The likely consensus on Neoni is already waiting for the record before the first chorus arrives: here are makers of sharp, empowerment-coded, internet-ready dark pop, all serrated bass, villain poses, cinematic drums and captions sharpened for immediate use. It is a convenient reading because it is partly true. Neoni’s music understands the contemporary economy of impact. It knows how quickly a song must declare itself, how efficiently menace can be rendered, how a hook can double as a personal manifesto and a mood-board heading.
Sneering at that would be too easy, and also a little dishonest. Pop has always traded in usable selves. The girl group, the glam star, the goth idol, the rapper as outlaw, the indie singer as wounded diarist: all of them are brands before the word becomes embarrassing. The better question is whether How to Kill a Fairytale turns Neoni’s legible persona into something with album weight. Does the fairytale-destruction conceit deepen the act’s hard-edged self-mythology, or does it merely place another black ribbon around it?
That is the useful test. Aesthetic force is not the same as consequence. A good opening blast can carry a single; an album needs pressure, release, a sense that one song has altered the conditions for the next. How to Kill a Fairytale arrives with a strong surface. The question is whether the surface holds.
The record broadly succeeds as a statement of intent, and only partly as a fully persuasive album. That distinction matters. On its own terms, How to Kill a Fairytale is not tentative. It knows the room it wants to occupy: a place where pop hooks are armoured, where self-assertion arrives in gothic costume, where childhood storybook language is recast as a manual for survival. The princess is not waiting. The castle is probably on fire. Someone has remembered to light the smoke machine.
The method is clear. Neoni use dark-pop grammar, the bass drop, the chant, the compressed percussion, the minor-key melody, the vocal stacked into something both intimate and confrontational, to build a world in which self-invention is a defence mechanism. The album’s title supplies the organising myth. To kill a fairytale is to reject the pre-written story, especially the one that promises rescue, goodness and a neat moral settlement. The record asks to be heard as a demolition job: against passivity, against prettiness as obedience, against the idea that a life should be narratively clean.
That is a high standard to set. If the album wants to be more than a sequence of exquisitely designed threats, the songs must dramatise different states of mind inside that rebellion. Anger alone cannot do the work, however stylishly presented. Nor can empowerment, a word pop has worked so hard that it now requires hazard pay.
The strongest tracks are those that make the concept feel like action rather than decoration. On songs such as “Villain” and “Funeral”, Neoni’s taste for melodrama is given a use. “Villain” understands the pleasure and the cost of accepting the role others have written for you; it has the clean, almost comic-book satisfaction of a character turning towards the camera and deciding to enjoy the accusation. “Funeral” is broader, but its graveyard theatre gives the hook a proper stage. The deathliness is theatrical rather than profound, but theatre is not a failing in pop. Often it is the point.
“Fangs” works in a similar way because it lets appetite into the record. Its menace has motion. The vocal attack has bite, and the production does not simply underline the title, it snaps around it. “Bloodstream”, too, gives the album a bodily charge. Its language of contamination and compulsion suits Neoni’s clipped, high-contrast writing, which is better at impact than at confession. There are pop acts who can turn a whisper into a wound. Neoni are more convincing when they turn the wound into armour.
The problem comes when too many tracks occupy the same dramatic posture: shoulders squared, eyes blackened, chorus raised like a weapon. “Killjoy” has the efficient ugliness of a good insult and the forward motion of a track built to detonate quickly, but it does not travel far beyond its premise. “Hooligan” similarly commits to its role with admirable nerve, then risks mistaking volume of attitude for development. These songs do not fail in isolation. In the album’s middle stretch, though, they begin to resemble adjacent rooms in the same nightclub, each with a slightly different neon sign over the door.
That is where the fairytale frame is both useful and limiting. It gives Neoni a coherent vocabulary: villains, funerals, fangs, blood, endings, refusals. It also tempts the writing towards a set of pre-approved gestures. The record is most alive when a song seems to ask what it costs to tear up the story. It is less persuasive when it simply celebrates the tearing.
One should give the album credit for its discipline. Neoni rarely sound as though they are throwing effects at a wall in search of scale. The production is dense, but not shapeless. The drums arrive with the bluntness the songs require; the bass has a synthetic snarl without always collapsing into sludge; the vocal layering gives the choruses a communal force, as if the self being declared is already multiplying. That suits the material. This is pop about becoming harder to corner, and the sound keeps finding ways to make the voice feel less alone.
The sequencing also does some quiet work. The album does not abandon its palette, but it does vary the angle of attack. Tracks that lean into confrontation are balanced by moments where the theatrical darkness opens into something closer to vulnerability, or at least into fatigue with the performance of invulnerability. Those moments matter because they complicate the brand. They suggest that the black crown is heavy, which is a more interesting thought than merely insisting it looks good.
Neoni’s vocal presence is central to this. The singing is rarely casual. It is placed, sharpened, sometimes almost over-articulated, but that precision gives the songs their particular tension. The voices do not sound swallowed by the production. They cut through it, often with a gleam that keeps the record from becoming murk for murk’s sake. When the hooks land, they land because the performance treats melodrama as a technical challenge rather than an excuse.
There is pleasure here. I do not mean the thin pleasure of recognising a style successfully executed, though there is some of that. I mean the stronger pleasure of hearing a record understand its own rules and, at its best, bend them just enough to make the listener lean in. For an album so invested in darkness, How to Kill a Fairytale is often impressively lucid.
The limits are equally clear. Neoni’s consistency, which gives the album its identity, can flatten its emotional weather. Too many songs arrive already knowing how powerful they are meant to sound. The slogans are sharp, but sharpness is not depth by itself. A line built to be remembered can sometimes feel as if it has skipped the messier business of being believed.
This is not a complaint against theatricality. Pop would be poorer if everyone were obliged to mumble earnestly over tasteful guitars until moral seriousness had been established. The issue is that How to Kill a Fairytale sometimes overdetermines its darkness. The imagery tells us where to stand before the song has earned the ground. Villainy, blood, monsters, endings: these are potent signs, but they become less potent when asked to carry the same emotional load again and again.
As a full listen, the record’s middle can feel airless. There are dynamic shifts, but fewer changes in psychological pressure. The album is best when refusal feels like a decision made under duress. It is weaker when refusal becomes a logo. A certain type of modern dark pop has perfected the sound of triumph over unspecified enemies; Neoni are too capable to settle for that every time, which makes the lapses more noticeable. The songs that last are the ones with a bruise under the boast.
Neoni sit comfortably beside current strands of dark pop and empowerment pop that prize immediate definition: the industrial-pop thump, the anti-hero chorus, the playlist-ready sense of cinematic danger. There are echoes, inevitably, of the post-Billie Eilish appetite for shadowed pop space, of the trap-inflected theatricality that has filtered through alternative pop, and of the motivational punch that sync culture has made almost unavoidable. Comparisons can quickly become a parlour game, and a dull one. The point is not that Neoni have invented a language from scratch. Few have.
The more relevant point is that they are unusually efficient users of that language. Their best songs are not derivative in the lazy sense; they are too sharply made, too aware of impact and contour. Yet efficiency carries its own danger. The more instantly legible a pop persona becomes, the harder it is for surprise to enter. How to Kill a Fairytale occasionally finds surprise in texture and performance rather than in form. That may be enough for a song. Across an album, it leaves one wishing for a little more disorder, a crack in the mirror, something not already dressed for battle.
The verdict: a strong concept, not quite an unshakeable album
So, does How to Kill a Fairytale turn Neoni’s strong dark-pop concept into a fully persuasive album? Not fully. It does, however, come closer than the easy reading might suggest. The record is coherent, sometimes fiercely so. Its world is clear, its production is purposeful, and its best songs give the self-mythology enough bite to outlast the first aesthetic hit. “Villain”, “Funeral”, “Fangs” and “Bloodstream” show how effective Neoni can be when the persona is attached to dramatic movement rather than mere pose.
The album falls short of complete durability because its consistency too often becomes enclosure. It knows how to burn the fairytale, but not always what to build from the ashes. Still, there are real stakes in its best moments, and a persuasive command of form throughout. If this is branding, it is branding with craft, conviction and occasional force. That is not everything. It is not nothing, either.
