Just A Book You Throw Away — 2024 in 10 albums
Some years, this is easier than others—the process of figuring out which albums are both indicative of the year, and the ones that you hope, at least in some regard, will age gracefully, and you will carry them with you into the years that follow, as much as you are able. That doesn’t always happen—sometimes an album that left such an impression is something you rarely, if ever, revisit. You, at least I, want your reflection on the year in music, in terms of albums, enjoyed as a whole, to be both timeless and timely but it is a difficult balance to maintain.
In more recent years I have selected three albums that I enjoyed more than the others, and then listed the additional seven in alphabetical order, by artist’s name. This year, though, the top three, or four, was very easy to figure out, yes, and to my surprise, the other albums featured on this list, came together in this order, without much duress.
10. Bloomsday - Heart of The Artichoke
And I think the thing that was so initially compelling about the debut full-length from Ira Garrison’s project Bloomsday, Heart of The Artichoke, and the thing that has remained so compelling, with each subsequent listen, throughout the summer, into the fall, and now as this year comes to a close, is the way Garrison, and the band, are able to effortlessly create a juxtaposition between aesthetics—the delicate nature of so many of these songs, and the handful of the album’s ten that are structured with the intention, I think, to contain a little more of a snarl, or an edge to how they land.
Heart of The Artichoke, as an album, taken as a whole, is a lot of things, and the one that comes to mind immediately, as an analytical listener, is that it is a portrait of growth—specifically in a kind of confidence that radiates loudly through Garrison’s lyricism, as well as in the organic, tight musicianship heard when the band is very clearly coming together and working toward something.
There is a kind of ramshackle, downcast “indie rock,” folk-adjacency to how Bloomsday sounds on the album—and that is to say, those qualities were not missing from Garrison’s debut under the project, the EP Place to Land, released two years prior—but there was both a bit of a rigidity, or tentative nature, and certainly a dreamy shimmer to the band’s earliest work—and I am remiss to say that they have “grown out” of that sound, because that is not necessarily the case, but the group, with Garrison at the helm, have prioritized a natural evolution in sound and scope.
For an album that is inherently hushed, it seems perhaps counterintuitive to describe parts of it as exhilarating, or thrilling even, but there are little jolts found, musically, throughout Heart of The Artichoke—there is the slow motion, downcast indie tumbling of the gorgeous, melancholic opening rack, “Where I End and You Begin,” and the similar sound they return to in bookending the album, though perhaps a little less stark in tone, on “Old Friend,” or the breathtaking, cathartic single, “Dollar Slice.”
And for as introspective and inward-turned as it can be, like the hushed, whispered, “Carefully,” or the even the somber sway and shuffle of “Bumper Sticker,” there is also a musically playful nature to be found on Heart—the jaunty, groove-ladened warmth of “Virtual Hug,” and the surprisingly rollicking bounce to the soaring, penultimate track, “Object Permanence.”
For the contrasts that the group maintains in dynamism throughout the album’s run, just in terms of arranging and instrumentation used, Garrison as a lyricist also manages to walk a contrast as well—there is a wistfulness to a lot of their writing, or a very palpable longing, that makes a number of moments on Heart of The Artichoke feel very humanized and personal; there are also places on the album where Garrison is not less personal by any means, but is much more thoughtful or poignant in their observations.
The wistful, humanized kind of longing ripples through the early parts of Heart, which is where we are taken as the album opens on the swooning, fuzzy “Where I End and You Begin,” where Garrison, their voice incredibly delicate, ruminates with a bittersweet kind affectionate observation. “Saw your car from college broken down on the highway shoulder,” they begin, already crafting a terribly evocative image. “Saw you’re yes flashing in my rearview mirror. Smell your perfume here—used to smell it everywhere. Never got it out of that sweater—I hope you’re doing better.”
They return to strikingly similar imagery later on, on the swirling titular track. “Found your favorite t-shirt in the back of the car,” they explain. “Smelled like fire and bug spray, and your face in a flashlight, at dark.”
Heart of The Artichoke is not intended to be a bleak album—and it certainly isn’t, though there is an unflinching honesty to a majority of it, certainly when Garrison is looking for slivers of a higher power in the every day, as depicted in the album’s finest song (and one of the year’s finest as well), “Dollar Slice,” or trying to navigate, among other things, a politically tumultuous literal landscape in “Bumper Sticker”—within that honesty, there are brief flashes of hope, or. At least a want for optimism, which is where Garrison brings us in the triumphant, jubilant “Object Permanence.”
“We can make a mess,” they declare. “It doesn’t remain that it’s all gone to shit. Object permanence—dare to believe in what we have.”
A bold step forward for Bloomsday, as a band, and Garrison, as a “band leader” and songwriter, Heart of The Artichoke finds just the right balance in its myriad contrasts, or aesthetics, and it does so without breaking the stride of a kind of subtle and impressive confidence.
9. Pillow Queens - Name Your Sorrow
No, I’m not sad. No, I’m not sad. Let’s just play some rock ’n’ roll music.
And how often do we push ourselves when it would perhaps behoove us not to—to admit we need to pause. To take a break. To try again a different day. How often do we ignore the feeling, and the understanding that we might, under different circumstances, be in a better position to do something that requires energy, or concentration—requires us to be creative, or thoughtful—and that if we push ourselves, when we are not feeling our best, the result might be one of diminishing returns.
How many times have you assured someone else, or yourself, that you are fine, when you are most assuredly not, and you push yourself forward, simply hoping for the best.
“No, I’m not sad. No, I’m not sad,” the Pillow Queens front person Pamela Connolly snarls under a dizzying, clattering percussive rhythm and the low, churning chords coming from the guitars in the opening track to the Irish quartet’s third full-length, Name Your Sorrow. “Let’s just play some rock ’n’ roll music.”
Pillow Queens have always had an edge to their sound—it has to do, at least in part, with the traditional instrumentation the band uses, of two guitars, a bass, and drums. It creates what is inherently a “rock band” aesthetic, and yes, certainly over the group’s existence, they have matured and evolved in how they use those instruments, in terms of overall tone. And in that maturation and evolution, the sound, at least in arriving on Name Your Sorrow, has grown louder, and is much, much darker comparatively to their other albums.
The darkness, and the edge, or ferocity, rather, and the scope of sound, certainly comes in part from the band growing more confident since the days of their formation—but more than anything, that darkness and that edge come from the way it weaves specific thematic elements throughout its entirety—the dissolution of a relationship, often depicted in unflattering and unflinching ways.
Told through non-linear means, Name Your Sorrow is a series of fragments where we as listeners bear witness, mostly, to moments unfolding after the relationship has already begun its decline—oscillating between confusion, disbelief, and hurt, anger, and spite, a surprising amount of lustiness, or restlessness within the body, and then a want for hope—not of reconciliation, but of something potentially better, or less destructive waiting ahead.
Even in the towering heights and levels of voluminous bombast that the group grasps for on Name Your Sorrow, it is an album that never falters in terms of maintaining an accessibility or an infectiousness to how the songs are constructed—Pillow Queens, even at their most raucous, in the past, have always maintained a knack for pop songwriting, and that still resonates here, like once the record really finds its stride after the moody and atmospheric mission statement, “February 8th,” which, through murky imagery, introduces the kind of creeping dread of “an end” that ripples throughout the songs that follow, and it is the song that finds Connolly pushing ahead, despite something telling her not to.
“No, I’m not sad. No, I’m not sad,” Connolly assures. “Let’s just play some rock ’n’ roll music.”
The group, at times channeling a more dissonant or wandering sound, does focus quickly on the thudding, chugging, and eventually shimmery and ascendant second track, “Suffer,” which was the first single released from the record, months in advance of its announcement—the thundering percussion, and downcast, distorted guitar chords creating a kind of anthemic environment that lifts off slightly, or offers reprieve from the ominous nature, in the chorus, both working to mirror the sentiments of the song’s lyrics. “Keeping this home together,” Connolly sings through gritted teeth. “Despite your appetite to lie.” Though that anguish is replaced with a moment of tenderness shortly thereafter. “Still gonna love you. Still gonna fight,” she exclaims. “Still gonna try to catch a glance of your eye.”
Name Your Sorrow does find a way to a much more accessible and impressively so sound within the arrangements in the second half—again, even when it is noisy, or aggressive, like on side two’s opening track, “Gone,” there is a gorgeous catharsis and a kind of head-nodding groove buried in the layers of guitar distortion as both Connolly and the group’s bassist, Sarah Corcoran, howl the brutally honest line, “I’m gone. I’m someone else’s sun…I’ms someone else’s problem,” or in the uncomfortably self-effacing line that arrives in the torrential bridge—“Tried to be your rock but I’m just your fool. I could make it stop, but I’m not that cool. I was in your top five things to do—I’m bored of it.”
It is a dark album, yes, and it is in those moments of darkness where it does thrive the most, or is the most emotionally resonant—though there are places where the darkness lifts or it is not as heavy, musically, like self-deprecating sass of “Like A Lesson,” and the enthusiastic “Friend of Mine,” both from the first half of the album, or “So Kind,” from the second, but Name Your Sorrow is most stunning and most surprising in it darkest corner, the smoldering and angry centerpiece, “The Bar’s Closed,” and the desperate, lusty exhalation of “One Night,” tucked near the album’s conclusion.
“The Bar’s Closed”—one of the band’s most impressive on this album certainly but in their catalog as well, churns at an intentional pace, building up until it can no longer hold itself back, and breaks down in an upsetting swell and downpour of noise, with Connolly sneering and scoffing above the sound, “You’re kind of vacant—you’re kind of mean. When you undress me, I hate how I feel,” which arrives after, as the song is still finding its way, and slowly climbing, one of the most cutting lyrics in any song, on any album, I had heard this year.
“Save all your money. Sell off the memories. Buy back your life.”
That kind of hurt, and unchecked anger, is juxtaposed with the surrender to lust in “One Night,” which moves with a kind of dramatic flair as it tumbles in its verses before exploding in bombast in the chorus, where Connolly absolutely belts out another extraordinarily memorable lyric—“When I smell like whatever you smell like, you can fuck me clean.”
There is a small resolve—hard-earned, though earned nevertheless, as Name Your Sorrow ends, in “Notes on Worth,” where Connolly muses, with pain in her voice, as the song concludes, “I can feel my body beating—hated it all my life. I don’t wanna go home alone this weekend. I think I’m worth the time.”
No, I’m not sad. No, I’m not sad.
We keep pushing ourselves, even when it would behoove us not to, with the hopes that we find our way to a sliver of optimism. To find our way to the worth.
8. H. Pruz - No Glory
There’s a heaviness to the morning—not from you, you should know.
It rarely, if ever, rises above a whisper. And in the one instance where it really does, it casts a dizzying and ominous shadow, making it all the more genuinely interesting and memorable—a small, unsettling kind of ripple that does, in a sense, delicately trail throughout the songs that follow it.
And there are, of course, specific genres of music that I am more drawn to, over others, and within those genres, there are certainly styles, or aesthetics, that I find much more alluring in comparison to others—styles, or sounds, that I consider to be more compelling, or thoughtful, and ultimately more memorable, especially as the year comes to an end.
No Glory, the stunning, spectral debut full-length from Hannah Pruzinksy’s project H.Pruz, is “indie”—in the sound, or style of instrumentation that it favors across its nine tracks, but also in Pruzinsky’s aesthetics, and ethics, as an artist.
Among the ways I would describe No Glory, or at least how it feels, as an album, once you sit down with it and kind of immerse yourself in the world that Pruzinsky has created, outside of the hushed, pensive nature that it has, there is also a meditative, and extraordinarily thoughtful quality to it—in Pruzinsky’s lyricism certainly, but also in the “indie folk” instrumentation and arranging used. It’s stark, and even in how stark, or somber it often becomes, it is still a beautiful album to experience from beginning to end—a haunting beauty, yes, but a beauty regardless.
Before No Glory recedes into that truly skeletal and introspective place, Pruzinksy does create moments that are both literally and figuratively stirring—like the slow churning, smoldering opening track, “Dark Sun,” and then the jittery cacophony of “I Keep Changing.”
“Dark Sun,” as it opens, with its huge strums of the acoustic guitar, doesn’t seem like the kind of song that would work itself into a kind of haunting exercise in tension and release, but it does—with the longer it goes on, and the more elements that are added with intention, like the subtle and brushed percussion, and the surging bass notes that do find their way into the fabric woven by Pruzinsky’s guitar. The give and take, with the more “Dark Sun” builds slightly, creates this swooning sensation, with Pruzinksy’s vocals, often fragile in other places on the album, treading into ethereal territory here as they howl in stunning moments when all the pieces are thrown together and swirling around, “Forget everything is real—we’re here, in the sun.”
No Glory is at its finest, and Pruzinksy as a performer and songwriter is at their most impressive, when the album is less ominous, or uneasy, and finds its way into the hush that does fall over a majority of this collection. That hush is most effective in creating the atmosphere for Pruzinksy’s evocative, often very literate and personal narratives, like the cavernous, somber “Worldfire” where they channel Ruins and Grid of Points-era Grouper in terms of the way the silence deliberately hangs in between the notes coming from the creaky upright piano are played like an instrument themselves, while their voice, both muffled, or low, in some places, then delicately rising throughout, and depicts a kind of bleak, ambiguous, but telling narrative. “Vinegar in the stream—pour it from the bridge,” Pruzinksy observes, then adds, “Time takes what we leave.”
Even with the deliberately slow, wandering structure of a song like “Worldfire,” there is something extremely memorable to the creeping vocal melody and how it all lingers well after the song has finished. “I promise it wasn’t all smoke,” we’re assured. “We met in a snowstorm,” Pruzinsky recalls. “What you saw was steam.”
No Glory isn’t a “breakup” album, but it is an album that is informed, at times, by the end of not only a relationship, but a job as well. That kind of dissolution does play a large role in Pruzinksy’s interactions with others, detailed within the album, like the slow, dreamy shuffle found in the second half, “Like Mist,” which recalls an evening out with someone, though the dynamic they have is intentionally left uncertain. “You like to dance to shitty open mic band,” Pruzinksy observes, as the music around them slowly and somberly turns and glistens. “You grab my hand and say, ‘We’re gonna join them for the last song.’ And you know the words to say when they ask us if we’re friends, or just two strangers having a good time.”
There are a lot of songs that create lasting effects, or lingering moments, across No Glory, but perhaps its most compelling, or evocative, both in the way it floats, musically, and in the introspective way Pruzinsky writes, arrives early on, in “Dawn.”
There is an inward kind of saunter that “Dawn” takes early on, in its rhythm, with an inviting and icy piano melody plunked out drifting through it, accompanied at times by wind instrumentation. It isn’t “relaxing,” really, but it is infectious, even in how subtle it is. Like this little bit of an instrumental break, in between verses, is something that did truly stay with me throughout the entirety of this calendar year and will certainly follow me into the next.
Pruzinsky, in their writing, even when it is not the most optimistic, or there is ambiguity to what is happening within the narrative, remains tender, and “Dawn” is one of the places where they are the most tender, and most humanizing in their observations.
Addressing an off-stage and presumably romantic partner, Pruzinsky begins in a fragile voice—“I love to say ‘I love you’ in my head when it’s new. I wanna tell you about that. I wanna tell you it all,” they continue. “I hold you when I wake up—count the creases, and the crows. There’s a heaviness to the morning—not from you, you should know.”
And the mornings are, of course, at least for me and perhaps for you as well, the heaviest or the hardest. A kind of fog that you hope, as the day progresses, will slowly lift, but that isn’t always promised.
And, I suppose, a lot of things are not promised. And while it is not the central conceit of No Glory, I think what we do with the disappointment life hands us, or the unanticipated, or the frustrations we find ourselves facing—the human condition, if you will, is very present in all of these songs, with Hannah Pruzinsky gracefully and beautifully continuing to wade through all of it, even in moments when it feels bleak, or stark. It might not always feel like there is hope, but there are shreds of optimism that we can and perhaps should try to cling to.
7. Eliza and The Delusionals - Make It Feel Like A Garden
And something that I am still struggling with, and would hope that, in the coming years, might grow a little better at doing, in terms of listening, is to really understand that not everything, in terms of contemporary popular music—and any form of art, really—is intended for deeper analysis. Or, like, the kind of intentional “sitting down with,” and not so much pulling an album or a song apart, but deliberately unpacking it and giving consideration to the elements that it is comprised of.
And I find that, the more I grow, or change, in the way I listen to music—for enjoyment, outside of writing about it, as well as for analytical purposes, there is an attraction to both—or, at least, I understand the allure of music that is just asking you to have fun, and let go, if you will. But it is hard, or at least it still, as this year ends, proves not impossible but difficult for me to always turn off, or lower the volume, of my analytical nature.
I tell you all of that to tell you this—there are albums that can do both, or at least attempt to walk the line between thoughtful or resonant lyrics, with elements that you can parse out and analyze, and albums that do, in the end, wish for you to have fun as you listen. And the sophomore full-length from the Australian outfit Eliza and The Delusionals, Make It Feel Like A Garden, is one of those albums.
And in walking that line, between an album with poignancy woven throughout, but with the emphasis overall being on the tone it strikes, and sustains, throughout its nearly hour run, this is not to be dismissive of the lyricism of the group’s namesake, Eliza Klatt, because there is certainly a thoughtful and contemplative nature to her writing, especially the further along into the album we’re taken, but between the lighter, breezier range that Klatt sings in, as well as the robust, well-assembled, and often glistening arrangements to these songs, the lyrics, or what one can take away from them, is something that does reveal itself after a number of listens.
It is an album that, even if there is a little bit of a darkness to the writing, does an impeccable job of dressing it up just enough in pop sheen to distract you, albeit temporarily, and implores you to have a fun time.
Make It Feel Like A Garden, musically, was one of the most dazzling and bombastic albums of 2024—it is just simply enormous in sound, right from the moment it begins with the explosive, soaring titular track, and the group effortlessly sustains that kind of exuberance until its final moments, and I think what was ultimately so impressive, and memorable, about the album, is how Eliza and The Delusionals pay homage, without being derivative, to a very specific sound, and era, of pop music, with a number of moments on the record calling to mind elements of the late 1980s and early 1990s—specifically the jaunty kind of shuffle in “Hurts,” and it is that sense of playfulness, and urgency within the song’s shimmering bridge, that does dress up the lyricism and distract from the tinge of darkness of Klatt’s writing—“You hurts,” she sings pensively, but with strength projecting out of her voice. “The strangest things to keep you out of my mind. It feels worse—I’ll own this pain for just a little while.”
Klatt and the group return to that kind of shuffling, playful sound near the end, on the sultry, rhythmic, and iridescent “Somebody,” which, in leaning heavily into that specific kind of pop sound, is one of a handful of tunes on the record that features a saxophone solo, and lyrically, as it propulsively slinks forward, lyrically, Klatt steers it into a place of longing, often tumultuous, which is where a number of the songs on Make It Feel Like A Garden operate from.
The album, taken as a whole—I think it’s intended to, as on the digital version, there are instrumental interludes that connect one song to the next—works well, but it is at its finest during particular moments, like the surprising, downcast, gloomy “Lately,” which snarls with not exactly a sense of menace, but something much more ominous than found elsewhere on the record, and includes a guest turn from the Silversun Pickups vocalist, Brian Aubert, as he and Klatt trade off singing of a kind of dangerous, urgent, affection—“Lately, have I been in your bran? Not in a weird way—think bout you all the time.”
The inverse of that, I suppose, at least in tone, are the brightest moments on the record, where the group taps into a kind of unabashed, dreamy nostalgia—both the early arriving “She Sits Up So High,” and the even shinier in its execution, “Will She Know Today,” both sound like they were plucked from the closing credits of a late 1990s teen coming of age film in a way that is staggering in its sincerity.
The finest moment on Make It Feel Like A Garden, though, is the album’s third proper track, “Falling For You,” which, in looking at its essence, I think is the most successful or well-assembled of the set because of how it is a convergence or sorts of the best things about the album, and the group itself—like the soulful saxophone solo arriving at the end, and the blindingly bright sounds of the electric guitar and synthesizer tones, creating something 1980s inspired, set against a mid-tempo rhythm that creates a groove you cannot help but fall into as the tempestuous romance depicted in the lyrics falls, then rises, in time along with the swelling of the music, and Klatt’s pleading in the chorus. “I keep falling for you—I don’t want you rolling. I’m not in your love song, but my heart keeps falling in love.”
Not every album features songs that require, or ask for a deeper analytical listening—and if we do end up falling into that, we find small, bright flashes of a kind of universal want, or longing that a lot of contemporary popular music understands and uses to express itself. Make It Feel Like A Garden is an album that still asks something of us though—though I do not think it is a big ask, as Eliza and The Dellusionals wish for us to have fun, along with them, and perhaps shout along to the enormous, towering choruses that are packed into this record, and follow them into the rhythms they’ve created that beckon us to move, regardless of if we are in the mood to or not.
6. Clairo - Charm
I wouldn’t ask you to take care of me.
I was late to the party on Claire Cottrill’s full-length debut as Clairo—2019’s glitchy, melancholic Immunity, but even over five years later, there are two things I cannot separate myself from with that album, specifically, and I suppose with Cottrill herself as an artist, even after she has moved further and further away from that sound.
I can remember in January of 2020—only a few weeks into the new year and two months before everything was going to become very, very bad and uncertain, sitting in one of the bedrooms in a large AirBnB in rural Minnesota. I was there with my spouse, and a number of her co-workers, and their families—including her boss, all there to attend a wedding. And there were, of course, parts of the weekend when I would try, as best as I was able to at that time, to be a good sport and venture into the living room or kitchen and socialize, but I did, as I still often do, find myself retreating to the bedroom, and looking for small moments of solace.
And it is, of course, hard to find solace or comfort or even just a little quiet in a large house that you are, for less than 48 hours, sharing with, like, seven other people, but I do remember sitting on the edge of the bed, with my laptop resting on the large dresser, listening to Immunity for the first time, and immediately, as I often do when I am so moved by something I hear, ordering a copy of it off of Discogs.
I wouldn’t ask you to take care of me.
For a number of years, I walked to work—even during 2020 and 2021, when my spouse was working from home, and neither of us rarely, if ever, used the car. In the early morning, as the sun was just rising, the 15 minutes it took me to walk from my home, to work, was another place where I was often looking for a small moment of quiet, or solace.
I would listen to music most mornings, and in March of 2020, well into April and May, even, there were a handful of songs that I would play as I tried to gather myself to begin another day of uncertainty—“Alewife,” “Feel Nothing,” and the stunning, sprawling closing track from Immunity, “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” were among those I would hear, most mornings, as I trudged the nearly empty streets, when the world was just waking up.
We are nearly five years removed from the onset of the pandemic.
And there are, of course, things that I am, even after so much time has passed, unable to divorce myself from associating with the first few months of uncertainty. Cottrill’s debut album, and those three songs, specifically, are among those things. It isn’t necessarily bad. It doesn’t make me not wish to listen to them. It just takes me back to that place. Those morning walks. The tumultuous feelings. It all lingers.
I wouldn’t ask you to take care of me.
I think that sometimes, as listeners, we wish for artists we like to continue making the same thing, or things very similar, to what attracted us to them in the first place, because there is that familiarity. There are times when taking a risk, or growing in sound, or maturing as a performer or songwriter, perhaps doesn’t always resonate with everyone.
Claire Cottrill is never going to make another album as inward and skittering as Immunity. You may wish for her to. And maybe there are even times when I might wish for her to do that as well. But she continues to grow as a songwriter and an artist—her sophomore album, Sling, was an admittedly sleepier and more organic-sounding affair, produced and co-written with the polarizing pop auteur Jack Antonoff.
Comparatively, Charm, Cottrill’s third full-length, is much more enthusiastic than its immediate predecessor, but it is another enormous step in growth and maturation, and a step further away from the icier, more synthetic and jittery aesthetic of her debut. Now 26, I am hesitant to say there is a “wise beyond her years” kind of feeling to Charm, but it does owe a great deal to the sound of a totally different era—both in its production and engineering, but also in its arranging.
Describing Charm as lush, or robust, does it a disservice—even if you are to think that it is a sleepier, or a less enthusiastic kind of record, it is a technical marvel. Like Sling, Charm finds Cottrill working in close collaboration with one other individual in terms of production and co-writing—here, she teams with Leon Michels, who was a founding member of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, and his background in a soulful, R&B kind of sound can be heard from the moment the record begins. It is warm, and it is densely layered, though it never feels crowded in terms of how much is happening within any song at any given moment.
It is also an album that was recorded live to analog tape—and while this kind of striving for a “perfect take” of each song was something that was lamented in at least one review that I had read upon Charm’s release—Pitchfork stated it made the album feel sterile, but I would disagree. There is a meticulousness to it, yes, but it does not feel labored over in a way that detracts from the warmth it exudes. It is, even in the moments when it slides into the slightest bit of dissonance or psychedelia, an extraordinarily welcoming album that is impressive from start to finish and has moments of sheer joy peppered throughout.
Cottrill and Michels work to strike a balance of tension and release—well, as much tension and as much release as a relatively relaxed-sounding album can have. There are places where it is slower paced, and turned a little more inward, and then there are the spots that have a little more bounce in their rhythm. The word that I found writing down most, in listening with intention, is “groove.” And it’s not like there were not grooves to be found on Immunity, but it is perhaps because of Michels’ history of soul and R&B that lends itself to the way these songs do just demand that you nod your head along in time to the beat—specifically thinking of the hypnotic and alluring “Second Nature,” and the slower, slinkier “Slow Dance,” both found on the album’s first side.
And I have spent parts of this year, and certainly last year, at the behest of my best friend, learning how to appreciate “vibe-based music”—music that, often, just wishes for you to have a good time while you are listening, or implores you to have fun, and is not something that needs to be subjected to a serious analysis—specifically when it comes to lyricism. It’s something that, as a critical listener, even when it is not an album that I am opting to write about, I have admittedly struggled with knowing how to do.
And this is not to say that Cottrill’s lyric writing on Charm is not worthy of analyzing, but what I have found, the more time I have spent with the album, and certainly as we reach the end of the year, is that it is a more vibe based listen—regardless of how jaunty or rollicking a song ends up being, even in its slower and more pensive moments, it is about the feeling of the sound overall—that older, warmer sound that it manages to sustain throughout.
The album’s first single, “Sexy to Someone,” is, of course, one of its finest or most fun moments across the board on Charm—it is certainly the most exciting, pulsating song in the first half. And this is, of course, not to sell any of the writing on the album short by any means, because there is this kind of earnest longing to be desired that has a kind of universal appeal, I think, that Cottrill describes in literally the opening line of the song: “Sexy to someone—it’s all I really want,” and I don’t think she’s asking for too much, but it is a song really glides along the surface of a give and take—there is a reserve within the verses, and a bright, dazzling burst of jubilance when she arrives at the chorus. And it works because it is fun—it is fun to be desired, and to want to be desired by someone and to allow yourself to give into the nearly unrelenting rhythm bashed out in the crisp drum kit while additional, soulful, and, more importantly,, playful flourishes come and go.
Cottrill and Michels return to a remarkably similar sound, or at least a strong, driving rhythm at a similar tempo, on the album’s second half, on “Add Up My Love”—another high water mark on Charm. And I find that in pop songwriting, there are certain things that perhaps come a little easier than others. Writing about “love” can mean any number of things because I do feel like there is a difference between a “love song” and songs that are about love—both the good and the difficult—but you do not often hear songwriters exploring the idea of sensuality. Writing about sex happens often, but there is something admirable about exploring smaller moments of intimacy, which is something Cottrill does on both “Add Up My Love,” and the viral slow burn, “Juna.”
“Add Up My Love” works from a place of tangible longing, and Cottrill sneaks in these moments of a very quiet kind of sensuality or intimacy between two people that are among the most vivid across the album. “Do you miss my hands hanging on the back of your neck?,” she asks playfully before the enormous, shimmering chorus. “It’s just something I’m into. Do you miss my name—said it in between your breath,” she continues. “I remember when I see the moon.”
And there are moments, in pop songwriting, when the depiction of sensuality, however big or small, is surprising—perhaps because it is so uncommon, which is where Cottrill takes us on the shuffling, slinky “Juna,” where there is a kind of quiet surrender that is detailed in a coy, but alluring way.
“It’s when you talk close enough that I feel it on my skin—breathe it in,” she begins, with the twinkling, rhythmic arranging rippling underneath her. “Most of these days, I don’t get too intimate,” she continues, before adding. “Why would I let you in? But I think again.”
Cottrill is the most sensual, and “Juna” is perhaps the most surprising in its second verse. “You make me wanna go dancing. You make me wanna try on feminine,” she confesses, in a breathier, higher register. “You make me wanna go buy a new dress—you make me wanna slip off a new dress.”
And there is a thoughtful nature, in the end, to Charm—Cottrill has written candidly in the past about her mental health, in both the stunning, tender opening track to Immunity, “Alewife,” and in the pensive, unflinchingly honest “Just For Today,” from Sling. She returns to that space, in a sense, as Charm comes to a close, on the fumbly, acoustic “Pier 4,” which is a departure from the rest of the album’s tone, in that it is more thoughtful, and more lyric-based, focusing less on a rollicking vibe, with Cottrill’s lyrics exploring a kind of loneliness, and how difficult it is to maintain genuine connections. “You’re just playing dumb—what’s the cost of it,” she asks in the chorus. “Of being loved when close is not close enough.”
When I think of Claire Cottrill, I think of the young woman who, like a mantra or a prayer, even, over cavernous piano chords, repeated the phrase, “I wouldn’t ask you to take care of me,” in my ears, as the sun was rising, and I was walking to face another uncertain day, nearly five years ago. Cottrill is both still that woman, and not, if that makes sense. She continues to mature as an artist, and she does ask—rightfully so, that we grow alongside her. Charm is an enormous, captivating, and, yes, charming step musically in terms of an artist embracing and committing with grace to an aesthetic, and it is an album that, in turn, does embrace us, as listeners, with a joyous warmth when we open up to it.
5. Hemlock - 444
I will do the dishes that I meant to do this morning, and I’ll brush my teeth, and go to bed, and try again…
I am perhaps not explicitly looking for certain things when I analytically listen to music, but regardless of how conscious I am of it, I am often finding these things—similar things, or elements, that can assist me in finding my way into the record, and to make my analysis of it more thoughtful, yes, but then also much more personal than it should be. One of those things, or elements, that I am drawn to, and not explicitly looking for but am often finding, or honestly, creating as a means of analysis, is the convergence.
Until there is some amount of overlap.
I tell you all of that to tell you this—throughout the dozen songs included on it, the sophomore full-length from Carolina Chauffe’s Hemlock, 444, an album that is both extraordinarily thoughtful and bold, does end up converging within itself in a number of ways, or at the very least, is an exercise in a kind of duality, as it, from top to bottom, shows the kind of dynamism that Chauffe has as a songwriter and ultimately as a band leader.
Hemlock, as a project, or “band,” itself contains multitudes—it is the name that Chauffe has performed under as a solo artist for a number of years, often just with the acoustic guitar, releasing collections of sparsely arranged, home-recorded material, and touring incessantly, building an audience across the country through a truly independent and DIY ethos.
Hemlock is also the name of the band that Chauffe fronts—performing full-band gigs, as they are all able to, with a second guitarist and rhythm section, but more importantly, they are an assemblage of sharp, intuitive musicians that accompanied Chauffe in the studio for the intensive recording sessions for 444, giving the album a tight, thoughtful, urgent, and robust sound.
Not that any of those things were missing on Chauffe’s full-length debut as Hemlock, 2022’s Talk Soon, but in the interim, what you can hear on 444, even in the album’s quietest or most meditative moments, is that there has been an exponential amount of growth in confidence—Chauffe’s lyricism is personal, but also ambiguous enough to leave you, at times, in a bit of a poetic, fragmented haze, but the album’s arranging is really what creates that kind of convergence.
There are places where Chauffe is more or less performing alone, or with little additional instrumentation provided—like the hypnotic and woozy opening track, “Day One,” and then there are the places where the band joins them, and in doing so, can push the sound, or the aesthetic of a song into places both expected and not—leaning into the familiar folksy, rootsy drawl that Chauffe has favored in the past with Hemlock, or arriving at something much more volatile and raucous in comparison.
The songs from 444 were all selected from material Chauffe had put together through their ongoing “Song A Day” endeavor—one month from each year that they dedicate to writing and home-recording a song each day. The results of this project are available to listen to via Hemlock’s Bandcamp site, as well as streaming platforms, and Chauffe began, in their most recent Substack update, provided a side-by-side comparison between the original sketches of these tunes, and how they sound now, after they were given the opportunity to be developed and expanded upon by the band.
And because of the immediate nature with which many of these songs were originally written, a lot of them are short. No track on 444 runs the risk of overstaying its welcome (a number of them clock in at, like, 90 seconds total), and there are places where you both wonder how the song is going to find its way to a resolution, or conclusion, in such a short amount of time, and you wish that it could, perhaps, stick around a little longer—specifically the gritted teeth ferocity of the album’s first single, the uncharacteristically loud “Drive and Drive,” or the dreamy, swaying rhythms of “Deja Vu.”
Chauffe, as a lyricist, across all of these songs, oscillates through any number of feelings—there are moments that are playful, or even a little sensual, like the jaunty “Hyde Park,” which is a sharp juxtaposition from the catharsis and sheer frustration depicted in noisy “Hazards.” More often than not, though, these songs all come from a place of warmth and earnestness—Chauffe, in their between-song banter, and in conversation, is an incredibly warm and earnest individual, and the earnestness here is most effective, or impactful, in the moments where it taps into a palpable kind of wistful longing for another, or when it is turned inward into a place for reflection.
And I often, especially this year, in writing about music, I try to articulate what I feel to be the differences between “love songs” and a song that is “about love.” Because, like all things, there is a place where they overlap, but there are enough elements that make them distinct from one another—it is perhaps surprising, as it is not something that Chauffe has really written about in the past, but there are moments of real, outward tenderness and affection on 444, with the swooning, stunning “Sky Baby,” the album’s penultimate track and one of its absolute finest, being the place where that sense of longing is, yes, still delivered in an extremely poetic way, but the song’s sentiments remain accessible or at least, like, understood.
Musically, “Sky Baby” is built around a quickly, but delicately plucked acoustic guitar, with other elements of the song being introduced gradually, allowing it to build momentum until it does really swirl, and ascends, through the gently brushed percussive elements, and the impressive vocal layering, repeating the final line like a mantra.
The lyrics are based around a series of affectionate metaphors, with the intensity, or urgency of that affection, growing with each one that Chauffe delivers. “If you were a garden, each flower a song,” they begin at the top of the song. “I’d plant you bouquets-full our whole springtime long.”
Then, later on, “If you were a hound dog, could I be your bone,” they ask. “You can have all my marrow—carry me around our home. If you were a dove, dear, please make your tree,” they implore in the next verse. “My branches your cradle—build your nest with me.”
These sentiments culminate in the final verse, and the line that is then repeated until the song reaches its delicate conclusion. “If I am the setting sun, then you are the sky,” Chauffe attests, with the immediacy of this want, or longing, in these affections, reaching its boiling point.
The inward turn 444 takes can be heard throughout, but the narrative, I think, is the most impressive on “Drive and Drive,” where, over sneering, distorted electric guitar chugs and bashed-out percussion—channeling a kind of indie rock angst previously unheard in Hemlock’s music—Chauffe breaks down the fourth wall, in a sense, between themselves as the writer and performer, and us as the audience, addressing us in a truly familiar way as they, in a breathless kind of stream of conscious way, reflecting on, among other things, the lifestyle of a DIY touring musician—“How does anybody get out of bed before 11,” they ask, pointedly in the opening line. “Have I lost my way again? Have I lost it? Or maybe I’m just built to drive and drive to a new city every day and sleep in someone’s guest bed every night.”
From the guest bed, then, Chauffe uses the stream of conscious flow of “Drive and Drive” to, as they often do, both in their writing and as a person in this world, extend gratitude—“People are so generous,” they observe. “It’s true—people are kind.”
“Drive and Drive” does not operate at what I would call a breakneck pace, but at less than two minutes in length, it is breathless, and relentless at the ideas Chauffe is ruminating on, with the band keeping time underneath. And it is through that breathlessness that we find ourselves at the most poignant and human observations in the song and potentially across the album, and a portion of lyrics that I have returned to since first hearing them in June, when the song was released as a single, months ahead of the album’s arrival.
“And I will go to therapy again this Monday evening—talk about how hard it is to strike some balance in this life. And I will leave feeling the same way I felt walking in, or maybe with some burden lifted, or maybe with some burden bare. And I will do the dishes that I meant to do this morning. And I’ll brush my teeth, and go to bed, and try again, and try again…”
Chauffe, as the song careens towards its sudden, dissonant conclusion, repeats the expression “try again” nine times—and for as ferocious as “Drive and Drive” is, and in how it seems to be over just as soon as it started, that repetition is what does truly linger long after that final, distended note of the guitar has evaporated into the air.
Trying. We are all supposed to try. I think about that a lot. And I have written about that a lot—specifically in the last five years. We try. Not even our “best” at times. But we show up, regardless. And put in the effort that we can and hope.
And that’s what 444 ultimately leaves you with. Chauffe, as a person, and a songwriter, is not pessimistic but is certainly realistic, and for every difficulty or hardship, and for everything bleak that the world offers up, both on a larger scale, but also within the daily minutiae of you and I, the album is a beautiful, evocative reminder to look for, and show gratitude for, small moments of beauty, or wonder, or hope, and to find the places where the multitudes we contain, or duality we hold, allows us to converge within something not even larger than ourselves, but gives us the space to be more considerate as we navigate.
4. Why Bonnie - Wish On The Bone
And if you are, perhaps, like me, with the way you listen to music, even in the slightest regard, maybe you, too, often struggle to recall how, or where, you were first introduced to a new artist, but you have a memory of listening to them for the first time.
I don’t remember exactly how I would have first heard of the group Why Bonnie—described somewhere as an amalgamation between shoegaze and Americana, which, in the hands of a less capable outfit, could be absolutely disastrous, but the band’s 2022 full-length debut, 90 In November, found itself walking the thin line between the two drastically different tones—giving into a kind of ferocity and snarl, while still making room for a southern drawl embedded within the feeling of the songs, as well as in the often smoldering vocals of the group’s singer and songwriter, Blair Howerton.
But it was a job that allotted enough freedom and, at times, just enough solace, and I was able to listen to music for large portions of my shift, and I remember looking at the red and orange cover art to 90 In November on the thumbnail provided in Spotify, and I can remember the sound of the album coursing through my single AirPod, mashed further and uncomfortably into my ear because of the cumbersome noise protection headphones I had to wear to muffle the cavernous sounds of 40 dogs barking all at once, as the sun was coming up on a Friday morning in August, as I individually walked dogs outside to use the bathroom, and put out fresh food and water for them in their kennels.
Sometimes, it’s over before it gets started.
And, yes, sometimes it is over before it gets started. And that can mean so many things. And I guess, in even using my earliest memories of listening to Why Bonnie as a flimsy conceit to talk about the group’s blistering and brilliant sophomore album Wish On The Bone, yes, sometimes it is over before it gets started—like a job that you realize you are not long for after only a few hours into your first day, but find yourself muddling through for longer than you wish, out of necessity.
Sometimes, it’s over before it gets started, like a piece of writing that you spend time, and effort on, and get a few hundred or even a thousand or so words on the page before you start to second guess yourself and talk yourself out developing it any further—out of, more than anything, I think, frustration in yourself, or an uncertainty of how your idea can be sustained, or where you can even take it.
It’s over before it gets started.
Something that I often think about with regard to contemporary popular music is the idea of the second album. Some artists, perhaps, think of it as a make-or-break situation for their careers—maybe that is not the case now, in 2024, with the way the “music industry” works, and how music is consumed, which is, anecdotally, less focused on the idea of the album, or the album as a whole, or the “album cycle,” if you will.
The second album, though, is the place where a band can find themselves growing into the potential that they perhaps demonstrated brilliant, if not ramshackle, flashes of within a debut.
I am thinking of instances of this in the past that have, over time, really stayed with me—like the Canadian indie rock trio Land of Talk, and their second full-length, 2010’s Cloak and Cipher, or the glitchy and brooding outfit that, at the time, was named Sister Crayon, and their 2015 effort, Devoted. Instances where the debut is undoubtedly impressive, yes, but by the time that the artist in question returns with its follow up, they have grown into themselves, or evolved, and the results are simply staggering.
Wish On The Bone is that kind of an album for Howerton and Why Bonnie—a record where the stakes are high, yes, but the group has the freedom and space to reflect on the want for growth, or maturation, in sound, and then explore what that means, or what that looks like within the context of this collection. And if anything, I think that in the two years between the release of 90 In November and Wish On The Bone, what you can hear is a confidence and robustness that wasn’t lacking, exactly, but it is something that the group has grown into and certainly grown more comfortable with—the songs are just maybe not as noisy, or edgy in tone, but they seem much more intentional or thoughtful in how they were developed and ultimately how they sound on the album, in terms of the use of tension and release, and the way different instruments weave themselves in and out of the mix.
Sometimes I think about how songs sound like they are moving in slow motion—it’s more of a figurative kind of description, and maybe, to you, it does not make any sense, but it’s a feeling from within the music itself that I often find I am giving consideration to. It really doesn’t have to do with the tempo, or pacing of a song, or even the length—it doesn’t mean that song is taking forever to arrive at its point, or even at its conclusion. No. It is more about like the way the notes or instrumentation hangs—how much space and silence is forming within the taps of the cymbals or the pinging of a snare drum. How melancholic or how tumbling or how gentle does it sound when a torrent of guitar strums continues to rain down, with a mildly rollicking or playful twinkle of piano keys fluttering in, and finding its rightful place to pull a melody through.
Sometimes, it’s over before it gets started.
Wish On The Bone is an emboldened album from beginning to end and it does make an enormous, bold, tumbling statement right at the top with its snarling, downcast titular track.
“Wish,” at times, seems like it wishes to soar, and it does transcend, I think, as it is able, through the searing and distended electric guitar soloing that you hear throughout-—there is a surprisingly playful or at least a lighter nature to it as well, from the bluesy piano progression that is quite literally sprinkled in, here and there, the further along we get into the song. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition—the sounds are not in opposition of one another, but it takes effort for us, as listeners, I think, to really understand how, in all of the swirling together—yes, in a kind of musical slow motion—the song’s arranging really works, and perhaps sets the tone for the dynamism Why Bonnie demonstrates once the record gets underway.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, lyrically, Howerton often writes from a place that is both personal and not. What I mean by that is she reveals as much as she wishes to, and in a number of places, like in “Wish On The Bone,” for example, it is just enough—there are hints, and they are evocative enough to string together the narrative, but it remains vague, and ambiguous enough in a poetic way that we, as listeners, are not in the dark exactly, but do not have an entirely clear sense of all the details.
“Two evil eyes in a good, good head making an imprint on my bed,” she exclaims after howling the poignant chorus—“Sometimes it’s over before it gets started—so call me when the coast is clear.”
It’s vivid—as are the lines that she delivers in the second verse. “Wish on the bone and take yours home,” she scowls at this off-stage antagonist. “Your soapbox has turned to an ice box—you’ll slip as it melts. It’s hotter than hell.”
For as big, and full of a huge, swaying kind of slow motion bombast as the titular track has, Why Bonnie smartly turns things inward in the jittery, and surprisingly soulful “Dotted Line,” which bounces along with a slight sense of glee thanks to the intricate, post-punk inspired bass work, and the crisp, very precise percussive elements that keep it tumbling forward. That is offset or at least slightly contrasted by the kind of downcast nature of both the electric guitar strums and the gritted-teeth delivery of the vocals during the verses before the song really does open up—and wide—in the chorus.
And that is where the surprising, and welcomed, soulful kind of groove that “Dotted Line” wanders into really takes shape. There’s this kind of urgent shuffling that comes into the rhythm, and the instrumentation pulls itself back a little into a place of tension for Howerton to sing in a smokier range, “I should have known better—turns out it was a lie. I should have known better than to sign on the dotted line,” she continues, with a layer of background vocals repeating some of the words underneath as a means of punctuation.
The contrast in aesthetics, or influences, across Wish On The Bone, create a genuinely interesting give and take in dynamics the further along into the album you get, with the noisier tendencies never really colliding head first into the rootsier, twangier inspired sounds, but you are able to hear the moments where one is more heavily favored over the other, and the moments when they are walking the line between the two—it isn’t until the final third of the album, on the very “country and western” tinged “Three Big Moons” do you really hear Howerton giving into the drawl in her voice over a slow, shuffling rhythm, accompanied by the pensive strums of the acoustic guitar and in this instance, a violin, while ruminating on a kind of loneliness and using space travel as an unexpected metaphor—“Houston we have a problem,” she exclaims in the chorus. “So many that I just can’t solve them. Now that I’m here on this big rock alone. There’s no way up—the only road goes home.”
The more raucous moments on Wish On The Bone never really get away from the band, or become too overpowering—if anything, that does create an element of excitement, or immediacy in the moments where they appear, like on the downcast “Fake Out,” which is the place where the group steers their sound the hardest into a more guitar-focused “indie rock” snarl, which, as it all kind of surges together into something cathartic, while Howerton is bellowing with angst, “It’s not my face I imitate,” there is a familiarity to how sounds, and in analyzing contemporary popular music I feel like I do try not to draw direct comparisons from one artist to another, but it was pleasantly reminiscent of the more cacophonic songs from the earliest Land of Talk albums.
Wish On The Bone never ceases to be compelling from start to finish, and its finest moments arrive at the top of the second half, and paired back to back,” Green Things,” and “All The Money” really do, in the way their tones differ completely, show the dichotomy within Why Bonnie.
The words I found myself continuing to write down when sitting with Wish and spending the kind of analytical time it deserves were “downcast” and “melancholic”—it isn’t a “sad” album exactly. It is dark at times, yes, but more than anything, there is a somber tone that kind of just hangs over the whole thing, and in some places, it hangs a little heavier than others. “Green Things,” arriving at the beginning of the second side, is the most inherently somber of this set. It is also arresting in just how gorgeous and fragile it is compared to the rest of the songs that surround it. It fades in slowly, and in doing so, the intricate guitar work glistens, and once the rest of the band join Howerton, it moves at a very deliberate pace—and, again, like on the titular track, but certainly less jaunty in how it is executed there are just these very tasteful plunks of of a piano melody that is dropped in throughout.
And there is that contrast of sorts in a clear narrative, and something much more ambiguous, happening lyrically in “Green Things,” which, like in so many places across Wish On The Bone, makes it incredibly compelling. It isn’t a love song, exactly, nor is it a breakup song—maybe something in between, because there is a hint of obsession, and intensity, woven into what Howerton sings gently. “It’s the token bitter end to feel the way I do now,” she begins, mournfully. “You were just so sweet to me—the sugar blacked me out.”
And there is a kind of suspicion, or bitterness, that can be found in Howerton’s lyricism in a number of places on Wish—you can hear it in the scathing observations of “Dotted Line,” and you can certainly feel it, as well as hear it, in the slinking, angsty “All The Money.” The song isn’t ominous, exactly, but there is a creeping sense of unease and dread that the band, seemingly with ease, conjures it unrelentingly keeps pulsating forward, growing just a little more intense, opening up just a little more, the further we’re pulled into it.
I think that, within “All The Money,” the most fascinating and genuinely interesting thing, is the way that even as the song creeps, and unsettles, there is a groove that the band locks into eventually—powered mostly by the kind of smashing out of the hi-hat cymbal and pointed thud of the snare drum that eventually happens within the rhythm, and the tightness that the guitar and bass operate in loosening up as things become more emergent sounding.
Howerton sings her lyrics—again, vivid, but incredibly vague, through a sneer. “What if I could be somebody’s baby?,” she asks in the opening line. “Never hurting. Always loving—baby,” she continues before the tone shifts in her voice to something with a hint of not menace, but disdain. “All the money in the world wouldn’t buy what you want.”
Wish On The Bone concludes with, again, not exactly a contrast in the band’s sound across the album, but certainly a contrast in the emotions that are peppered within Howerton’s writing. If “Green Things” is a kind of melancholic look at love, “Weather Song,” the penultimate track, is a more heartfelt and earnest glimpse at it. “I crave for your touch like a lonely melody,” she muses. “I just want to sing along—I feel you like a song that is just meant for us. Oh, what a feeling to feel so much.” This arrives before the album’s hushed, brief afterward, “I Took The Shot,” which continues exploring, over muted and chintzy instrumentation, the loneliness that purveys throughout Wish. “I was somewhere in between a vision and a dream,” she observes. “I’d hoped you'd follow me, but behind me, there was nothing. I waited at our old bar, but you never showed. So I took the shot I bought for you,” she reflects in the end. “And one more for the road.”
In the press materials for Wish On The Bone, Howerton refers to the album as being written from a place of hope, adding that she believes that, yes, the world is, at current, “fucked up,” but that you can believe it is possible to change things.
“Hope, to me,” she says, “Is strength.”
Wish On The Bone is enormous—bold, at times angry, at times tender, or gentle, but it is an album that, from the first note until the final, whispered moments of “I Took The Shot,” remains astounding and impressive in its scope and maturation. It is ultimately the sound of a band that is unafraid of growth, or evolution, regardless of what that means, and in managing to capture that in something tangible, it is a record that, even in its more hopeless or pessimistic observations, it does offer up these glimmers of a want for something more, or something bigger to come.
3. Katie Gavin - What A Relief
And it is not that idea, or the weight, of the “solo album” hangs heavily over Katie Gavin’s debut outing under her own name, the long-gestating What A Relief, but there are the faintest traces of it—the idea of an artist who is most associated with a group, and wishes to establish an identity of their own, however, that ends up looking, or I suppose in this case, sounding.
What A Relief is, from beginning to end, an album that regularly surprises—the first and perhaps most noticeable is the cohesion the album has. Even though the songs included were written over the course of nearly a decade, nothing sounds out of place as Gavin does show her dynamism in the way the sound can shift—moving with ease through a shimmery kind of acoustic-pop sound on the album’s lead single, “Aftertaste,” to the very down-home, folksy arranging of “Inconsolable,” to the tension and angst of “Sanitized,” and “As Good As It Gets,” which also features an eerie guest turn from Mitski Miyawaki as Gavin’s foil within the loveless relationship depicted in the song’s lyrics.
Within Muna, Gavin often is at the front of songs that do compel you to move, and wish for you to have fun, and perhaps do not take themselves entirely seriously. I am thinking of course of the opening line to “Anyone But Me,” and there are moments of self-aware humor on What A Relief, like the deprecation and reflection she does near the end of the record on “Keep Walking”—and the record itself, from the moment it quietly begins, to its melancholic conclusion, is unrelenting in how captivating it is, but it is most resonant in the places where Gavin is, in her writing, just unabashedly honest—that is not to say that there are places where she is dishonest as a lyricist, but there are specific moments that do make this a collection of songs that offers up a kind of reflection on the human condition.
It is a personal record—and in how personal it is, Gavin does reflect on generation trauma, in both “Inconsolable” as well as the similarly tinged “The Baton,” but it is her reflections on grief and lust, respectively, that are the most impressive songs on the album. Neither emotion nor feeling is easy to write about nor easy to write about with tact and thought, but Gavin does it, in both instances, with an admirable kind of grace.
Something that I have written about in the past, and will certainly write about going forward is the intersection of grief and joy—it is something that I was assured, at one time, existed. And it might be something that exists for you, but I did, eventually, come to understand that it might not be a space that I am meant to find. Gavin explores that intersection, and walks the incredibly thin line between the two extremes, in the restrained and tumbling “Sweet Abby Girl, placed near the end of the record, as she recalls in a delicate, bittersweet way, her relationship with a dog—Abby, who lived with her for a short amount of time before passing away. Grief is not easy to write about, and writing about the loss of a companion animal is not impossible, but it, at least for me, has presented a number of challenges to it with the kind of sincerity I think is deserved, and Gavin does it beautifully with her observational, reflective lyrics that do just delicately unfold themselves over the song’s quiet arranging.
“There’s sleep in the pink of her eyelids—absent-minded, I reach to tend it,” Gavin recalls. “Historically, that kind of thing put me off—with her, it felt like a privilege. And if I ever did have my moments, she’d pay no mind to the time we lost,” she continues, pondering the kind of seemingly endless well of patience that the titular Abby had with her.
“Sweet Abby girl,” she sings in the chorus. “Even though I only had you a year and a half, you made me laugh; now it’s making me cry. Thanks for coming into my world.”
Lust, or at least a kind of longing, is at the core of a number of Muna’s songs, though it cannot really compare to the overpowering intensity that is depicted in the album’s opening track—the sparse, yearning “I Want It All.”
And in writing about “I Want It All,” when I spent time with What A Relief in October, and into November, I had described what is detailed within the song—the intensity or “romance” of it all, as dangerous. And, I mean, there is this heightened, emergent nature to it. And maybe “danger” is still accurate, because maybe that’s what it feels like—a kind of obsessive sensation that comes over you, when you ache for another practically every minute of the day. You really do want it all, in the way that Gavin lays out in a series of statements that are delivered with a growing intensity in their sentiments, but her voice remains steady, though delicate, as she sings.
“I want you to film me when we’re not recording. I want you to see me when you’re not looking,” she begins, in the first verse, before arriving at the lyric that does play Gavin’s hand, and ultimately reveals just how intense, and lusty, the rest of the song’s sentiments are going to be. “I want you to fuck me when we’re not touching.”
She continues in a similar tone in the second verse—“I want you to feed me when we’re not eating. I want you to dream me when you’re not sleeping. And I want you to miss me when I’m right next to you,” before arriving at the short, but sensual chorus that, in just really two repeated lines, does describe a kind of passion that you can feel throughout your body. “I want it all, all the time,” Gavin explains before adding, “I’m gonna lose my mind.”
Stripping away the kind of slithering pop bombast that Muna has become known for, especially after the success of their 2022 self-titled effort, What A Relief is a quiet, contemplative, and further look at Gavin’s interests outside of a group setting—a truly flawless portrait of self-discovery that can and often courses with a jubilance, and is balanced out with somber honesty.
2. Hana Vu - Romanticism
And if you will allow me to perhaps get a little too far into the weeds, right out of the gate—this is, of course, something that I have iterated myriad times, throughout the years, and usually at year’s end. The amount of new music released in a calendar year is staggering. Nobody can make the time to truly listen to all of it—and I mean, like, “really” listen. Listen with intention. I say this because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many hours within a day I can allot to the discovery of and listening to something new.
I don’t have the time, or the capacity, to put something together that does the album justice.
And I tell you all of that to tell you this—Romanticism, the second full-length from Hana Vu, was not an album that was originally on my radar of new releases this spring, when it arrived at the beginning of May. And this is something else I have lamented about, seemingly more and more, but because things move so quickly, in the world—specifically how I often learn about, or hear about, an album or an artist, I do not really even really know how I was introduced to Vu, and the album—it was something that I started listening to, transfixed by the glistening and otherworldly opening track, “Look Alive,” and then surprised, pleasantly, but surprised nevertheless, by how the tone of the album’s instrumentation and execution switches rather drastically, with Vu and her collaborator, producer Jackson Phillips, steering the rest of Romanticism’s material into tight and crisp sounding, often bombastic, guitar-driven indie pop.
It took a number of listens through, specifically of the album’s first half, for the nature of Vu’s lyricism to reveal itself, and then resonate—and it became the kind of album that I found I needed to prioritize analytical time with, and the kind of album that found me at the right time.
And with the more personal turn a lot of my music writing has taken over the last few years—it has become important for me, I think, as a listener and someone who writes about music, to find where I fit into an album, I have been somewhat open about my failing mental health, and the flimsy relationship that I have with my own mortality—and this is what inevitably attracted me to Romanticism, and what has kept me returning to it months after its release, and why it is an album from one year that I will carry into the next. I don’t believe that Romanticism is a cry for help, but it is a cry—one of existential anguish, with Vu attempting to navigate her way through the human condition. It isn’t easy. Nobody said it was. And even when the depictions are extremely unflattering, or difficult to hear, there is a kind of humility and grace.
There is a grief, of sorts, that is among the things at the core of Romanticism—and that is the grief that comes with moving through time. We get older. We move further away from the familiarity of certain people, or places, and we are pushed, at times against our will, into the challenging or the uncomfortable. Vu writes about this directly in one of the album’s most jaw-dropping moments—the shimmering lamentation “22,” but the kind of dread and uncertainty that this grief causes is heard elsewhere on the album. “Welcome to your life,” she sings at the start of the fuzzy, gloomy, shimmying “Find Me Under Wilted Trees.” “It’s a big defeat,” she continues, and then swaps out one word, for another, in the second verse.
“It’s a big deceit.”
Anecdotally, the second half of Romanticism is much less bleak than the first—and there is a part of me that, at times, feels like the album is front-loaded with its finest, or most compelling material, but I don’t think that is true, because it does need the few, fleeting moments of Vu offers, even though they, themselves, at times, are rather stark, from the album’s second side.
The weight that Romanticism holds was something that hit me over time, with certain lyrics, or moments, certainly lingering—like the contrasting hopeful, yet macabre sentiments in the chorus to the writhing, bouncing, “Dreams,” where Vu sings, “Every night is beautiful, and every song’s your favorite one, and oh—it doesn’t hurt to be alive.”
It is within Romanticism’s first half where Vu oscillates between self-effacing observations, and detailing the kind of internal despair she often finds herself in, or, at the very least, what it is like trying to find your way through the world living in such a state—both of which collide in the uptempo, rollicking “Care,” where over the snappy and whimsical rhythm, Vu howls in the second verse, “Hold me now. When I open my mouth, it just screams ‘why?,’” before adding, “Oh, I don’t know. I just hope that someday, I’ll be fine.”
Vu’s deprecative nature appears in the song’s hushed, slinking bridge—“The more I think about it now, I’m just a book you throw away. ‘Cause you don’t know what I’m about. Yeah, you don’t know.”
And I am remiss to describe an album like Romanticism as “enjoyable,” because it does deal with such bleak subject matter, in often frank depictions, but it is still a record that is constructed to be infectious—musically, the snarly, guitar-heavy pop arrangements are meticulous in sound and composition, making the album, even in its darkest observations, surprisingly accessible.
The most poignant moments on Romanticism do arrive at the top of the record—the unrelenting one-two punch of “Look Alive” and the cacophonic “Hammer,” then, shortly thereafter, the dramatic sweeping of “22.”
“Look Alive,” in terms of its arranging, is a bit of a misnomer when compared to the rest of the record—there are no percussive elements at all, and Vu is more or less floating in a sea of different synthesizer tones that ripple and surge in varying intensities, occasionally swelling to a slight emotional peak as a means of punctuation for the chorus. And since it does operate in a slightly different sonic space, it does serve as a thesis, of sorts, for the rest of what follows—a delicate, brooding way to introduce a number of the themes that Vu expands upon later.
“There’s no song in my heart like I thought there was when I was young, and I fell apart,” she explains, the words coming out of her and tumbling out into the pulsating sounds below her. “There’s no air in my lungs, ‘cause my breath has changed and now I’m a ghost of who I have been.”
Then, later, as the song continues, she introduces the self-deprecative elements that she she will return to throughout. “I’m sorry about the way I feel,” she confesses, and just a few lines later, changes it to, “I’m sorry about the way I am.”
And it is “Hammer,” and “22” that are the most personally resonant songs on Romanticism, and in that personal resonance, Vu writes with a terrifying honesty, and manages to disguise the inherently serious nature of both songs through catchy, enormous sounding arrangements, both of them constructed similarly in the sense that there is a gradual build until a burst—but how they explode is rather unique, with the former reaching a howling place of ascension and a seething kind of desperation that clings to the sides of the song as it tumbles back down, and the latter shimmering in a dreamy, slow motion haze with a searing, pummeling instrumental break before the tangible sense of sorrow at the passage of time creeps back in.
And “22,” certainly, was a song that struck me immediately—it’s beautiful, and haunting, and soars, and swells with a kind of impressive grandeur, in all of the right moments, but it is also the kind of bittersweet reflection, and evocative imagery that Vu sings of that really caught my attention. That imagery arrives within the opening line, and really does not let up throughout until the final, gasping moments. “I’m at the movies, and they’re playing our story,” she explains in the beginning, over delicate guitar strums. “It’s black and white, and I can’t stop watching. And at the bar, they’re playing our song,” she continues. “It sounds like summer, and white guitars.”
The beauty, though, shifts to something much starker once the thudding bass and steady rhythm slide in—“I don’t wanna go anywhere, anymore,” Vu reveals. “I don’t wanna see anything, anything.”
Vu is now a few years older than when she wrote the song, but at its core, “22” is about finding yourself in the moment when you realize you are, in fact, getting older. That age may not seem “old” to you, but it is, at least to her, the space where you begin to leave your adolescence behind, and move, often against your will, into an adulthood full of uncertainty.
“I’m at the house that we grew up in,” she sings in the harrowing second verse. “It falls down without you here. And in the car, I scream so loud because I don’t exist no more.”
The hesitancy about time and age arrives in the line just prior to the chorus, where Vu repeats lyrics from earlier in the song, though she swaps out a single word, and in doing so, makes it all the more resonant. “I don’t wanna go anywhere, anymore. I don’t wanna be anything, anything. I’m just getting old,” she sings as the song slides into the powerful, anthemic chorus. “I’m just 22. I just want to hold onto you.”
For the darkness that looms in different places throughout Romanticism, perhaps the darkest place arrives early on, but is dressed up in something that takes off and dazzles, in the second track, “Hammer,” where Vu, over a very infectious kind of quiet/loud/quiet structure in arrangement, and layers of different guitars, explores her declining mental health.
“It’s been a hard year, I’m talking to you,” Vu begins, in her extremely unique contralto range—allegedly the lowest register for the female voice. “Are we gonna make it? ‘Cause I have to,” she continues, before delivering the line that took time, yes, but once it registered, I realized just how important this album was going to be for me this year.
“I don’t wanna be here—but I do.”
“Hammer” isn’t, in the end, about the avoidance of your problems—though that is something she touches on when she bellows, “And it’s hard to say what the trouble is—I’ll run away ’til it’s all behind me,” in the chorus—but rather, it is about the balances we attempt to strike. It is about the very notion of “trying.” About not wanting to be here, but still being here, regardless. The flimsy relationship we have, or at least I have, and perhaps you do, as well, with your own mortality. About the dismissiveness, or disbelief, that others have when you attempt to explain how you are feeling. It’s about the uncertainty of what, in the end, the problem even is, or why it is so persistent.
“Hammer,” once it gets underway, begins to slink as it builds, into a kind of rhythm that is alluring in the melody it follows. “And I called the doctor, and he said there’s nothing wrong,” Vu pleads. “And I called the pastor, and he said that love is strong. And there is no answer, but I want one anyway. And I swing the hammer just as hard as I can take.”
There are no answers. Though we continue to wish for one. We keep trying.
And that is, honestly, reflected in the resignation Vu makes on the final song of the album, “Love.”
“I guess this is love. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to stop.”
We don’t want to be here, and yet we still are. We often do not know what to say, but we continue to search for the words.
Despite the need to rest, we continue to push ourselves.
Romanticism is a bold, declarative, cathartic statement that thoughtfully and graciously unpacks terrible lows of the human condition—the sound of both running away from, and running towards, something within yourself and what it feels like to be stuck in between.
1. Queen of Jeans - All Again
If I got to do it all again—I’d find you there, like I did back then
And there is an intentionally cyclical nature, and honestly, a connectedness overall, to All Again, the jubilant, nervy, and dreamy third full-length album from Queen of Jeans—it begins and ends sort of abruptly, with the same kind of ambient/field-recorded noise, creating an impressive, similar effect that Death Cab For Cutie’s Trasatlanticism did two decades prior. And it begins, and ends, with the same kind of feeling—one of a palpable, deep longing, and affection, for someone. And in between those bookends—the stunning, swooning opening track, “All My Friends,” and the hushed, warbled epilogue, “Do It All Again,” the group covers a seemingly endless array of emotions.
And there are, of course, places where emotions intersect—emotions that are often in opposition to one another, or at the very least, seem like they could not, or should not, coexist. It can be confusing, or feel unnatural, and if pop music, or at least pop songwriting, is done well, it can, over just a single song, or, in the case of All Again, over the course of a number of songs that are very, very loosely connected, create that space where there is perhaps less opposition, or confusion, and the opportunity to try and understand, or at least unpack, what you are experiencing.
I tell you all of that to tell you this—I have written about it before, certainly, and I do not recall to quite what extent, but I am, as perhaps you are too, chronically online in a way that does not always serve me. But, in being that chronically online, I often understand that I am not alone, though it is perhaps a minority of people, who regularly feel both sad, and like they want to fuck.
And, I mean, it is not the best place to be, but it is a place that I, and perhaps, you too, know. And it is the place that Devora writes from in the bombastic, winking single, “Horny Hangover,” as well as one of the album’s most staggeringly impressive moments, “Go Down Easy.”
I, and maybe you do too, have misgivings about the use of the word “horny,” but regardless, it does, certainly, evoke a feeling, or a state of being, and in describing a hangover that way, brings to mind a kind of vivid, fully bodied lust that stays with you long after you wish it to. Musically, “Horny Hangover” is not the most enormous sounding song on the record—Queen of Jeans takes so many of the songs on All Again to absolutely towering and blindingly bright heights, giving them a fist-pumping, shout-a-long anthemic quality. “Horny Hangover” is of course one of them—forgoing a kind quiet/loud/quiet structure to pull focus on the chorus, the song, in the way it is assembled, rarely if ever lets up, with the dueling rhythm and buzzy lead guitars, and the thundering, crashing drumming that propels it forward, as Devora works to unpack, as best as she is able, the lingering, sensual feelings she has for a former partner.
“Let’s start at the top,” she explains, before the rest of the band literally comes slamming down behind her at just the right moment. “I fell desperately in love with someone I knew was bound to fuck me up.”
The conceit of a song like “Horny Hangover” is that Devora knows this off-stage character was not good for her, and is still not good for you, but the impact they had really lingers—not bittersweetly or wistfully, but one that has her feeling some type of way, as she reaches the soaring, anthemic, winking chorus. “I get a horny hangover every time you cross my mind. I know I owe myself more than this,” she admits. “When I sleep, I’m still trying—‘cause I don’t want you, and I can’t stand you.”
The title “Horny Hangover” is certainly forward in its lustiness, but it is “Go Down Easy,” tucked into the album’s final third, which is perhaps the most forward in its depiction of longing, the sexual hunger for another that we surrender to, and the convergence of ecstasy and sorrow that can come from that experience.
Like the dreamy smolder that the album opens with in “All My Friends,” “Go Down Easy” simmers slowly and deliberately, with the group not working itself into a frenzy by any means, but certainly taking their time with crafting a narrative and a sense of tension that does eventually take off, and becomes one of the more pensively cathartic moments on All Again, with the woozy guitar strumming laying the groundwork for a propulsive rhythm to come rushing in, pushing the song to its tumultuous conclusion, moving with a sensual kind of immediacy.
All Again is an inherently personal record, or if not personal, it is revealing in the narratives that Devora has written—“Go Down Easy,” outside from the way it details that moment of giving in, it is also extraordinarily vivid in the world it creates, and the kind of nervous but excited but terrified feelings that she experiences within the song are palpable enough that we feel them too.
Like “Horny Hangover,” “Go Down Easy” has a stunning opening line. “God damn you, and I mean it,” Devora attests. “I never should have let you in. It’s like I’m 17 with all these feelings running around in my head again.”
“She calls me up when she’s too drunk—says I need to pick her up. So I speed on over to be near her,” she continues, growing breathless at recounting this tale. “I’m not a hero—I’m not her hero. I’m driving home. She shouts ‘No!,’ smiles and says to take it slow. Then her face grows colder—pull onto the shoulder. We both get out—kisses my mouth and I go down easy.”
And there is of course confusion depicted in the intersection of lust and sadness—the confusion in both of these cases leads to a remorseful feeling which is where “Go Down Easy” ultimately lands as it comes to its conclusion. That intersection and the confusion are depicted with a little less intensity elsewhere on the record, like in the swooning concern of “Neighbors” and then the impressive, shuddering, and explosive “Books in Bed.”
There is a real gentle nature to the arranging of “Neighbors”—swelling, wordless singing and pendulum kind of momentum that delicately pushes and pulls, mirroring the romantic uncertainty and tension depicted in the song, with a jangly rhythm and guitars that glisten.
Even in the delicate, dream-pop adjacent way “Neighbors” continues to unfold and spiral, there is a kind of unrelenting, urgent nature to the way that Devora delivers the lyrics—perhaps out of the concern that is written into them. “You are spacing out—quietly lost in thought,” she sings. “What’s it all about—I get weird when we stop talking.”
That kind of big, swaying feeling is perhaps most noticeable in the chorus—“You know me,” Devora assures the person she’s addressing. “I’m not here to tie you down, make you wait, promise you a million things. I want it clear,” she continues, really getting at the heart of the song, which is admittedly dressed up a little in how it shimmers and swirls musically. “You still feel like we’re okay? Like there’s no change.”
For an album that can be as swooning and romantic as All Again often is, there are moments that are quite surprising in just how visceral and thundering they can be when all the elements come tumbling together—“Books in Bed,” arriving shortly after the halfway point is one of those places, where the group works to craft something towering, only to pull the rug out from under it, allowing it to tumble to the ground with stunning grace.
“Books in Bed” walks the line between being a huge, anthemic shout-a-long, and giving into the more downcast, melancholic lyrics—for as powerful as the chugging chord progression and clattering percussion is throughout, especially when it builds itself up until the moment when it breaks, it is the extended metaphor that Devora uses that does make it such a fascinating tune.
And there are, of course, so many emotions running throughout All Again, and “Books in Bed” is one of the places where a tangible kind of anguish and resignation to sorrow is depicted.
“All the boxes piled up on the floor,” Devora begins. “Carry what we’ll leave unsaid—there’s no use trying anymore,” she continues, with the song quickly sliding into the fist-pumping chorus. “Feel the bottom falling out from my bed from holding it all inside my head,” she howls. “Wishing that you were here instead of all these books I’ve read to fall asleep to dreams I won’t regret.”
The most impactful moment comes in the startling bridge section which intentionally builds with a seething kind of intensity. “We were driving,” Devora recalls. “Lost in an argument—pushing all of your buttons. Carsick, head between my legs, poising laced our voices. Warning as a static silence but by morning,” and in just the briefest, brightest of flashes, there is this instance that shows Queen of Jeans can transcend their dreamy, and overall gentler sound for something ferocious when the music drops out completely, with only the sound of guitar feedback squalling underneath the group as they bellow, “They said it wouldn’t hurt so bad.”
There are moments across All Again where the momentum does falter slightly, but it is an immaculate collection of glistening, dreamy pop songs with just a little edge throughout—meticulously sequenced so that it isn’t completely front-loaded with its best or most infectious material. But I say that to say that its finest moment or the song that is inherently the most sentimental and the one that I connected with upon my initial listen is its swirling and glittering opening track, “All My Friends,” which moves at an intentionally slower pace before tumbling into a place of beauty and genuine longing.
“Thought I’d call tonight,” Devora begins, her voice gentle and light, with just the sparsest guitar strums underneath. “Hear how you’re doing. Philly is freezing,” she continues. “I’m trying to play—the words aren’t there yet. But, somehow, it’s healing—humming you a tune to round out the day.”
And All Again does cover so many emotions, or states of being, and it is within “All My Friends” that the lyricism is most earnest, or sentimental, specifically in the lines that lead up to the chorus, and one crucial moment that arrives later on after a deliberate build towards it.
“No one sees me like you see me,” Devora continues, before the song ascends into the dizzying place of restraint it oscillates from until it finds its way to an ending. “And I’m convinced, without your voice, I’d float away.”
The reveal, though, within “All My Friends” comes near the end, when Devora articulates what it is like to find yourself in a moment of yearning—perhaps surrounded by other people, but away from that one person you wish to see. “Let it devour me,” she exclaims. “Moving through the spaces, I can’t own…with all my friends around, but I’m not home ’til I’m alone with you.”
All Again ends with the briefest epilogue. “If I got to do it all again, I’d find you there like I did back then,” Devora sings, in a track that is less than a minute long, and manipulated through an antiquated, warbling sound. It’s a beautiful sentiment, wrapping itself back around to how the album began—and then the album itself, of course, full of bold, enormous sentiments. An album that reflects on the confusion and frustration that occurs with the convergence of emotions, doing so with a real warmth, and often an exhilarating bombast, that welcomes you every time you return to it.
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