In October 2022, feeling ever more estranged from her decade-long run on the pop treadmill, Eves Karydas decided to set a flame to the whole thing. On her Instagram, the Brisbane musician titled “On social media, the music industry, and my experience as a woman within it all” that outlined the destabilising cycle she’d fallen into, a culture that prioritised social media likes over her actual music, and where she felt forced to sexualise her image (“I’ve posted thirst traps, marketed myself as a ‘hot girl’”) to get ahead in the industry. “The truth is, as someone with a lot to say I’ve been surprisingly quiet as an artist,” Karydas wrote at the time.
“I’ve silenced myself because I’ve been pushed to believe that my best asset is my body. Nothing gets the algorithm going quite like tits and ass.” She signed off saying that to salvage her creativity and sanity, she’d be moving forward self-managed.
“It was incredibly nerve-racking to do that Instagram post – I’d never spoken about something like that before – but it was a way to draw a line in the sand,” Karydas, 29, says. “I had to look in the mirror and be like, this vision of me that the public is seeing isn’t lining up with how I view myself.” The post went viral, striking a nerve in the local music industry.
“More than anything, it just showed how quiet women feel a lot of the time,” Karydas says. “It’s such a specifically female experience, having your image be so ra.
