Boys Lie, but Their Netflix Passwords Don’t

Taffy Starlight writes pop songs with one hand on her heart and the other checking recent account activity.

Dismissed in certain unkind quarters as “Temu Taylor Swift,” Taffy has built an audience by treating minor romantic humiliations with the scale normally reserved for royal deaths and meteor impacts. She understands the modern break-up: the relationship may be over, but there are profiles, playlists, chargers and shared subscriptions still requiring diplomatic settlement.

Boys Lie, but Their Netflix Passwords Don’t is her sharpest album because it knows exactly how silly heartbreak looks from the outside—and how catastrophic it feels from within. Its production is bright, expensive-sounding and packed with choruses engineered to survive direct contact with a hairbrush microphone.

Synth-pop sparkle sits beside glossy pop-rock guitars, sudden acoustic confessions and drums that enter whenever dignity leaves. Taffy moves from wounded balladry to cheerful revenge without allowing enough time for legal advice. She sings about read receipts, suspicious follows, location sharing and the intimate violence of discovering that “Continue Watching” has moved on without you.

The title is magnificent because it reduces an entire relationship to the one piece of information that remained reliable. Elsewhere, Taffy proves herself more than the joke surrounding her. Her melodies are ruthless, her details are specific and her best lines capture the strange mixture of grief and admin that defines young love conducted through several devices.

There are moments when the polish becomes almost aggressively sweet, but Taffy uses that sweetness as camouflage. By the time the chorus lands, somebody’s hoodie, reputation and access privileges have disappeared.

MERINGUE! asked whether any former boyfriends had inspired the record.

Taffy smiled and said, “Which profile are you watching on?”

Our screen went black.