📀
Okay, I’ll be honest, I haven’t listened to Halsey since my middle school alt-emo-edgy phase, but the album‘s promo and backstory kinda reeled me back in. And damn is it worth a listen!!! She did a really good job not only emulating other artist’s styles but incorporating her own too, and damn does it get personal and heavy on this one. Some standout tracks: Dog Years, Panic Attack, The End, Lonely is the Muse, Arsonist, Life of the Spider, Hard Feelings. Even if you don’t love it I’d say at least listen to the album once just to understand the feelings
Oct 27, 2024
Related Recs
🙃
In general, but also like, yes I did say I was a huge Ethel Cain stan back in 2022 and yet I only listened and understood the impact of strangers last week. Great song, have been listening to absolutely nothing else. It’s embarassing, but sometimes it’s super fun to admit that you’re a huge poser
Feb 29, 2024
📀
the way i could write a world-changing 33 1/3 about this album!!! oh my goodness. (this is the kind of album you write after achieving meteoric pop success if you are a serious person, in case any inescapably famous singer-songwriters are taking notes.)
but for real -- this album is at once a perfectly-preserved late 90s time capsule (neurotic, stylish, a hint of a sneer, but real hope underwriting it all) and also secretly about us, right now, in the year of our lord 2024. it's fierce and smart and darkly hilarious. it's about going to therapy and getting your dad to go to therapy, and then feeling weird imagining the kind of dark shit your dad must be working through in therapy. it’s about trying to search for the divine while watching a bunch of idiot rich people get influenced into paying $2000 for like past life regression readings or whatever and feeling weird about the idea that they’re searching for the same divine you are, because if they’re looking for it too then it can’t possibly be the real thing, can it? it’s about being the bright young thing who wrote jagged little pill and suddenly finding all of your interpersonal relationships totally unworkable because everybody is too blinded by the brightness of the young thing who wrote jagged little pill to let you also be a human being. it’s about feeling so old already at 24 and looking back on your teenage self at a tender distance as if those days were a lifetime ago, as if you’re actually any wiser now. it’s about wondering if anything you will ever do is ever, ever going to be good enough. alanis’s lyrics here are biting and precocious and the songs are just so chatty (witness “front row” in which she layers four entire extra verses behind the chorus, effectively writing a whole bonus song because the situation is just too complicated to explain in four minutes) and they’re talking about all the same things we talk about now, in the same way we talk about them now, except without all the self-serious posturing so many of our contemporary songwriters fall prey to. (“the couch” is somehow both the most earnest and the least corny song anybody has ever written about therapy.) i know this album must have hit properly when it came out because it was the only thing my mom played in our house for the entire calendar year of 1999, but it feels so preternaturally tailor-made for the moment we’re in now that i can’t believe it hasn’t had one of those improbable tiktok renaissances or whatever that seem to keep happening. highly recommend a revisit or a first acquaintance if you haven’t made one.
Feb 6, 2024
🎵
Some really vulnerable and angst stuff from Gwen Stefani, queen of cultural appropriation and my young heart …. Very formative record. Inspiring, even
Feb 14, 2024
Top Recs from @realpaingirl
🟩
Sympathy is a knife with Ariana is going to be crazy. Everything is romantic with Caroline Polachek is gonna be crazy. Apple with The Japanese House is gonna be crazy. Mean girls with Julian Casablancas is go
Oct 7, 2024
Oct 12, 2024
Oct 12, 2024