In her video for “Fist in a Honeypot,” Mignon cuts a regal figure, decked out like a Marie Antoinette for late stage capitalism. With Benjamins dripping from her cage skirt, and more bills doubling as a fan, she sips tea and spits out lines like, “money to cheat for/they rob you.” Both the costume, made by the singer herself, and the song are a commentary on today’s “let them eat cake” elite.
“It’s about people having too much money,” Mignon says with a laugh about what she describes as the most anti-capitalist of her new batch of songs.
On a video call a handful of weeks she released “Fist in a Honeypot,” Berlin-based Mignon mentions the anti-capitalist streak she has seen with young people, name-checking art/design duo Fecal Matter’s Matiéres Fécales fashion show, which featured gloves with bloody-red hands and a dollar bill eye mask. “You can see that everywhere, people don’t want capitalism, definitely not in that form anymore,” says Mignon. “It’s gone too far.”
Emerging from the Berlin underground, Mignon toured with Peaches in the early 2000s, which included a stretch opening for Queens of the Stone Age in the U.S., and released her debut EP in 2004, followed by three full-length albums between 2007 and 2018. Right now, she’s in the midst of dropping her first album in eight years, A Blind Dark Horse, one single at a time. “Fist in a Honeypot,” released in April, is the most recent.
Back in 2022, Mignon began work on A Blind Dark Horse, with the tone of the new music reflecting the outside world. “It’s quite dark in places,” she says, “but, also, some tracks are are hopeful and celebrating the outcasts of society and the misfits.”
Her first single from the album, “We’re the Monsters,” is one of the celebratory cuts, a manifesto for those who exist outside of the mainstream. “I think it enables people to see solutions,” she says of the song and its theme of empowerment.
Mignon finished A Blind Dark Horse last year. Since she hasn’t toured since 2019, though, she’s been taking time with the release to reintroduce herself.
“I was like, I guess I have to find a new audience or just tell people hey I’m still here,” she says. “So, I started to join TikTok and it’s going really well. It’s crazy. I found this new audience. They’re all teenagers…They’re all goth queers and girls and I’m pretty thrilled about that.”
She adds, ”I still plan on touring, of course, but I’m quite happy to have a little bit of an influence on the younger generation.”
And, Mignon does have some wisdom to share. “I think, in the electroclash era, I was all-in-all a pissed off kid. I’ve been always been feeling a little bit like an outsider in society and was always pissed off about the world. I’ve been to countless demonstrations in my life and always wanted to change the world, but didn’t know how,” she says. “I feel like now I know a little bit more how to change the world.”
Concurrent with the new music, Mignon has been podcasting. Her series, Utopia Rising focuses on depictions of utopian societies across media, including her own favorite book, News From Nowhere by William Morris. The two projects give a fuller picture of how Mignon is thinking about the world. “The album is more like a cry out and fight for a better future,” she explains. “The podcast is about the solutions. I’ve been studying utopian worlds from literature. It’s all about no money, no government. It is about people who are governing themselves and to live in this society that is catering to the people and not just to one-percenters.”
The utopian ideals resonate with Mignon based on the camaraderie and kindness that she’s experienced throughout her life. In our follow-up emails, she mentions living in a truck squat in the late 1990s. “When anyone needed help or had to borrow tools that was perfectly natural,” she says of the group, who even raved together as a convoy. Mignon was also part of a drag group in Berlin, where everyone took turns tending to the various aspects of organizing shows and demonstrations. She recalls random acts of generosity while traveling too. “When I travelled and hitchhiked in my 20s I was sleeping on a beach once in England Cornwall with my then boyfriend, a lady brought us breakfast, tea and toast I will never forget it,” she says. “Also I once hitchhiked alone through Spain and I had food poisoning, a couple took me in and nursed me for two days until I was better.”
Even with a song like “Fist in a Honeypot,” which clearly takes aim towards the one-percent, she still brings her hope for a better world into the song. “Unfortunately, people get rich on the back of the ‘small people’ who get more rules and more restrictions put upon them, more freedom is taken away and it is harder to get by. The gap between rich and poor is getting bigger all the time,” she says in our follow up emails. “And I think we should be reminded of the values of friendships and the love to our alternative families, sometimes the kindness of strangers is also incredible.”
Mignon points to the lyric, “I’m a day late and a dollar short” in “Fist in a Honeypot,” as the kind of “carefree” spirit that’s part of her message. “By living in squats and hitchhiking a lot when I was little, I feel I learned, how to be more carefree than some rich people,” she says. “Sharing money, giving to charity, giving gifts to people who are not so fortunate can give a lot of joy.”
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
Listen to Beatique, April 2026 on Mixcloud, featuring music from Slayyyter, Kneecap, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Armand Van Helden and more.
Keep Reading:
Lapêche Dance Through Third Album, Autotelic
Karen Schoemer Wrote a Poem a Day in August, 2022. The Resulting Album Is Out Now.
From The Centimeters to Elf Freedom: The Musical Evolution of Nora Keyes