FEATURE:
Unafraid of Heights
IN THIS PHOTO: Irish sensation CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson)/PHOTO CREDIT: Ellius Grace for The New York Times
Queens on Top: Focusing on Three Very Special New Releases
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I was going to review…
IN THIS PHOTO: boygenius (Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus)/PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez via them
separately the new E.P. from boygenius, the rest, the album by Mitski, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, and the fantastic CMAT’s Crazymad, For Me. As my reviews are usually quite expansive, instead, I am going to highlight these three incredible works. They are amazing releases by phenomenal women in music. Proof, again, that the very best and most impactful music of the moment is from women. That is not to discount music from anyone else! I just feel, when we think about the best-reviewed and stunning albums, they are made by women. I am especially interested in new work from Mitski, CMAT, and boygenius, but they are just the latest examples of the sheer brilliance that is around at the moment. Artists that are legends in their own right, yet you feel like they are going to get huge opportunities in 2024. I want to bring in some promotion around these three works, in addition reviews for each. I will start with Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. A track from that album, My Love Mine All Mine, is a global chart smash. Her recent live performance at Union Chapel won high praise from the likes of The Telegraph, and The Guardian. A modern great whose seventh studio album is yet another work of genius. The Japanese-American artist is one of the most consistent and extraordinary of the modern age. You can get The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We here.
IN THIS PHOTO: Mitski/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz
Prior to getting to a review for The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We – in lieu of any promotional interviews -, there is an article from The Ringer that says how Mitski is fighting for her privacy. In the sense that she would prefer that fans refrained from recording entire sets or song. Gigs like the recent one at London’s Union Chapel, in a more intimate setting, is a way of getting a little more connection and attention. A major modern artist who wants fans to connect with her and be present in the moment:
“But as that audience grew bigger, her attempts to corral them seemed less successful. In 2022, she tweeted a lengthy thread requesting that fans not record video at length during her shows. “Sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together,” she wrote. “When I’m on stage and look to you but you are gazing into a screen, it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content.”
What had obviously seemed to Mitski and her team like a relatively reasonable request soon transformed into an online furor. People replied to her tweet arguing that dissociation, ADHD, and depression meant they couldn’t be present at her shows, and needed to take videos to process the experience later. Eventually, the tweets disappeared.
In part because of her music’s sudden popularity on TikTok, as Mitski’s fame has grown, so has the generational gap between herself and her audience. Songs like “Nobody,” “Washing Machine Heart,” and erstwhile deep cut “Strawberry Blond” off her second album have soundtracked thousands of TikToks, boiling down angst, loneliness, and unrequited love into a few quick seconds. When I saw her play in Milwaukee during her Laurel Hell tour in March 2022, I felt like a comparative crone at 26, surrounded by Zoomers in bedazzled cowboy hats.
Mitski is a millennial and earlier in her career used the internet like one, tweeting quips and blogging on Tumblr. But her fans’ engagement with the boundaries between the digital and the physical suggest a demographic shift; if you first heard a song when you used it in your own TikTok, maybe you felt a kind of ownership over not just the music but the position of performing it. In 2020, Jason Parham wrote in Wired about TikTok’s “digital blackface,” the phenomenon where white users lip-synch to Black voices. This is just one particularly egregious example of the platform’s encouragement of blurring the boundaries between self and other; a different kind of appropriation happens when a fan makes a video lip-synching to Mitski’s “Nobody.” You can imagine how, having embodied Mitski by pretending her words are coming out of your mouth, a person might feel less like they love her and more like they are her. This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mitski, of course; it happens to any artist whose music blows up on the app. But not every artist is as committed to creating distance between themselves and their audience as she is.
In an interview after the Twitter furor over her request for less filming at concerts, Mitski remarked, “It does feel sad to be told directly by people I’m hoping to share my heart with, that to them I’m a product they have bought for the night, and they will do what they want with me while they have me. It is sad to go onstage and now be conscious of the fact that, to some of the people in front of me, I am a dancing monkey, and I better start dancing quick so they can get the content they’re paying for.”
Her recognition of the link between the work of music and the access to her people expect is no surprise, given how often references to the labor of trying to make it in the industry show up in her music. Mitski sings about living with her parents while she tries to break through in “Class of 2013”; her second album is called Retired From Sad, New Career in Business. One track in particular off The Land Is Inhospitable offers some insight into her difficult relationship with the job of music. On “I Don’t Like My Mind,” she sings about working herself to the bone in order to avoid being left alone with herself. In the wailing chorus, she pleads, “Please don’t take / Take this job from me.”
It’s true that without an audience Mitski wouldn’t have this job. But perhaps she also means to communicate that her audience, who needs too much, who tries to cross the boundaries she’s so carefully erected onstage and on her records, is also taking her dream job from her.
Mitski is promoting The Land Is Inhospitable with a series of concerts she’s calling Amateur Mistakes. These small, acoustic performances are mostly in Europe; the only North American dates are in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Toronto. Surely not every fan who wants one will get a ticket. But maybe these shows are Mitski’s way of getting the job she wants: a little crowd, an acoustic guitar, and a night where she might cut the bathroom line unrecognized”.
There are so many five-star reviews for The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. The Guardian were full of praise and admiration for Mitski and her seventh studio album. One of the best albums of the year, she is someone who will be ranked alongside the all-time greats. I think that everyone needs to check out the fabulous The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We:
“Mitski Miyawaki has a complicated relationship with fame. She withholds intimate details in interviews – one journalist was requested not to reveal the name of her cat – and retreated from social media in 2019. The same year, she announced her retirement onstage. She subsequently reconsidered, although a persistent online rumour suggested the ensuing album, her sixth, was another farewell. Pop-facing, trailed by Working for the Knife, a single that seemed to be about not really wanting to return to music, and packaged in a sleeve that depicted her trapped by lines meant to represent her own songs, Laurel Hell was held to be a contractual obligation that, once fulfilled, spelled the end.
We are hardly talking about Taylor Swift levels of stardom here: in 11 years, Mitski has released just one big-selling album – 2018’s Be the Cowboy – and has never had a traditional hit single. But hers is a resolutely 21st-century kind of success, involving TikTok virality – by 2022, her music had soundtracked more than 2.5m videos on the platform – memes and hashtags, tracks that go gold and platinum without grazing the charts, indicative of being streamed obsessively over a long period. That a lot of the memes and hashtags suggest her music is a replacement for therapy perhaps says something about the intensity of her fanbase. You could see why she might consider beating a permanent retreat.
But here she is, back with her record label and another album, albeit one that carries an aura of reset about it. The first thing you hear on The Land Is Inhospitable is tape hiss, followed by nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, redolent of the instruments on which people usually learn to play: the sounds of someone tentatively trying out recording in their bedroom. The whole album feels noticeably different from anything she has released before. Its sound sometimes leans towards shoegazing – as on Buffalo Replaced, which pulls off the trick of seeming simultaneously forceful and lethargic – but its main currency is country, or rather the country-inflected pop that came out of Los Angeles studios in the late 60s and early 70s, the realm of Glen Campbell’s collaborations with Jimmy Webb or the Nashville-tinted end of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s oeuvre. There are weeping pedal steel guitars, ballads in waltz time, brushes pattering against snare drums, shimmering reverb, choral backing vocals and epic orchestrations: the arrangement of When Memories Snow reaches Phil Spector levels of lavishness.
This is classic songwriter territory, the better to show off Mitski’s considerable songwriting chops. The album’s 32 minutes are filled with melodies; she can write straightforward love songs, filled with beautiful imagery – “I bend like a willow thinking of you / Like a murmuring brook curving about you / As I sip on the rest of the coffee you left / A kiss left of you,” runs one verse of Heaven – but what tends to get lost amid the earnest discussion of her lyrics is how darkly funny they are. You could, if you wished, characterise I Don’t Like My Mind as a song about loneliness, its protagonist attempting to silence unpleasant memories through overwork and sensory indulgence. Yet it feels a lot lighter on its feet than that description suggests. “A whole cake! All for me!” she wails, melodramatically elongating the vowel sounds. “Then I get sick and throw up.” Similarly, you could read Bug Like an Angel as a confessional about alcohol, but it somehow doesn’t seem as if it wants you to. “Sometimes a drink feels like family,” she sings, before a massed chorus suddenly and incongruously bursts in: “FAMILY!”
Mitski’s voice is usually tender and intimate, but has another mode, one suggestive of a woman raising her eyes skyward as she sings. She deploys it during I’m Your Man, leavening a song about the insidious destructive power of patriarchy: it’s leavened further by its conclusion, which features airy, wordless backing vocals and snarling dogs, like the Swingle Singers being savaged to death.
Perhaps it is intended to diffuse some of the intense seriousness with which fans greet her work. Either way, Lee Hazlewood feels like an apposite comparison and not merely because of the album’s sound: The Land Is Inhospitable shares his ability to slip between the heartfelt and the sardonic without ever losing its grip on the listener. It ends with the singer alone on I Love Me After You – rather than heartbroken, she is celebrating her freedom by walking around the house naked (“don’t even care that the curtains are open”) – which feels about right. There are an awful lot of singer-songwriters around exploring the kind of subjects Mitski touches on here: disillusionment, isolation, broken relationships, overindulgence. But it is questionable whether anyone else is doing it with this much skill, this lightness of touch or indeed, straightforward melodic power: in the best possible sense, Mitski feels out on her own”.
The second album I am focusing on is from the wonderous CMAT. The Dublin-born songwriter also made her challenge for album of the year Wirth Crazymad, For Me. You can buy it here. Whereas Mitski’s new album was released in September, CMAT released Crazymad, For Me on Friday (13th October). I will get to a review of CMAT’s second studio album soon. Real name Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, she spoke with DIY recently about her career and what it feels like to put out an album that will put her in the spotlight:
“Born in 1996 in Dublin, Thompson spent the majority of her youth in the tiny commuter town of Dunboyne before moving back to the Irish capital to study, and then across to Manchester with her then-boyfriend to pursue music. Throughout these periods, the constant thread was a feeling of frustration at the lack of opportunity afforded to her. “A lot of loneliness came from feeling like I was trapped in poverty, in the sense that I felt I was really talented and good at writing songs, but no one fucking listened to me because I was working in a TK Maxx,” she says. “Nobody had any time of day for me. I wrote 75 million songs and a lot of them were good, and I’d be bringing them back and forth to London but no one cared because I wasn’t interesting enough because I didn’t have any resources to be interesting.
“I felt like, for a lot of years, there was a thing I wanted to do but I literally couldn’t see a way of executing it. I had two jobs - I was also a sexy shots lady - because I just wanted enough money to get the Megabus to London to do writing sessions and gigs, and all of my spare time and effort and energy went into trying to be a musician and a pop star. I was so angry and frustrated all the time that no one was paying attention to me because I didn’t have any money. And that was how it felt, that there was no way to get my foot in the door because I didn’t have any connections or resources.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenn Five
Eventually, she would crack the door open by leaving her old band Bad Sea, splitting with her partner, moving back to Dublin and beginning to put her songs on YouTube where she was scouted by a management team. The flights of fantasy coupled with feelings of extreme isolation that populated last year’s full-length debut ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ capture the intensity of this time, while October’s forthcoming follow-up ‘CrazyMad, For Me’ acts as a potted document of that breakup and the years of anger, questioning and resentment that would follow. However, where CMAT’s poetic leanings and tendency for the swooning epic might lend a romantic hue to many of these offerings on record, the reality was far less rosy.
“I find it funny, because I get a lot of people telling me I should write a book but my life was not fucking interesting,” she explains. “I didn’t do anything. All my drug-taking was sad and weird and not that social, and that’s another thing - that entrapment directly leads to substance abuse and that was very much the same for me. I was stonked out of my brain on hash the whole time that I lived in Manchester because I did not want to be in my reality. So temporarily getting out of it for a bit was like, ‘Great, love it’.”
Still, however, Ciara wouldn’t let herself give up. Upon leaving Manchester, she remembers landing her dream proper job as an auctioneer’s assistant but acknowledging that, if she was ever going to make an album, she would have to turn it down for fear of being “too content”. “In an alternate universe, I’m itemising Tupperware from the 1960s - I could have been a contender!” she laughs. “But even when I was working in a shop, and had no money, and was a normal girl by textbook definition, I also wasn’t relatable because I was a fucking freak. I was selling cigarettes and scratchcards on the till and in my head I was like, ‘None of these people know how good I am at writing songs…’ I’ve never been humble in my life.”
In conversation, it is easy to spot the difference between CMAT and Ciara. Where her pop star persona is a fun-loving rhinestone cowgirl, slaying her way across the stage and popping out choreography and splits at every turn, Thompson is a fast-talking overthinker with an intriguing mix of supreme confidence and ready self-criticism. The two are both sides of the same coin, but they’re also fundamentally separate. “The way I’ve always thought about it is, CMAT is singing songs about a girl called Ciara, but CMAT is not Ciara,” she begins. “When CMAT is on an Instagram Live it’s all, ‘Hey girl, slay’ and you have to do that so people find you pleasant. I don’t want people to come into contact with me outside of me singing and be put off immediately.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenn Five
Do you think you’re off-putting? “Oh 100%. I’m really annoying,” she answers immediately. “I’m not saying this to rag on myself, but I know I’m off-putting because I had a difficult time until I became a pop star and I would regularly meet people who just did not like me because I talk so much all of the time. People find loud women off-putting and I am as loud as they fucking come, and I’m very much a woman - I’m very girly - but I don’t do the demure thing. I’m the opposite of chic.
“I’m very selfish, and I know that about myself, and it’s hard not to be selfish and self-centred when the thing that brings me the most joy and fulfilment and peace is just me talking about myself, which is what my music is,” she continues. “I watched that Wham! documentary the other day, and George Michael is one of the nicest men ever to work in music - so talented and so brilliant - but when I watched that doc I really related to the bit when he cried because ‘Last Christmas’ didn’t go to UK Number One because he wanted four Number Ones in a year, and instead Live Aid went to Number One. He’s fucking fuming even though he also sings on that, but he didn’t write the song so it wasn’t good enough. I really related to that.”
It’s rare to find a burgeoning pop star in 2023 that’s ready to be truly candid, and far far rarer to find one that’s willing to own and admit their flaws in such an open-book way. Thompson’s lack of artifice might be polarising for some (even her bandmates, she says, sometimes won’t talk to her in rehearsals for fear of incurring the brunt of her ambitious criticisms), but it’s also undoubtedly part of what’s got her this far. There’s a hustle mentality to the singer that knows if you want to make it, you’d better buckle up, strap in for the ride and keep your skin thick. It’s an ambition that also comes through in spades on ‘CrazyMad…’ - an album that takes the melodic bones of her debut and bulks it up into a concise portrait that balances granular lyrical detail and widescreen sonic ambition.
“Objectively I know that this second album is probably going to be the best album I ever make,” she shrugs. “I think it’s the best collection of songs, and they’re really instinctive, and it’s about something really real and raw and quite simple, so on some level I think it’s gonna be the one that everyone likes the most. I wanted to make something that people could say was objectively really good. I don’t know how close someone like me can get to the George Michael thing of being omnipresent, I obviously can’t get anywhere close to that, but I’d like to think this would be my version of an attempt at doing something big: that’s why I’m excited”.
One of the most-acclaimed albums of the year already, there is a lot of love out there for Crazymad, For Me. It has received a wave of affection and respect. This is what The Line of Best Fit wrote about a monumental album from a unique artist. One of modern music’s absolute finest and most talented:
“She’s an artist who has hit a creative purple patch on album number two; imagining, and delivering, a story worthy of its creator’s prowess.
While addressing themes not unheard of on a pop record, Crazymad, For Me is still a unique piece of work; creating a psychedelic soundscape with a foundation of country-influenced chord progressions. Its themes of heartbreak and regret meanwhile are, of course, commonly walked paths but its the presentation of such themes that give the album its edge.
Set 20 years in the future, the album revolves around its protagonist, presumably CMAT, travelling back in time to prevent her past self from entering into a damaging relationship. Following CMAT’s journey from anger to heartbreak and eventually acceptance, the record’s story is put centre stage and is delivered with a relatability not often associated with concept albums.
Crazymad, For Me’s grandeur is found in its imaginative delivery, which combines the alternate realities of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love with the sci-fi worlds of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Such magic moments are seen on reflective tracks like the Bush-drenched “I…Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny” which sees CMAT interrogating her reflection and “Whatever’s Inconvenient” (the LP’s lead single) which explores her unhelpful tendency to gravitate towards damaging situations. These tracks form the album’s pointed edge and push Crazymad, For Me into symbolising a new chapter in CMAT’s development.
Elsewhere there’s nods in the direction of The Cure (“Where Are Your Kids Tonight”), Patsy Cline (“Can’t Make Up My Mind”) and Angel Olson (“Torn Apart”); three influences that have perhaps never shared an inspiration board before. Nods are also cast in the direction of Irish Trad music, which gets somewhat of a spotlight on the album’s closer “Have Fun!”.
While such abstract concepts require perseverance, and do run the risk of coming off as pretentious, CMAT succeeds in making each track individually compelling, while simultaneously excelling in exploring her more abstract side.
Crazymad, For Me shows CMAT to be in a world of her own, one that’s way ahead of the pack”.
These may seem like random and unrelated works. I am using three recent examples as demonstration that the most captivating and adored music of the year is from female artists. Again, I am not writing off male artists! We are in a time when there is inequality and imbalance still. Every time an artist like CMAT or Mitski releases an album that gets this explosion of praise, you wonder why we still need to talk about gender equality. Why there is this thing about ‘women in music’. Like they need highlighting! I am doing it because it shows that equality and representation across the industry needs to happen quicker. That the wonderful music year in year out is not translating into parity. I know that Mitski, CMAT and my next spotlight act, boygenius, will get big festival bookings next year. Following the release of the record earlier in the year, the group (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) have released the E.P., the rest. Produced with Catherine Marks, the record is one of the best albums of this year. Rather than the rest being a case of scarping together tracks that did not make it onto the album, it is another brilliant chapter from the trio. You can buy the rest here. I am going to end this feature with a couple of reviews for the rest. This is what Pitchfork noted in their take:
“Friendship, famously, is Boygenius’ raison d’être and a key part of its value proposition. Kindred spirits who first met while making the rounds with their respective solo projects, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus were eventually booked on a joint tour, precipitating their first EP together. Almost immediately, their union accumulated extramusical significance. Initially, it felt like wish fulfillment for those eager to pass off women playing rock as a newsworthy event; ultimately, it settled into an extended counterpoint to heteropatriarchal ideas about feminine friendship and cooperation, and to the notion of genius as an attribute of erratic (male) individualists. (When a prominent contemporary embodiment of that idea recently used Boygenius as the setup for a cheap joke, Dacus minced no words.)
Over the pandemic, seeking companionship and a creative outlet, the band got back together to write and record a proper debut—The Record, released this March. Six months later, they’re following it with The Rest, a four-song companion EP aglow with the sense of triumph that has haloed the group’s recent history. Boygenius are about as big as a rock band can be in 2023: They’ve landed an album in Billboard’s Top 10, received second-line billing at Coachella (“I’ve never played a festival when the sun was down,” Baker quipped), and, earlier this month, sold out Madison Square Garden. Their shows incite rapture; all three women are queer, a clear subtext and surtext of their performances, which has solidified their tour’s reputation as a welcoming space for sapphic expression.
With Boygenius’ tour wrapping at the end of the month, The Rest bookends this period of transcendence, its title containing a note of finality as well as of respite. The songs feel unwound; on the cover, the boys are faceless figures before a misty sea, soaking in the sublime, like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting. Unlike many post-album clearing-house EPs, this material is brand new, produced in May with returning collaborators (Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Collin Pastore) along with affiliates of the members’ solo projects. The songs revisit old themes, like Bridgers’ lunar voyage, with clear eyes and renewed spirits. Baker reconsiders the black hole that appeared on The Record’s “Not Strong Enough”—there, a symbol of domestic unrest; here, one of unexpected potential. “You can see the stars/The ones the headlines said this morning/Were being spat out /By what we thought was just/Destroying everything for good,” she sings over a steady pedal point, referencing a recently discovered supermassive black hole that mysteriously produces new stars instead of obliterating old ones. This cosmic twist on the notion that destructive forces can be generative calls to mind another lyric from The Record. To quote Dacus quoting Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power. When an idealogue with a death drive appeals to Dacus’ narrator on “Afraid of Heights,” she voices her skepticism: “Not everybody gets the chance to live a life that isn’t dangerous.” As usual, the members take turns up front, each leading songs that bear the hallmarks of their own writing, and “Afraid of Heights” is classic Dacus—a writer first and musician second, by her own estimation. In her hands, steady, soft acoustic strums and pedal steel are like pale blue lines on loose leaf, waiting to be filled. She spreads her ideas across pages rich with dialogue and imagery, including the tidy, perfect couplet, “The black water ate you up/Like a sugarcube in a teacup.” It’s part of a parable about hope: “Oh, it hurts to hope the future/Will be better than before,” she sings. Expect nothing and the worst you’ll get is validation; expect more, and you’ll be crushed.
Boygenius is sometimes billed as “sad girl” music, a dubious classification born of Spotify playlists and social media’s bad habit of aestheticizing mental illness. It’s only marketing, but it still threatens to sand down the contours of the band’s music, which is full of emotions not so easily parceled and labeled (nor managed) as “sadness”—and, often, not so sad after all. As Bridgers has observed, this reductive interpretation involves a certain amount of projection on the part of fans. Such is the nature of producing art for public consumption: Songs are made, released, and then made into something else in the ears of their listeners.
The band’s relationship to its ballooning audience is not uncomplicated, but certainly Boygenius respect the power of their platform. Anyone in their position would be grappling with the question of what they mean, to whom—a line of inquiry that can give way to self-mythologizing. This instinct has always been present in a band that’s styled itself as both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Nirvana, but in these songs, it starts to feel less self-conscious, more sincere. It’s in the internal references, the leitmotifs—an emergent iconography of Boygenius. It’s definitely in The Rest’s closer, “powers,” a Baker-led superhero origin story set to sonorous brass and ambient texture. She sings about crawling out of a nuclear reactor, about supercolliders and fission, invoking the invisible, unknowable forces that govern our universe as a metaphor for profound transformation. “The hum of our contact,” she concludes, summarizing the Boygenius ethos, “The sound of our collision.” Her words suggest preciousness, but also ephemerality: When particles collide in an accelerator, they erupt into ultra-rare bits of matter that linger for only a split second before breaking down. We are called to look closely while they last”.
I will end up with NME’s review of the rest. Such a kindred and close-knit group, boygenius have rounded off 2023 in fine style. Their powerful and beautiful music is something that everyone needs to hear. It is transformative and arresting:
“When Boygenius – composed of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus – released their debut album earlier this year, NME gushed that it was an “instant classic”. Released in March, ‘The Record’ saw the trio “elevate their songwriting by combining the best parts of their artistry” after years as solo artists, operating in the same musical orbit.
It was the kind of purple patch where you knew magic was in the air, the kind where every scrap of music – completed or otherwise – would be illuminating and important to the Boygenius canon. So arrives ‘The Rest’, a four-track EP that bookends a mammoth run of shows throughout the year, and a release well timed for Grammy consideration. The members each now stand on the precipice of continued success as a unit or as solo artists.
Ignore the flippant title, there’s material on ‘The Rest’ that could have fought hard for space on their debut album. When the band played a triumphant headline show at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden this past weekend, they performed the four songs that make up this EP in their entirety.
On ‘Black Hole’, one of the most expansive tracks in their catalogue, the melody remains the only constant amidst a cacophony of conflicting drums. Baker is feeling contemplative but also strangely at peace in the wilderness (“out here it gets so dark / You can see the stars for once”) while Dacus and Bridgers splice in sentimentality: “Sometimes, I need to hear your voice” they whisper at the conclusion. On ‘Afraid Of Heights’, Dacus muses on mortality with a reckless subject: “I wanna live a vibrant life / But I wanna die a boring death”, she sighs, adding that “not everybody gets the chance to live / A life that isn’t dangerous”.
‘Power’ has links to ‘The Record’’s penultimate song ‘Anti-Curse’. On the latter, what begins with a gentle strum builds with tension before chasing a showy sonic rush, but on ‘Power’, the band allows the song to implode on itself. After singing of the “tail of a comet burned up in an instant ” and the “light flashin’ before the eye of whatever comes after”, the trio pull back and cede space to horns that see the song home. Whatever comes after this era is still a mystery, but it’ll no doubt be equally compelling”.
I wanted to highlight three remarkable recent releases from some incredible women in music. Showcasing, again, that modern-day queens are well and truly in a league of their own. I was going to review CMAT and boygenius’ new work. Instead, joining them together with Mitski in this feature felt better. I may do it more regularly. Instead of a single review, looking at the best albums from a month and going into detail. In the case of CMAT’s Crazymad, For Me, Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We and boygenius’ the rest, we have three very strong contenders for the…
BEST releases of 2023.