp, kind but never disruptive. She sips matcha, wears clean neutrals, and reads just enough poetry to seem profound. She exists somewhere between girlhood and content strategy, a digital myth born from a thousand filtered moments. But peer beneath the floral skirt, and you will find bruised knees. Her smile is intact, her pose unshaken, yet something in her gaze hints at fatigue. Hazel performs serenity, but it is a rehearsed calm. She does not rebel, not because she agrees, but because breaking character feels riskier than playing along.
It is this character that Sluttony deconstruct in their single “Hazel”. Formed in the Santa Cruz college scene and now based in Los Angeles, the all-femme four-piece use distortion and restraint to tell the story of a girl many know intimately, even if she doesn’t exist. “Hazel is the personification of the push and pull we all feel as we come into ourselves,” the band explain. “She represents power, regret, beauty, pressure, and how we internalise or reject all of that.” Built on a slow, grunge-inflected burn, the track opens with a lone voice before swelling into layered frustration, channelling both vulnerability and resistance. Hannah Goodwin, Sabine Hovnanian, Caroline Margolis and Nina Maravic, all UC Santa Cruz alumni, create space for the contradictions Hazel suppresses.
Hazel is also the narrative core of their debut LP, a figure through whom they explore how femininity is both worshipped and weaponised. She joins a canon of archetypal digital girls, from Michelle to Heather, Jolene and Delilah, avatars of specific moods and aesthetics that went viral through TikTok’s culture machine. But Hazel is not just a vibe. She is a standard. She is what happens when identity is flattened into palatability. What makes her so dangerous is that she doesn’t feel fake. She feels reasonable, safe, and aspirational. But that comfort conceals a quiet violence, the demand to be knowable, pleasing, and permanently composed. And in a world that treats being undefined as a threat, many girls learn early how to perform safety in exchange for belonging.
Sluttony reject that bargain. Their alter egos are not masks but mirrors, exaggerating the myth until the cracks show. If Hazel is a performance of perfection, then “Hazel” the song is a refusal to participate. Their sound is not polished; it is truthful, a slow descent into what it means to grow up watched, edited, and categorised. In their world, defiance is not always loud. Sometimes, it is in the refusal to smile. Hazel will not disappear. She will morph, rebrand, and return. But if enough people stop pretending, she might finally lose her power. Sluttony’s message is clear: you do not have to play the part. Not being her is the beginning of being free.
And maybe that is what happened to Hazel. She began as an aspiration, then became a costume, then a warning. Sluttony do not offer solutions, but they make space for something radical — complexity. Their version of femininity includes the anger, the fatigue, the pressure to be both sweet and sharp, beautiful and broken. Hazel, for all her contradictions, is not the enemy. She is the residue of a system that keeps evolving, a mirror held up to those trying to survive it. What matters now is who gets to rewrite the story. Sluttony are making sure it is no longer told in silence.