On This Track: Midweek Listening #9
Five new discoveries looking at anxiety, burnout, intimacy, political awareness and the strange ways music helps us make sense of the world around us.
Music does not always have to be explicitly political to tell us something about the time we're living in. Sometimes it is there in a song about a relationship, in the exhaustion of touring, or in the feeling that the world outside has become too much to process. This week's On This Track: Midweek Listening 9 brings together five very different records and tracks that all touch, in one way or another, on how we deal with pressure, uncertainty and each other. Tokyo Rose turn mathematics into a story about codependency, Sylvan Esso face a world on fire, Lydia Saint George writes about the exhaustion of giving too much, and Sorcha Richardson finds something valuable in slowing down. BODEGA close the selection with a question that might be the most important one of all: what can art actually teach us about understanding other people?
Tokyo Rose - “Better When (Fibonacci x Pascal)”
There are probably not many emo songs that begin with the Fibonacci sequence and Pascal's Triangle. Tokyo Rose use both as the basis for a relationship that is anything but rational. “Better When” describes a codependent romance through mathematical patterns, turning something orderly and predictable into a story about two people who clearly aren't. The New Jersey band returned this year with "Never Say Die", their first new music in almost two decades. That makes the song interesting for another reason. Tokyo Rose come from a scene where emotional openness was practically part of the genre's vocabulary, but “Better When” doesn't simply recreate the band's early-2000s sound. There is a strange confidence to it, and the mathematical concept gives the song an extra layer of absurdity. The band's description of the track as a “math-rock fever dream of a manic depressive” is certainly a lot to take in, but the central idea is surprisingly relatable. We often try to find patterns in relationships that don't really make sense. We calculate, repeat, analyze and look for some kind of formula that might explain why we keep going back. Tokyo Rose just happen to turn that impulse into a song.
🎧 Stream “Better When (Fibonacci x Pascal)” by Tokyo Rose on Apple Music
Sylvan Esso - ”Ow ∞”
Sylvan Esso's new album "Ow ∞" was made over several years, but it sounds like it was written while looking directly at the present. Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn describe cities under water and on fire, memories taped together with fragments of the past, and the feeling of trying to function while everything around you seems increasingly difficult to control. The climate crisis is an obvious part of that picture, but the album isn't simply a collection of songs about environmental disaster. What interests me more is the tension between the huge problems outside and the small things we do to keep ourselves together. "Ow ∞" can sound messy and ecstatic one moment and almost desperate the next. There is still room for a party, even when the world feels like it is falling apart. There is also a nice contradiction in how the album was made. Sylvan Esso are singing about a lack of control while having more control over the band than ever before. This is their first album on their own label, Psychic Hotline, made in their own studio and with a huge group of musicians they chose themselves. Maybe that is one way of responding to an overwhelming world: you cannot fix everything, but you can decide what you want to build around yourself.
🎧 Stream “Ow ∞” by Sylvan Esso on Apple Music
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Lydia Saint George - “Lungs”
“Lungs” starts with something very personal: the exhaustion of giving everything to another person and getting very little back. Lydia Saint George writes about reaching the point where the excuses have stopped being convincing and the relationship has become more draining than sustaining. That feeling is familiar, but there is something worth looking at beyond the breakup itself. We talk a lot about emotional labor without always calling it that. Who remembers the details? Who keeps trying to fix things? Who apologizes first? Who keeps making the effort when the other person has already checked out? “Lungs” comes from one particular relationship, but the imbalance at its center is much bigger than that. Musically, the song doesn't need to shout about any of this. It builds slowly around an eight-second keyboard loop that Saint George found while going through sounds during the recording process. The loop stays in the finished track, giving “Lungs” a repetitive, almost stuck quality that fits the subject. You can hear someone reaching the end of their patience without the song ever becoming melodramatic.
🎧 Stream “Lungs” by Lydia Saint George on Apple Music
Sorcha Richardson - ”Draw The Outline”
After years of touring and spending almost a decade in New York, Sorcha Richardson found herself moving in the opposite direction. She returned to Ireland and eventually settled in West Kerry, where "Draw The Outline" took shape at a much slower pace. The album came after a period of burnout, and you can hear that change in the way Richardson approaches the songs. That makes "Draw The Outline" feel particularly relevant right now. There is a constant expectation to be available, productive and moving forward, especially for anyone trying to build a creative career. Richardson's response wasn't to work harder. She stepped away, walked, drove without headphones and let songs arrive when they were ready. The album is quieter than the language around it might suggest. There are acoustic guitars, piano, woodwinds and Hammond organ instead of huge gestures and Richardson leaves plenty of space in the arrangements. Her songs also deal with loneliness, intimacy and the fear of being misunderstood. It is a record that seems to ask whether slowing down can actually change the way we see ourselves and whether we really need to have everything figured out in the first place.
🎧 Stream “Draw The Outline” by Sorcha Richardson on Apple Music
BODEGA - “Literary World”
BODEGA have spent much of their career making music that engages directly with politics and society. With “Literary World”, they are asking a slightly different question: what happens when political awareness isn't enough? Ben Hozie argues that we have become much more politically conscious, particularly as technology has made information and injustice harder to ignore. What he thinks we may be missing is a literary or poetic perspective - the ability to imagine how another person thinks, even when that person is difficult to understand. That is a pretty ambitious idea for a rock song, but it is also a useful one. It connects to something that has become increasingly difficult online. We are very good at knowing what someone believes. We are much less interested in understanding why they believe it. For BODEGA, art can occupy that space. A novel forces you to spend time inside someone else's head; a song can do something similar. “Literary World” is playful and infectious, but underneath it is an argument for empathy that doesn't require everyone to agree with each other. BODEGA are also moving away from the more explicitly political writing of their earlier records. "All Inside Aquarium" is more interested in poetry, personal experience and the possibilities of imagination. That feels less like a retreat from politics than a different way of approaching it.
🎧 Stream “Literary World” by BODEGA on Apple Music
The five releases this week don't give us one easy answer to what music can do in difficult times. Tokyo Rose find patterns in messy relationships. Sylvan Esso turn climate anxiety into something you can dance to. Lydia Saint George puts the exhaustion of an unequal relationship into a quiet song, while Sorcha Richardson questions the idea that constantly pushing forward is always the answer. BODEGA go one step further and ask us to imagine other people more carefully. Maybe that is one of the things independent music still does particularly well: it gives us a place to sit with complicated feelings before we turn them into opinions.
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