Long before creators Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw began writing their irreverent Gen-Z sitcom Adults, they were obsessed with TV shows with memorable, ridiculous musical numbers. So when it was their turn, they knew they had to full send.
Enter “Hiccups
(Body Go Crazy),” a quarter-life crisis packaged as a K-pop single complete with car-crash noises, sirens, and clanky, ear-splitting synth production matched with nonsensical lyrics like “Paradise, I lose control/Drive so fast, we hit the pole/Rap, and pop, and rock and roll/All the genres light my soul.” The song was first introduced in Episode Six of Adults Season Two, “Pop Girlie,” where Samir’s (Malik Elassal) girlfriend Carly (Rachel Marsh) decides to abandon dentistry to pursue K-pop stardom.
Shaw says they “got really charmed by the idea of the first time you have to break it to a partner that they’re making a decision you think is a really, really bad idea.” But what they didn’t expect is how the song they purposefully created to sound as terrible as possible has found a new audience online. Since Adults Season Two dropped on Aug. 27, “Hiccups” has become an underground hit on TikTok, with thousands of videos, likes, comments, and views all centered around one demand: the release of the full version. Now, fans will no longer have to suffer. “Hiccups (Body Go Crazy)” by Carly with a Y. is officially available to stream today, courtesy of FX and Hollywood Records, with the added bonus of an official music video.
“It’s been amazing watching Adults become a tradition for friend groups — after work watches, making ‘house rules’ boards from Season One, planning Halloween costumes,” Kronengold says. “So getting to give [fans] this thing that they have decided is their anthem in its fullest form for them to blast at their next pregame or ill-advised dinner party is such a delight for us.”
Set in current-day New York City, Adults follows a hodgepodge friend group who share a home in Queens. The group consists of Samir — whose parents own the house — chaotic rich-girl Issa (Amita Rao), anxiety-ridden teacher’s pet Billie (Lucy Freyer), people pleaser Anton (Owen Thiele), and the sexually fluid hottie Paul Baker (Jack Innanen). With disparate career goals, sexualities, and beliefs about social cues, it’s rare that the ensemble find themselves in agreement. But they’re all set on one thing — Carly’s song is fucking terrible fucking.
When Marsh first got a call from Kronengold and Shaw, she thought her character was being killed. “Weird for this comedy to kill off someone so early,” she says with a laugh. But when she was told Carly would be attempting K-pop stardom, she was immediately in. “Obviously anytime I get to be an idiot onscreen, that’s why I do this. “The ultimate compliment is to create someone that’s a little bit delusional. When I read the script, I was like, ‘I have to do this.’”
The song was composed and produced by Charlie O’Connor (who’s worked with Please Don’t Destroy), and written by Kronengold, Shaw, executive producer Rob Rosell, and writer Raffi Donatich. Rosell, who might be best known for working on the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia musical hit “Dayman,” says the team developed the sound and lyrics after listening to KATSEYE singles like “Gabriella,” “Touch,” and “Gnarly” nonstop.
“Originally, [Carly] was going to sing like KT Tunstall’s ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.’ But then it evolved into her wanting to be a K-pop singer,” Rosell says. “The goal was something that felt alarmingly bad, but within the zone that someone who is an intelligent person could, in a moment of poor judgment, think was actually a good song.”
That ambiguity is where the song thrives, according to Donatich. “On set we were pitching versions of what the song could be and ‘Hiccups’ really had staying power. I was proud to have contributed the parenthetical ‘body go crazy,’” she says. “We tasked Charlie with being a way worse musician and producer than he is in real life. He would send us so many versions and we would be like, ‘We want this 30 percent worse.’ The emails we would send were so crazy. ‘Hi, can we add the sound of smashing plates after verse one? Let’s amp up the sirens!’”
Shaw and Kronengold have been delighted at the song’s life online. Although, if their experience on set was anything to go by, they should’ve known sooner that “Hiccups (Body Go Crazy)” had legs. They tell Rolling Stone crew members could often be heard humming it during filming. “Just to give you a sense of how pervasive the song was, when they would slate the pickup, our assistant director would say ‘Pick up, pick up, pick up, and my body go crazy,’” Kronengold says. “So it became this ultimate rallying cry on set.”
By the end of “Pop Girlie,” Carly has realized that K-pop is not in her skill set and returns to dental school, rededicating her ambition to the promise of a white doctor’s coat. But the creators of Adults say that the real-life success of the song speaks to Gen Z’s tendency to support creative risks — even if they’re tough to watch.
“This generation likes cheering things on,” Shaw says. “And if the audience response is any indication, Carly is onto something. Maybe we were all wrong about her.”
“[‘Hiccups’] is an anthem for people who don’t even know who the fuck they are, because I feel that so much in my life. There’s no judgement. Try a different genre of your life. Try to fuck up in a way that makes you go global for being an idiot,” Marsh adds. “We’ll always have ‘Hiccups.’”
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