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theeverlastingshade · 10 months ago

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Favorite Albums of 2023

10. i’ve seen a way- Mandy, Indiana

2023 wasn’t a year lacking in compelling, well-realized debut LPs that hinted at artists with a completely fully-formed sound before a follow-up LP. Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana was one of those artists, and their debut LP, i’ve seen a way, was one of this year’s most satisfying surprises, with its potent blend of danceable beats, serrated guitars, menacing synths, and versatile vocals courtesy of Valentine Caulfield. Here, nimble rhythms collided with thick slabs of dissonance in a way that distilled the best of dance punk, no wave, post-punk, and noise music without sounding beholden to any single sensibility or stylistic presentation. Caulfield’s writing, sung entirely in French, was an evocative series of leftist insights made all the more potent juxtaposed against her band’s relentless sonic onslaught. It’s rare for music to achieve such an infectious, blood-pumping high with the visceral suggestion of violence emerging around every crevice in the mix, but M,I achieved just that with aplomb, making good on the tired “indie sleeze revival” narrative with music more assured and singular than pretty much anything to come from that dubious umbrella descriptor. Regardless of whether or not dance punk continues to sustain the momentum it achieved this year moving forward, M,I seem likely to continue growing into one of the most thrilling bands active today.

Essentials: “Pinking Shears”, “Peach Fuzz”, “Drag [Crashed]”

9. Everyone’s Crushed- Water From Your Eyes

Very few bands in 2023 experienced the kind of well-deserved payoff that Water From Your Eyes did. After years of honing their craft with increasingly strong records, playing over 90 shows this year, and garnering appreciation for their humor and talent through seemingly outlandish but impressively well-realized covers, the Brooklyn-based experimental pop duo that consists of vocalist Rachel Brown and multi-instrumentalist/producer Nate Amos seemed to have finally gotten their due. And in addition to the impressive aforementioned feats, (as well as the reason for the arrival of their due) WFYE also released their best record to date earlier this year with their perma-stoned art-pop opus, Everyone’s Crushed. On EC, the duo concocted a collection of 9 thrilling songs that veer from whiplash inducing sound collages (“Barley”), to superbly-textured drone compositions (“Open”) to string-laden ballads (“14”), to propulsive post-punk rippers (“Buy My Product”) with air-tight sequencing and finesse. Like many of the albums that I love from this year, EC walks a tightrope between being an impressive display of eclecticism and a disjointed mess, but to my ears it never quite veers into the latter category, and it’s that high-wire sense of ambition that makes it such a thrilling record. And Brown’s writing, which blends irreverence and absurdity with cutting capitalist critiques strewn over the top of their colorful cacophonies really elevates the album into a singular, sprawling fever dream.

Essentials: “Barley”, “True Life”, “Buy My Product”

8. Maps- billy woods and Kenny Segal

There’s been quite a bit of discussion surrounding 2023 being the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and there wasn’t a single release from this year that I listened to that really showcased the indisputable longevity of the form quite like Maps, a full-length collaboration between rapper billy woods and produce Kenny Segal. Maps is the second collaboration between woods and Segal, and it’s the strongest release that either of them have released to date. The conceit is essentially a concept album about life on the road as a touring musician, and the pair deliver an eclectic collection of songs that revel in the absurdity of this necessary component of their chosen careers. The largest draw of Maps is undoubtedly woods at the center of the storm, waxing poetic on everything from food to drugs to sound checks with wit and candor in his distinctly deadpan drawl. But Segal is no slouch, and his beats are in rich in color and personality, drawing from disarmingly (at least for woods) melodic pockets of soul, funk, and jazz for woods to wade in. Danny Brown, Quelle Chris, Elucid, Aesop Rock, and ShrapKnel each drop by to deliver a show stopping verse, and it’s a testament to the craft on display that neither host is ever upstaged. Maps is the byproduct of two artists in complete command of their respective crafts, and operating at the highest level with a hunger that belies their status as veterans.

Essentials: “Year Zero” ft. Danny Brown, “Babylon By Bus” ft. ShrapKnel, “Kenwood Speakers”

7. Dogsbody- Model/Actriz

In another year dominated by discourse on terminally chill, sonically inoffensive indie music, Dogsbody, the debut LP from Model/Actriz, arrived like a refreshing Molotov lobbed at your favorite music publication. The Brooklyn 4 piece specialize in a brooding, blood-stained fusion of dance punk, post-punk, industrial, and noise music with glints of chamber pop peaking through the din. The music is extremely well-realized, and frontman Cole Hayden’s horny yet harrowing vocal prowess imbues the music with a truly idiosyncratic, unsettling allure. Their early EPs were satisfying early forays into shaping what would become their claustrophobic yet danceable sound, but on Dogsbody everything crystallized into a sharp distillation of their disparate influences (namely the musical Cats and Throbbing Gristle). Here, brutal noise-flecked floor-starters custom-tailored for igniting mosh-pits like “Mosquito” and “Amaranth” collide with disarming, tastefully rendered ballads like “Sleepless” and “Divers” without disrupting the sequencing or compromising any shred of the momentum. The band’s consistency and commitment with respect to both ends of their sonic spectrum proved that there’s far more to them than simply being a nightmarish incarnation of Brooklyn’s next generation of “indie sleeze”, or any other fabricated projection more fixated on their image and what they represent than what they’ve proven remarkably adept at musically.

Essentials: “Sleepless”, “Divers”, “Moquito”

6. Raven- Kelela

Kelela’s music has been so consistently excellent from the jump that it’s been easy to take the quality of her releases for granted, but the monumental leap forward that she made on her 2nd LP, Raven, was just too immense to gloss over. Raven unfolds like a meditative spell across its 15 song, hour-long runtime, with immaculate sequencing that lends the experience the feel of an air-tight dj set even throughout its quieter corners. Kelela initially made a name for herself by flirting with the conventions of r&b and experimental electronic music until the boundaries felt non-existent, and on Raven she incorporates garage, drum & bass, and ambient music (with the assistance of an all-star team of producers that includes Kaytranada, LSDXOXO, Bambii, Junglepussy, and more) into the proceedings in a way that feels ambitious and daring but never quite exceeds her depth. Bookended by two gorgeous ambient totems (“Washed Away” and “Far Away”, respectively) that tastefully frame the record, Raven finds Kelela masterfully juggling floor-filling heaters like “Happy Ending” and “Contact” with subdued breathers like “Closure” and “Sorbet” that result in a dynamic, multi-faceted journey. And the writing, which touches on themes of self-realization, reinvention, and acceptance delivered with her versatile vocal approach that’s expressive but delivered with a smoky nonchalance, is her most gripping work to date. Kelela’s been a singular, inimitable artist for over a decade now, and Raven finds her continuing to find compelling new avenues for her voice to flourish in.

Essentials: “Raven”, “Happy Endings”, “Contact”

5. Radical Romantics- Fever Ray

With each passing year I continue to mourn the dissolution of The Knife, the beloved Swedish experimental electronic duo comprised of siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer, who made some of the most striking music, electronic or otherwise, of the 21st century so far, but thankfully Karin continues to make thrilling music under their Fever Ray solo moniker (and Olof’s solo work is also pretty solid, fwiw). Fever Ray’s 3rd LP, Radical Romantics, is their strongest solo record to date; one that achieves a near perfect balance between pop’s pleasure center and the adventurous allure of the avant-garde. The amount of range on display here is impressive at every turn. Early highlight “New Utensils” lurches to life with an infectious visceral intensity all too uncommon in synth-pop while single “Carbon Dioxide” is a floor-filling heater that's disarming in its immediacy. And while their now familiar thematic focus on carnal desires is thoroughly present, particularly on the swaggering early cut “Shiver”, and the show stopping centerpiece “Kandy”, RR finds Karin expanding their scope to tackle subjects like trans erasure (“What They Call Us”), the difficulty of dating as a middle-aged queer person (“Looking for a Ghost”), and what is easily the greatest helicopter parent bully revenge song ever penned (“Even It Out”). RR is just flex after flex of the most sublime synth-pop that I’ve heard all year fronted by the pied piper of goth-tinged off-kilter electronic music. We didn’t deserve the singularity of The Knife, and we sure as hell don’t deserve the singularity of Fever Ray.

Essentials: “Kandy”, “New Utensils”, “Carbon Dioxide”

4. This Stupid World- Yo La Tengo

It’s difficult to discuss Yo La Tengo without reference to the legendary indie rock institution’s nearly unparalleled longevity. The New Jersey based trio have been making good to great records since the mid-80s, and although what’s widely acknowledged as their “imperial phase” was from 1993-2000, they’ve still managed to release more great records in the years since that period than most bands manage to release halfway decent songs throughout their lifespan. The trio’s 17th LP, This Stupid World, happens to be one of their finest to date, and while generally praised as a “return to form”, which on some level it certainly is (the form in question being their penchant for pitch-perfect loud/soft dynamics, angelic vocal harmonies, generous use of distortion and feedback, and a general head in the clouds sort of dreaminess that almost threatens to belie the remarkable precision on display), but it’s not merely the sort of resting on past laurels at the highest possible level that that sort of designation tends to imply. The most satisfying development on TSW that pushes their sound into exciting new sonic realms for them is the pair of lengthy droning cuts in the form of the title track and “Miles Away” that close out the record. The band have flirted with drone before, but not quite like this, with the former sustaining distorted clusters of notes alongside a chugging floor tom/sleigh bell rhythm as they build steam through bludgeoning repetition and subtle tonal shifts while the latter takes a softer approach with a beating snare set against drummer Georgia Hubley’s ethereal croon and thick washes of white noise and negative space. They’re masterful exercises in restraint, and portend a few interesting directions the band could go next. And the prior 7 songs are just as compelling, whether we’re talking about the explosive stage setting opener (“Sinatra Drive Breakdown”), the lilting breather (“Aselestine”), the hypnotic, bass-led march (“Tonight’s Episode”) or anything else here. YLT’s consistency as indie rock lifers content to continue honing their craft, devoid of trend or clout chasing, remains as inspiring as ever.

Essentials: “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”, “This Stupid World” “Until It Happens”

3. the whaler- Home Is Where

This is probably the most underrated record that I’ve written about all year, which is a damn shame for several different reasons, but perhaps most of all because it’s a record with an appeal far beyond the fifth-wave emo wave that birthed it. Home Is Where are unabashedly emo, by their own admission, and they strike a sweet spot sonically, lyrically, and thematically between 4th wave emo legends, The Hotelier, and cult favorite Neutral Milk Hotel (which HIW have also acknowledged, albeit jokingly). And while there’s a lot of truth to through lines like raw, unvarnished vulnerability, surrealism, urgency, and ample use of singing saw that makes that parallel feel particularly apt, HIW are very much on their own trip. Their classic 2021 debut LP, I Became Birds, still feels like a lightning in a bottle 18 minute leftist masterwork that seamlessly blended emo, punk, hardcore, and folk into an idiosyncratic statement of purpose with more personality and purpose than the vast majority of their peers, emo or otherwise. The band’s follow-up, the whaler, doubles down on the promise of IBB with a more sobering tone and an even further refined sonic palette. The band’s eclecticism is still on display, but the ingenuity is even more pronounced, with whiplash inducing mid-song stylistic shifts such as the folk foundations of “lily pad puplis” slowly transitioning into a hardcore breakdown, or the tape loop sound collage of opener “skin meadow” bleeding into an anthemic emo rollercoaster, that are inventive and thrilling in their disregard for convention. Like on IBB, frontwoman Brandon MacDonald uses sublime surreal imagery in service of leftist sentiments, but her critiques are sharper and more colorful this time around. There’s a tremendous deal to unpack and admire about the 10 dynamic songs on tw, and the generous melodicism coursing throughout it all makes it all too easy to get lost in. Irreverent, earnest, adventurous, and flush with unabashed integrity, tw exemplifies so much of what I find exciting about in art, and cements HIW as one of the most exciting bands active.

Essentials: “floral organs”, “everyday feels like 9/11”, “skin meadow”

2. After the Magic- Parannoul

Shoegaze is in a tremendously exciting place right now. It’s undergone a completely unprecedented creative resurgence throughout the 2020s as arty projects have emerged from disparate scenes around the world putting their own spin on the genre through the increasingly low barrier to entry afforded by modern technology, and this coupled with the bizarre traction that many of its new practitioners have experienced on Tik-Tok this year has given it a curiously heightened level of visibility. Which makes it all the more fitting that one of, if not the most exciting shoegaze album of the decade so far is After the Magic, the 3rd LP courtesy of the anonymous, South Korea-based solo bedroom shoegaze act, Parannoul. After toiling away in obscurity for years, Parannoul had an unprecedented level of visibility with their 2021 breakthrough LP, To See the Next Part of the Dream, which lit up the blogs due to its adventurous strain of entirely MIDI-generated lo-fi, emo-leaning shoegaze, and ATM ups the ante of its predecessor on every conceivable level. The sound of ATM is still emo-leaning shoegaze, but the scale of the music here is simply enormous, incorporating elements of disparate genres like K-pop and hardcore into the fold of their stadium-sized shoegaze without diluting their approach. Early highlight “Arrival” erupts into a furious Siamese Dream style suite of blown-out guitars that feels like it could level buildings, while “Parade” unfolds like a disarmingly tender trojan horse imbued with gorgeous vocal harmonies juxtaposed against field recordings of fireworks and children playing, and it’s a testament to the sprawling ambition throughout that both pieces feel right at home and don’t even remotely disrupt the flow of the record. Naturally, the words are sung entirely in Korean, but you don’t need to understand a word of Korean to understand the emotional thrust of the music. On ATM, the music itself is more expressive than any words could ever really convey. Parannoul remains a rare talent who fully understands music’s expressive sonic potential, and thoroughly taps into that to distill worlds of feeling into their work.

Essentials: “We Shine at Night”, “Blossom”, “Arrival”

1. Rat Saw God- Wednesday

In my experience, it’s rare for an album that was hyped beyond reasonable expectation to actually live up to the hype, and maybe over deliver on the anticipated excitement, but Wednesday achieved just that with their fifth LP, Rat Saw God. The Ashville-based 5 piece have been making great music that sits at the intersection of shoegaze, lo-fi indie rock, grunge, and alt-county for a handful of years now, but RSG feels like the culmination of their sensibilities, and the album they've been working towards throughout their brief but substantial career so far. The music on RSG consists of bleak, bad-vibe bummer jams that are considerably more polished than Wednesday’s music has ever sounded, but the curdled undercurrent of observations accumulated through growing up in the late-capitalist American south still unfurl with the same harrowing disposition. The music roars to life with vivacious licks courtesy of guitarist MJ Lenderman on songs like opener “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” and early epic “Bull Believer”, but it’s equally arresting in the album’s moments of fleeting tranquility like on “Formula One” and “What’s So Funny”. The ensemble performances throughout RSG captivate at every turn, and it’s the scrappy execution that imbues the music with so much charm and personality which help the morose details go down smoother. References to Narcan, desolation, and crumbling infrastructure are ample, but so is the band’s generous melodicism and infectious communal spirit of perseverance against the odds. Frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s eye for detail is the album’s greatest appeal, and her storytelling on RSG, which touches on everything from a miserable New Year’s Eve party replete with Mortal Kombat and nosebleeds on the aforementioned single “Bull Believer” to domestic abuse that culminates in a drug bust on late album highlight “Quarry”, and so much more throughout these 10 immensely evocative songs. Wednesday exemplify the unbridled catharsis of the best art that any medium has to offer, and while the vignettes throughout RSG are often hard to stomach upon close inspection, they’re also more rewarding and richly rendered than anything else that I’ve had the pleasure of listening to this year.

Essentials: “Bull Believer”, “Quarry”, “Bath County”

#wednesday #parannoul #home is where #yo la tengo #fever ray #kelela #model/actriz #billy woods #kenny segal #water from your eyes #mandy indiana

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beautifulletdownfics · 4 years ago

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Nothing To Him - A Harry Styles One Shot

Harry Styles is a liar.

He lied your whole relationship.

He promised to love you forever and then he walked away.

A lovers to nothing break up fic feat. blisters, heartache & two sides to one story.

Word count: 15k (Sorry! You’re going to want to open this little pal in a browser window probably. Eek)

Story Playlist:

The First Lie: Damn This Love - Thirsty Merc The Second Lie: Do You Remember - Jarryd James The Third Lie: Nebraska - Oh Wonder The Fourth Lie: I Saw You - Jon Bryant The Fifth Lie: Here We Go - Emily Hearn The Sixth Lie: Crying Dancing - Nina Nesbitt , NOTD

MY MASTERLIST.

The first lie was that you were different.

Harry felt different with you.

You just slipped into his routine and his life. You didn't buy into the spectacle of it all. You told him on your first date that you didn't play games, and that it wasn't often you connected with someone on an intellectual or emotional level. Harry sat there and listened to the woman across from him say she didn't expect to finish the date still attracted to him.

And he fucking loved it.

The next morning he called you at quarter past eight, because he figured you either started work at eight-thirty or nine o'clock, so he'd catch you on your commute or just before you walked into the office. You answered your phone like you would a business call. He teased you for it, but really he was just glad you answered at all. It felt like getting test results telling Harry he was in the clear.

The truth was when Harry first met you at the birthday party the night before he'd been angling towards you being a hookup. He saw you across the bar as soon as he arrived, gaze zeroing in on your legs in That Dress, his ears leaning to the sound of your laugh pulling eyes from around the room. Harry wanted you, and he'd been through a bit of a dry spell. You radiated the kind of energy Harry could get drunk on, the sort of body he wanted to lose himself in for a night.

It was almost an hour before he managed to edge into the same circle of bodies as you. You knew the birthday girl the same way he did; through work. Harry caught early on that you didn't still work for his record label, but did a few years before and stayed in touch with everyone. You seemed like the kind of person who collected people, who everyone wanted to keep in touch with. Harry just wanted to touch you.

Two tequilas in he got you to himself.

You were good at flirting, which excited Harry initially. You had a quip for everything or an interesting addition to each story he told. You were well-read and well-travelled, and you weren't hesitant in showing Harry that you had opinions and ideas of your own. Over the years he'd become good at getting people to talk, good at asking questions that make someone share themselves because the alternative—Harry sharing himself—wasn't something he could do. But something about you and the way you framed questions made Harry feel like it was safe to share a little more, you'd disarmed him quietly, and by the time he noticed Harry didn't feel the need to protect himself anymore.

"That's bullshit," you'd told him when he said he wasn't all that into contemporary fiction. You hated the artsy elites who listed off the Hemingway's and the Kerouac's and the Vonnegut's as though the only literature worth mentioning came from lifetimes ago. Your hair swished back and forth at your cheeks as you shook your head emphatically, "You're being lazy. Imagine saying the same about modern music."

Harry's lips ticked up into a smile, and he raised his eyebrow in concession, "That would be bullshit," he agreed, thinking of the album he'd just released and how he wanted to know if you'd listened to any of his stuff. (Very quickly he decided he probably didn't want to know because it stuck Harry the answer would be no.) His eyes couldn't pull away from watching your lips as you spoke, admiring the shade of lipstick you wore.

"Right," you continued, "Modern fiction teaches me about myself, about my life. It gives words to what my friends and I are experiencing. The classics are amazing—don't get me wrong—but I don't see myself in them."

"Seems like your criteria stem from narcissism," Harry was sure he had you there. He grinned at you happily.

"Exactly," you agreed without hesitation, "Maybe 'Hills Like White Elephants' is genius, and as a woman, I should be grateful to Hemmingway for horrifying his audience in 1927 with a normalised view of abortion but … I don't think he wrote that for me. He was challenging ideas then. I feel more connection and loyalty to an Instagram poet who's painting the world that actually matters to me, the world I'm trying to survive now."

Harry hums into his drink and says nothing. He expects you to back away a little, or ask him some question that watered-down your view and opened up the table to his. But you don't. You let your view sit on the slice of the bar between you and don't apologise for it.

"There's a reason artists burst out of every generation," you add, sitting forward on your stool. "If the classics were the perfect form, the perfect commentary of humanity, then there'd be no need for anyone after them to bother trying to put the world and life into words, or pictures, or music. You can't just dismiss a generation of voices because some smelly, old, white, university hasn't decided to name a building after them yet. I don't think being published as a little orange Penguin Classic is the singular hallmark to good literature."

He didn't entirely agree with you, (he thought it was vital to learn from the past, thought those great authors you reeled off and dismissed set the benchmark artists today should aspire to) but Harry liked hearing your thoughts and seeing the passion burst out of you. He liked seeing how you didn't second guess yourself or try to soften your opinion by asking for his. You just said what you thought, and that was always one of his favourite characteristics in a person.

That night you met him, you were the designated driver for a few of your friends. He should have noticed the way you switched to pineapple juice after you finished your first drink, but he was too busy trying not to look at the curve of your thigh when you crossed one leg over the other. Trying to ignore the smell of your perfume or how you kept licking your lips and he wanted to taste them, desperately. Harry didn't like to say anything when he offered to buy you another gin and dry. Still, when it eventually came out in conversation—that you were strictly only having one tonight—he felt his excitement deflate. His warm buzz suddenly felt pervy and presumptuous.

"Well, that's bloody annoying, isn't it?"

His response surprised you, "Me getting my friends home alive?"

With his hand comfortably resting over your knee, Harry shook his head, "I was hoping to go home with you."

"Oh."

You blinked at him, not having expected him to be so bold. You didn't hate it though, you felt the twinge of realising you were going to miss something that could have been good. Could have been great, probably. The last time you had sex had been … sad. And disappointing. Still, you hadn't come out to meet anyone tonight, why the sudden rush of despondency? These were old work colleagues you rarely saw, and you figured it would be a night of catching up before six months of not seeing each other because life got in the way.

Then Harry asked for your number. Asked if you'd go out with him the next night. He didn't beat around the bush with it, he wanted to see you again and told you so. The way you said you would filled him with relief but also fear. Harry knew he'd need to really deliver with you, he couldn't half-arse it. He was terrified he'd overshoot it and lose the change to be someone who impressed you.

He settled on a Sunday evening picnic where the two of you ate takeaway on a beach towel at the top of a park halfway between your houses. Something told Harry you would be happier with him underplaying the date than you would be getting taken to an expensive, showy restaurant. You wore jean shorts and a long sleeve jumper which churned his body more deeply than the dress with the split from the night before. He was hooked.

"Do you not like olives?" Harry asked, sucking the oil off his fingers after just depositing one into his mouth. You instantly loved the way the inflection of his words rose at the end of his sentences, and you'd mock him for it your whole relationship.

You looked at the plastic container sitting between you, you'd been picking at the cheese and crackers, the antipasto was not your thing, "They don't seem like something humans should eat … Salty and rubbery with a tiny stone on the inside? No, thanks."

A laugh burst out of Harry's mouth as he picked up another green olive, "More for me then."

"I'm happy about the rosemary in these though," you held up a cracker before digging it into the hummus, a plastic-stemmed wine glass with a dry rose in your free hand, "You got the fancy ones."

"Only the best," Harry returned with a smile and then went on trying to playfully wedge more information from you about the secret poetry Instagram he was convinced you had. He was already feeling buzzed from the wine, but more from the way you kept looking at him and he couldn't catch a hint of you being anything other than yourself.

You didn't go home together that night either, despite The Kiss at the end next to his car. Despite Harry's hands on the back of your thighs as things got heated. The way the tips of his fingers feathered against the elastic of your knickers, just slipping under before pulling away. Your chests heaving together in a rhythm you'd never found with anyone else.

He felt like he had just auditioned for a part he wasn't sure yet that you were going to give him. Wine always heightened his anxiety, so Harry also wanted to appear controlled and measured. He wanted to be as thoughtful as you were. As connected to himself as you were to all your wonderful opinions and facts. There was some part of him that feared taking you home too soon might risk that being the only night Harry got. So he pulled away, kissed your cheek and promised to call you later on.

Somewhere along the line, Harry decided he wanted more than a little bit. He was greedy. Harry wanted the whole pie all to himself.

That was a theme, him wanting more. Even now, months since you've seen or heard from him. Harry always knew how to get you to take that one step out of your comfort zone, take that little bit extra risk. Letting go of him in one way felt like small release valve finally letting go. A tiny bit of your safety net tucking closer around you. A little quiet moment to take stock and check every part of you was still connected, still there. A deep breath in. A short pause of calming silence. Like getting your heart back … But then finding it didn't fit in your chest the same way anymore.

So you found it particularly cruel to have received a follow-up email from his assistant this week, checking to see if you were able to attend his show tonight.

The show that six months ago Harry drew you a mock ticket for and hand-delivered to you sitting outside in his garden with a tea and a biscuit. Even then, even as his girlfriend, you'd feigned not knowing if you could say whether you would attend. Now it felt foreboding, the way you'd pulled your features together thoughtfully and told Harry you'd have to see closer to the date. You waited just long enough for him to switch over into thinking you were serious before you laughed and told him of course and where else would I be?

Where else would I be, was right, in a sense. Because this is still your city, and you're here tonight. It's not his anymore. He moved soon after you broke up … Relocated to one of his—what was it you used to mockingly call them?—" location" homes. Houses you never saw in person. Places he never took you. Either Italy or France. Somewhere he could hide, be creative, recenter himself. All three of those things filled you with dread for different reasons.

Were you really going to go tonight though? Walk in through the front door of the venue with a ticket and barcode on your phone, sit in a crowd and listen to Harry for two hours? Look at him from across the room and just take it on the chin?

It certainly seemed you were dressed for it. And you were out of the house with time to get there. Would you get off the train at the stop though? Would you walk down the street with the bright sign his name lit up? Would Harry even know if you didn't go?

Part of you wonders if his assistant didn't mean to email you. Maybe she forgot you were no longer in Harry's life? Perhaps it was a scheduled email she forgot to stop? Probably it was Harry just being fucking nice, and polite, and worrying about how you'd feel if you were uninvited. Or if he didn't check in on you while he was here.

You accepted the reminder too easily and scolded yourself for it. His team was expecting you. Harry was expecting you. And now, sitting on the train and counting down the stops you felt caught. Felt like he had you again, even if it was just winning whatever tonight was.

Harry did always enjoy the chase. Admitted it himself, admitted to loving the beginning of meeting someone. Loving the audition process, the figuring each other out, the get. The Catch.

You wonder now if it was the chase he liked back then. Was it a thrill having you make him feel as though he had something to prove? Or was it Harry experiencing for the first time not having the upper hand, not having even the tiniest amount of weight around who he was count for anything. Now it felt like Harry was nothing but upper hand.

Whatever it was—the Chase, or your endless facts, pancakes on a Sunday morning—the part of Harry's lie about you being different that hurts the most is the way you bought into it so proudly. Wore it later as his girlfriend like a badge of honour. As though it signalled to others you'd been hard-won, and Harry was lucky to have you.

Different turned out to be such a dirty word.

Different turned out to mean nothing. To get you nowhere.

All different got you was Nothing To Him.

The second lie was that he saw a future with you.

Harry didn't shy away from talking about it. He made plans for you both.

Sometimes it was in the moments right before you both fell asleep at night, or in the final seconds before the kettle finished boiling. Always in some small window where his mind drifted and sat comfortably stagnant when all there was to think about was the next holiday you'd take together. Or what breed of dog you might have one day. Whether you wanted your kids to be close together in age or have larger age gaps between them. What you thought about silent retreats in Thailand.

He stored your answers away in the file full of you in his head or added them to the note on his phone with ideas for gifts for people or things going on in their lives he wanted to remember.

"My family have always had cats," he told you one night, fingers drawing circles around your bare kneecap, your naked thigh resting across his stomach, "When I'm settled I'd want to get a few of my own."

It was one of those hot summer nights no position felt comfortable for sleep, you raised your arms up over your head and stretched out further on the mattress, fingers dangling off the edge of the bed to feel the cold stream from the air conditioning unit above, "I don't trust cats. Isn't there something about them being evolutionarily build to hunt their owner?"

Harry turned his head to face you, "A fact for everything," he recited fondly, his common quip for your always having an answer for everything, "I'll let the cats hunt me, you'll be spared."

"As long as I can name them," you murmured, your eyes finally closing.

Close to three months later, an hour into unsuccessfully putting together a flat-pack shelving unit in Harry's garage, you heavily plopped yourself down on the concrete floor and hailed defeat. You tossed the small, silver Allen key onto the floor in Harry's direction and rested your chin in your palm.

A few minutes of watching his embittered attempts passed before he spoke.

"Hey Sulky, I can feel you looking at me," Harry was frowning at the short piece of timber in his hand, he was holding it next to what was supposed to be the base of the structure. This was your second attempt at pulling apart the shelves and starting again while you cursed the entire Swedish furniture empire. You were enjoying seeing Harry's stubborn frustration immensely.

He could be such a man sometimes.

"Yeah, 'cause you're hot," you said, mocking him dreamily.

"Ha ha," he drawled, rolling his shoulders back to try to regain his focus.

When he paused a moment later and looked up at you, his arms dropped as his brow softened and he let out a breath.

You grinned at him, "I'm pretty cute too, right?"

"All this shit is going to end up living on the ground because you're sabotaged the assembly!" He gestured wildly at the tools and spare paint colours for the house lying around you. His bike parts and the weird assortment of garden tools Harry collected were leaning against the wall waiting to be put on their new home as well, the shelf neither you nor Harry were skilled enough to put together.

"Baby," you began, but Harry waved you off, and you saw genuine frustration start to emerge on his face, "Okay! Okay, I'm sorry," you stressed, "Are you sure we're looking at this thing from the right way around? Maybe the designer meant for it to be wonky?"

He rolled his eyes at you. As if the mere thought anyone would design anything to look like the mess currently on the floor was purely preposterous—his temper for small frustrations on full display.

"Don't be rude!" You admonished, "It's a fucking shelf, we can do this, Harry."

It took you another hour and a half, but when it was done, Harry draped his arm around your shoulders, kissed you on the head and told you that you were the person he wanted by his side of all his future crisis. Someone to say to him, whatever the challenge was, it wasn't beyond him, wasn't something he couldn't handle or wasn't capable of.

You felt like you were floating that night.

It was one of those few times you could see your imprint on his life. See some evidence of it. There were shelves in his garage only there because you told him he needed storage there, and then you pushed him to keep trying assembling them. It was some proof you'd been in his life. An impression of your influence. A memory that would hover in his garage forever.

Two days after putting the shelves together, you and Harry had an argument about the plastic tubs he went off on his own to buy for all the loose bits and pieces he wanted to go on the shelves. You were annoyed he didn't purchase wooden ones, and he couldn't understand why it mattered that they were white plastic which would apparently be impossible to keep clean.

It's a garage, he thought, who's cleaning their garage?

And because arguments always dredge up things that they aren't supposed to, you made a jab about your relationship being secret.

You said something like, If I'd been able to come with you, we wouldn't be having this row!

Harry knew what you really meant straight away. You'd been together for more than nine months at that point, and nobody knew about it: nobody but your families and very very closest friends. There were no photos of Harry having lunch with you at a cafe, or of you walking a few steps behind him at the shops. Nobody had snuck a picture of you backstage at a show of his. He'd never appeared on your social media, even by suggestion, and Harry had never taken the risk including you on any private Instagram Stories.

Those photographs didn't exist, because those circumstances never had. There wasn't even a celebrity paper trail linking you to knowing Harry, let alone dating him. Harry didn't dedicate performances to you, or even to an unnamed significant other. You never got a song or an album dedication. Harry was so adamant on nobody getting wind of the relationship that sometimes it felt like … Like he enjoyed the sneaking around. The having a secret. (Later on, when you reflected on the relationship once it was over, you really weren't sure how there'd never been even one instance of you being seen coming or going from Harry's house. Hindsight made that feel suss to you.)

Most of the time you liked it, though, liked not having any fuss or interruption to your life but sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like something silently eroding you from the inside—a silent acid eating your spirit.

But you'd never tell Harry that. Then anyway. Now … You're not sure what you'd tell him now.

The truth was a lot of the time you weren't sure how you'd managed to keep it going so long. Part of it was obvious, maybe, like not being in public together. But still, surely after being together months and having arguments about shelves you could afford a platonic appearing coffee trip or going for a run at the same time, together?

Instead, you'd gear up and run in opposite directions down his street. Or Harry would stay in the car while you went in for the coffee. You'd sit in a nosebleed seat if you went to a show, sneaking through some fire exit and into the main hallways of a venue with the public to get to it. You looked like a sad woman attending a gig on your own, not the girlfriend of the star.

Nobody would know you even knew the man up on stage. That you had something in the slow cooker at home for you both to eat when you got home, or that he'd stolen a tube of your favourite lip balm and had it in his blazer pocket for his set. Nobody would guess you made him late for the soundcheck with just a smile and the undoing of a zip.

Seeing him tonight would be just like it always was, you and Harry from across the room. But then not like always, because Harry wouldn't see you tonight. You wouldn't have the taste of a good luck kiss on your lips. Or the sound of Harry's warm-up in your ears. Yours was always an invisible connection that was kept invisible by design, and now being broken up, it looked no different than together. Not really.

Tonight though it would only be you seeing Harry. Like you see him on late-night talk show promotions and billboards. Like the times you get into an Uber, and his song is playing. How strange it feels, to have your heart crack in your chest again while also lifting somehow. Singing along with a song about you. Or hearing his laugh or even just Harry speaking, and being able to picture the exact expression that would go along with it.

Every raised inflection. Ever breathy giggle. Every brow crease at a thought that Harry was chasing or somehow unable to articulate. All of those turning into you picturing what he looked like every time he knew he was disappointing you. Every whined sorry and all the instances of him loving on you to move your mind away from his deficiencies.

"What's the plan for Y/N?"

If your relationship with Harry was a t-shirt, that would be the slogan across the chest. Those would be the words under the cartoon impression of you banging your head against a wall Harry's standing on the other side of.

How will Y/N get in? Who's staying behind with Y/N? Where will I meet up with Y/N?

There was always a question. Always a plan for you and it was decidedly separate to the plan for Harry. His team organised a second car or an earlier flight for you. A back entrance or some other smokescreen to keep you concealed. In the beginning, it felt like a kindness, but in the end, you were embarrassed by it. The bother, the way what started as a careful consideration for your wellbeing turned into something rotten that painted you a different colour to Harry and his public inner circle, the circle you were never invited or initiated into.

It was exhausting. But Harry assured you it was for the best.

You wonder what the future he saw for you really was though. How much further did Harry see a life like that going? A life with you perpetually operating under cover of darkness. A life of you decidedly not existing. Not really.

So when he said he saw a future with you, you're really not sure what Harry meant.

Did he mean one day he saw himself lifting the veil and telling the world he had a Someone? Or did he mean that he saw himself forever hiding you, forever living that lie?

Maybe he actually saw nothing.

Sometimes you could be convinced the fact Harry hid you was an action pointing to a more profound truth.

That the future he saw was an imagined indulgence; a convenience, and a comfortable lie. Comforting on a temporary level, like bowling alley bumper rails or the plastic covering on a new watch face. The fake sense of security—of protection, of immaculacy—was just that, artificial and temporary. It ceased to exist the minute you plucked the corner and pulled back the protective layer. Crashed as soon as the bumpers were flipped down.

You were a secret only Harry had any power over. He led from the front because you didn't know there was any other option. And in letting yourself be that, you made yourself easily dispensable.

Disposable. Replaceable. Erasable.

Which is precisely what happened when he left.

Harry left, and the You of the two of you ended. But more than any other relationship ever could, the silence that followed felt deadly. It wasn't just a relationship that once was, it was a relationship that never was. A year of your life made no imprint on his. Nobody looking at him could know there was anything—anybody—missing, and maybe that was the whole point.

Maybe that was the design of it.

The third lie was that you could tell him anything.

Harry's golden rule always was honest communication.

There's no such thing as an overshare, he'd say when you naturally hesitated.

He was all about that. All about hearing what was worrying you, or the mundane things that were going on in your world. Sometimes you felt like maybe it was an act because nobody had ever found your family, or your friends, or your life in general as interesting as Harry seemed to. He was always telling you he loved hearing the funny text conversations going on, or who was having a row and why, or what each of your friends was stressed about in their jobs or relationships or themselves. And Harry always said he loved hearing it from you the most.

(Now, that struck you as a strange thing to say. Where else would he hear anything about you? Harry was the only line connecting you back to him. You didn't have mutual friends or people who'd known you both before you dated each other. There was nobody for Harry to hear anything from. It's not like your friends were going to reach out to him with gossip about you. Not like how you could sneak a look at update accounts or read about his performance online while he was away.)

Still, you loved the stories he told from the road, ate them up. The missing coffee mugs where everyone got their caffeine fix served in wine glasses and lemonade tumblers for almost two whole weeks. And then the tour t-shirts accidentally ordered in bulk in children's sizes that Harry hand-delivered them to a local children's charity. The crumbs of gossip Harry picked up about who in his team was sweet on who (he loved a setup, loved watching crushes silently and awkwardly orbit around each other).

Your secrets were safe with him, he promised. He wouldn't ever judge you. Wouldn't dismiss your feelings or what kept you awake at night next to him. So you did it. You believed him. And you slowly drained everything inside of you into him. Harry got all your stories, even the ones you vowed to leave exactly where they sat in your past. Even the ones you felt like might kill you to dredge back up. The ones that made you look like a shitty friend or sister or daughter. He got them all.

And even now, he's still got them.

"What's the biggest lie you ever told?" He asked you one night in his kitchen, both of you elbow deep in making dinner. Harry rolled out the lines of gnocchi and cut the inch long pieces while you pressed them over a fork to decoratively indent them. (Although Harry likes to tell you how when he was in Italy he learned in patterns weren't just aesthetic—it was all about soaking up more of the sauce, For the sauce, of course! He'd sing out in an Italian accent, proud of himself.) "Like, a proper lie," he clarified, "Not like how you told my mum you didn't take sugar in your tea when you first met her."

You hinged your knee out to attack his calf for the teasing comment but then rolled your lips together in thought, "I lied to my parents a lot growing up," you told him honestly. "I think about eighty per cent of the time I wasn't where I told them I was. Definitely wasn't with who I said I was with."

Harry shook his head as he rolled out the next lump of dough, "No, I mean like … Like a lie."

A moment passed as you thought more deeply about the question, travelled around your memories until you landed somewhere suitable, "I lied to my boyfriend at university," you begin. "A pretty bad one, I guess."

"And the lie was …" Harry prompts.

"I told him I was a virgin before him."

Harry eyes raised, and then he nodded, accepting it, "I think that's probably a common one, really."

"I thought he'd like me more if I said it," I admitted quietly, pausing the work with your hands. "Wasn't too proud of losing my virginity in a tent in the sixth form … And I mean, at that age you just so desperately want to be the version of you that you think the people around you will like the most. A whole group of us went camping at someone's grandparent's farm during the summer holidays. Not sure how our parents let us, to be honest. Anyway, I had awful, painful, embarrassing sex in a tent with a guy named … Dylan Fraiser."

You were surprised by how long the name took to come to you. Years ago, that was such a defining event in your life. Now it hardly mattered at all anymore.

Progress, you thought.

"A tent," Harry winced.

"Really came back to bite me in the arse when my uni boyfriend went on to tell a group of his mates he was my first and—

—Tent Guy was one of them?" Harry guessed. Correctly.

"Yep. Small towns are a curse."

"I promise never to have sex with you in a tent," Harry teased, grinning at you over his wine glass and then leaning over to kiss your temple. He looked down at the line of gnocchi pieces you'd made together proudly, "We're alright at this."

"Hmmm," you hummed, now lost in the past, "I told that uni boyfriend him I loved him … I didn't though," you say without thinking, shrugging as the words came out, "I thought he was boring. But it was cool to have a boyfriend, so I didn't break up with him … Guess I've told more whoppers than I thought."

Harry gives you an understanding look, "I've said I love you to protect someone's feelings too. Thought it might come a little later, that I was just not feeling it as quickly as them."

It should have made you question whether Harry meant I love you with you. But it didn't. He was speaking in the past tense, and you were imaging that version of him being younger than the almost thirty-year-old you were dating. Now though … You wonder what love meant to Harry when you were together. Whether your wires were crossed by different definitions. Even now, you couldn't vilify him. Not completely. He was too thoughtful in general, there'd be a reason for it. There always was with Harry.

"What's your biggest lie?" You turned the exercise back on him, smiling as he refilled your wine glass and skipped a few songs on the playlist. These were your favourite moments with Harry. The end of the day, where you were the only thing on his to-do list. There wasn't a lingering work call, or a meeting to prepare for, an email to reply to. Harry was just finishing his day with dinner and some time at home. With you.

Harry gave you a withering look, "I think you know already."

"I don't," you said because you really didn't, "What was it?"

"There's no way I'll ever do anything else with The Band," he said tonelessly as he turned to rinse his hands in the sink, unable to look at you while he said it. And even then, Harry didn't admit to the lie. Didn't name it. He just said what the truth was instead.

"Why wouldn't you?" You asked, instead of what you were sure Harry thought you'd ask.

You weren't interested in why he told that particular lie though, the answer to that was pretty apparent to you: he cared about his fans—they all did—and didn't want to disappoint them. And they probably hadn't been able to deal with thinking about the ripples ending it completely, right off the bat, would have caused. Saying you were taking a break was a much nicer way to let a world of fans down. An easier pill to swallow than 'We're done' straight off the bat.

You gave Harry time to respond. He fiddled with the gnocchi pieces in front of him, waiting for the water to boil in the pot behind you both, "Not sure, really."

He was lying now, and you could tell. He was ashamed of the truth.

"You're not sure?"

"I just wouldn't, there's no one reason. No big thing. It's not like I hate them all or anything, I just …"

There was one big thing, though. And it was typical Harry to not be able to name it. He was always so in denial about his own arrogance, about what it was that drove him. Harry thought he was above them. His success since The Band far outweighed anything any of the others had done. Going back to that would be diminishing for Harry's career. Wouldn't help him any. He was stronger on his own, more successful. More widely appreciated. That chapter of his life was done, it had been a stepping stone—yes, a life-defining one—but Harry had moved to bigger and brighter stages on his own.

"It's not what you think," he told you lowly when you didn't ask anything further.

It was so typical of Harry to not see the forest for the trees. To not see how he, yet again, was blurring and confusing the lines between a business decision and an emotional, personal one. He was speaking about The Band emotionally, but his reason for distancing himself from it was all to do with business.

"It's not?" You asked plainly.

"I don't think I'm better than them or some shit," Harry said, "I just … That part of me is done. I'm not who I was back then, and I don't want to go back to that person."

"You also wouldn't get anything out of it," you prod, knowing that you shouldn't have. But it was true. So much of Harry's life was a business decision. Everything was so carefully done, so deliberately set into place by him and his team that results and his successes were almost guaranteed.

At the time, you didn't understand how he couldn't see it. Or you couldn't believe that he didn't. He was so calculating, and he hated you telling him so. But he was. He liked to say he wasn't defined by his job, but Harry's whole life was defined by his career, by the who he was.

He loved to spout off his public shit about staying grounded and having a life away from being Harry Styles ™, but he didn't let anyone see even a skerrick that life. The only thing Harry ever let be projected about him was his job, that was all was ever on the table for discussion. And so it was hardly surprising that became who he was away from the cameras and lights as well.

Hiding you was a business decision, you figured out in the aftermath of The End. It was his way of keeping the narrative about his music and career on track. As soon as there was a You, Harry's private life would distract from his real focus and goal, his career. And you mean, it's not like it didn't work for him. Because here you were, standing outside in the chilly night looking at his name up in lights.

Harry's name always looked so good up on billboards and the fronts of stadiums. You always used to tell him even the letters of his name were visually pleasing, they looked good together, like they fit. So you stand on the street across the road from tonight's venue and take it in—HARRY STYLES, SOLD OUT—for several minutes.

You don't know that you're ready for this. Seeing him. You've so perfectly avoided it until now. Until you felt like there was a promise you made lifetimes ago you now can't break. Even if you felt like he'd broken a thousand promises between the two points in time.

Where else would I be? you'd said when he first drew that stupid mock ticket.

Where else, indeed.

You scuttle across the street and sneak between people to get yourself in through the doors. Dodging lenders selling merchandise and ticket holders excitedly covering their painstakingly planned outfits with t-shirts Harry—aided by his perfectionism, you were sure— probably spent months deciding on.

The barcode won't scan though. And the usher at the door doesn't appreciate you pulling your phone back and trying to adjust the backlight, as though that will help the loud, angry sound his scanner is making each time he aims it at the email on your screen. He eventually reads part of your email and then tells you that you need to stand off to the side, barks something gruffly into his walkie talkie and dismisses you in favour of getting through the backlog of people behind you. You're filled with a white-hot embarrassment as you shuffle over and stand under a neon EXIT sign. A moment later you step forward and ask him to try again, but that doesn't get you anywhere different, and you think you're going to get in some kind of trouble when he insists Just stand back over there for a moment.

Your feet have already started hurting in your too-tight boots when finally the wall behind you opens up, and you very quickly come face to face with Harry's assistant.

"Y/N," she smiles, "I thought I said in the email to call me when you got here?"

You're dumbstruck, you didn't read the email, not properly. "I … I …"

"It's good to see you again," her smile hasn't moved, and it's genuine. She reaches one hand out towards you and deposits a VIP lanyard around your neck, "Follow me."

You get halfway down the emergency exit, and she sidesteps a security guard through a doorway, leading you into the veins of the backstage area where there's a familiar buzz of busy people you'd not realised you missed being around until now. Your heart is racing because you weren't prepared for this. You'd been deliberately dragging your feet getting here, and you've arrived barely fifteen minutes before Harry's due to go on stage. She's walked you right to the side of the stage where there's a curtain just to your left and scaffolding all around. You can hear the audience, and you know that one step through that curtain will take you to the pit side of the stage, where you'd seen Harry's family stand during shows before.

"He wanted to say hi beforehand but," his assistant looks at her watch, "But it's a touch too close now so are you okay if I leave you here for just a second? I'll be back in …" her eyes go back to her wrist, "Probably about twenty-five?"

"That's fine," you nod dumbly. "Are you sure this okay?"

You're looking around wondering if this is where Harry meant you to be. Really, you're sure this isn't where he intended you to watch his show at all. A few people are milling around but nobody you recognise, and you figure the majority of them are probably venue employees. Harry and his band would only walk through here at the very last second. He didn't like standing around beforehand with anyone who wouldn't be on stage with him. Harry got in his zone and needed to stay there.

When you look back at his assistant she's giving you a look you don't want to read too deeply, but it almost looks like pity, "Of course," she tells you, "I'll be back by the end of the first song."

"I might go stand through here now," you point to the curtain, preferring the thought of standing in the dark by yourself than waiting for Harry to walk straight past you during his thirty-second countdown. "Is that okay?"

You get a nod, and she tells you to grab a drink off the table behind you. Leaving you with your heart rattling and the heaviest lanyard you've ever worn burning through your shirt to your chest.

Finding a spot to watch the show was easy. You picked the furthest side of the pit, under the concrete overhand of the seats above, and stand in the shadows, only half the stage in your line of sight. It felt like a little cave almost, and you lean your back against the cold concrete and tap your boots together on the ground below you.

The area starts filling around you as members of Harry's team finish their part in preparing him for the show. There are a few women wearing belts with makeup brushes and combs peaking out of them, and two familiar faces from Harry's executive team. They don't see you, though, and you're glad. You watch the roadies' torches flash on the dark stage as they neaten up leads and manoeuvre over amp boxes double-checking the guitars are in the right order for the sets.

There's a movement in your periphery that draws your attention back, the group of people who joined you in the pit all gravitating towards something back at the curtain. And it's not until one of them steps to the side that you see the floating head that's poking through the dark material.

Harry.

He's staring right at you: no expression on his face, just his searching, green eyes that stop when they see you standing in the dark as far from him as you can possibly be. He takes half a step forward, and the shoulder of an expensive suit peeks out. You hear in your head echos of a moment in Harry's living room unpacking a delivery from Gucci, the way you nearly choked on your tea at the cost of a tailored trouser and his half frustrated dismissal, 'It's nothing, that's standard for me.' You felt small at that moment, thinking about how one of Harry's suits could pay for your education for a year, and that would be nothing for him.

You feel small now too. This isn't the space you're supposed to occupy.

The shadow of a frown barely cross his features, but then Harry tries to pull his dimples up to give you a small smile. But it's testing, it's not a confident smile or one he looks sure he's giving. Like he's smiling at someone he's not sure will smile back.

There's no way I'll ever do anything else with the band, he'd said.

But that wasn't the biggest lie he'd told, just the most public, the widest.

His deepest, biggest lie was you.

The fourth lie was that he loved you.

Harry was the one to say it first.

It came out like a compliment. A response to a fact of yours he'd particularly liked. A sort of well done, that was a good one.

It was nearly two months since you'd met, and what started as three or four dates a week morphed into you staying at Harry's house most nights. You spending your weekends off work trailing around after him on his errands or to work things, or hanging out alone at his place until he returned from them. A couple of times, you went to the same exercise class, which involved the two of you going separately and not interacting at all. Still, you'd peek at him from across the room and have to hold your giggles for later when Harry spent the hour concentrating beyond anything you'd ever seen just to stay in the seat of the spin bike.

Saturdays and Sundays he started taking off too though, around a month into dating you. No more 6am weekend PT sessions or midday conference calls with creative teams. The only work Harry allowed himself to do on weekends was housework. Laundry. Food prep. Touching base with his mum.

"Did you know blueberries are actually false berries?"

"No, I did not know blueberries are actually false berries," Harry parroted back to you. You catch the half rolling of his eyes at you where you're sitting up in your favourite spot on the bench next to the hob, peering at him keeping careful watch over breakfast: blueberry pancakes. He was wearing just his pants, chest bare and cool in the autumn morning air. You were rugged up in leggings and a sweater, unsure how he could stand being in such a state of undress.

"It's true," you reaffirmed your tidbit, popping a false berry into your mouth while Harry—with far too much concentration for the job at hand—dropped the small round berries on top of the batter sizzling in the pan. "Berries by definition are fleshy, pulpy ovary fruits that have their seeds embedded on the outside. Blueberry seeds are on the inside. So they aren't really berries."

"Ovary fruits?" He questioned, with a look of mild distaste.

Your shoulders dropped as you realised Harry knew less than you thought he did, "All fruit are ovaries, Harry. Think about it."

He does for a moment, and you can practically see the cogs turning. Harry thinking about how fruit grows on their plants and bushes and shrubs. The fact of what an ovary is when it comes to basic anatomy. And when he comes to the full circle of it, he groans, "That is so weird."

"I think it's cool," you grinned. "Like a little bit cannibalistic in a way."

He barked out a laugh at that, "I don't think that's what it is."

"Well, maybe not technically," you conceded, "But it's something … Really makes you rethink eating eggs."

"Oh my god," Harry was truly laughing then, "Stop, please."

"Sorry," you peeped with a cringed look, tossing back half a handful of the small, round fruit in front of you.

He was shaking his head at you, laughter bubbling out between his perfectly straight teeth, and then it just slipped out, "Fuck, I love you."

The words didn't bump over any hesitation. I love you, Harry said.

Your stomach dropped instantly, but the fond happiness dancing across Harry's face didn't go anywhere. He didn't look back at the pancakes or to where your hands were wringing together on your lap. Harry held your gaze and didn't dodge away from what he said at all. Like he knew you'd need a moment with it, that you weren't expecting him to just come out with that.

"I love you," he repeated after a moment, smiling when he saw your lips start to turn up, "I mean it."

Hearing him yell the same words through the microphone from stage sizzles your heart a little, like the pancakes that day crackled in the pan as Harry pushed himself into you on the kitchen floor. You remember the feeling of his hands under your clothes, your leggings barely halfway down your thighs before he was claiming you in a wave of lust, pushed by the new, invisible force in your relationship—love.

The floor under you now vibrates as everyone gets to their feet to join Harry dancing through his first song. You stare at him, daring him to look over at you but knowing he won't. The longer you stand there, the more you thaw out to it, the more you find yourself with a smile on your face and a slight sway to your hips. His music is fun and familiar and feels like clicking into place.

It's mesmerising. He's mesmerising.

You don't like admitting you'd forgotten how good at this he was. He has the whole crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. Even his crew around you are grinning ear to ear and singing along. Sharing private jokes between them and cutting dance moves in small groups as they watch the show. It's fun. And it reminds you that so much of your relationship with Harry was like that. That there were countless nights spent dancing in the living room or screaming at laptop screens doing board game nights with his family.

You'd forgotten that you could laugh so hard your belly hurt and that Harry was one of the few people who'd ever been able to get you to that point of joy. Watching him throw joy off the stage now at thousands of people was reminding you how very good Harry was—used to be—at making you feel like the only person in the world to him.

"Babe," his giggles filtered down the hallway and into the bathroom where you were plucking your eyebrows, "Babe! Come … Come see this."

You rolled your eyes as you put the tweezers down and padded into his living room, not at all surprised to see Harry pretzeled on his yoga mat in a fit of laughter. He did this a lot, called you away from a task or from work for something hilarious that ninety-nine per cent of the time wasn't hilarious at all. You'd end up snorting out laughter of your own though, at him.

Now, Harry had one of his feet hooked behind his neck while the other was prostrate on the floor behind him.

"You're doing great, baby," you condescended lightly, tilting your head to the side and frowning at his position. It looked awful and not at all calming, let alone comfortable. He wasn't a very good advertisement for yoga at all.

"They say this one's great for—great for," he giggled too much to get the words out, his arms holding his torso back so his legs would do what he wanted them to, he took a deep breath, "It's meant to be the yoga colonic."

Harry was heaving with laughter as he finally got it out, his position faltered, and you watched as his limbs all fell back to the mat as he leant forward cackling. You were grinning too, amused by how amused he was.

"Been feeling backed up, have you?" You asked him, crossing your arms as you hitch one hip out.

He rolled over on his back and wheezed out the final string of laughter, one hand holding his lower tummy as if it ached from the whole spectacle, as his other hand reached out for your ankle, "Come down here with me."

"Hmm," you hummed, pretending to be unhappy to be dragged down on top of him, your hips resting on his thighs as your chin propped up on your hands at his chest, "It's very entertaining how entertaining you find yourself," you mused.

Harry rubbed the tears from his eyes and then settled his hands on your back, breathing in the pleasant weight of you there, "I just—I was thinking about what they think the yoga colonic is going to do." His giggles started again, "Imagine being in a class and it literally working? Everyone just—everyone just shits themselves!"

You can feel his laugher, his bones pushing yours up as his whole body fills with his happiness. The stream of tears coming from the corners of his eyes start again as he squeezed his eyes shut while the sound of Harry's deep, uninhibited laughter filled the whole house again.

The memory brings back a smile, like so many with Harry do.

But there's still the Too Fresh Sting of your final moments with him, your last moments with him. You've not seen him since that evening months ago where you both yapped at each other things that couldn't be unsaid, unhappinesses that couldn't be reverted or unadmitted. It wasn't like the fights you had about Harry's casualised view of money and how he'd drop thousands of pounds on seemingly nothing without thinking how small it could make you feel. Or the times you'd snap in frustration when Harry tuned out of you complaining about an issue with your friends he deemed as superfluous or rooted in something silly or not as essential as the Important Thing He Was Planning. He could be so dismissive when he didn't think something mattered highly enough on his scale of measuring things.

The Harry dancing around on stage in front of you wasn't the man who said you were independent like it was a dirty word. Yelled across the kitchen that it was too easy for the two of you to be apart, you didn't miss him enough. The man who told you he didn't feel like you needed him, thought you were always standing with one foot out the door the whole time you were together. And you can remember being flabbergasted (still are, really) by what he was saying because it just wasn't true at all. You? Too independent? You spent every night at his house, and were at Harry's beck and call the whole relationship. And you can hear all the times you said 'what would I do without you?' when he talked you off a ledge or had answers to questions you believed to be unanswerable.

You can see how it was another classic example of Harry telling a non-truth to cover up what was really there. To distract from his own shortcomings. He accused you of what he was feeling, of his flaws. Making them your problem meant he didn't have to be vulnerable. Didn't have to take a risk his business manager hadn't guaranteed. Didn't have to gamble on your future together.

In the relationship, he always had the upper hand. And maybe you did have one foot out the door emotionally, but that was only because you had to. Harry never invited you in with him completely. You were always on the outer. After nearly a year of dating you were still The Girlfriend He Didn't Have.

But I fucking love you, he'd said when he sensed where that night was going. Like Harry had a list of grievances, and it wasn't until he got to the end of reading them out to you that he realised where it landed him. He told you he loved you as though it would erase all the things about you he seemed to dislike so much. Things about yourself you apparently couldn't see.

Hindsight has taught you that if anyone was too independent, or hesitant to commit fully in that relationship, it was Harry.

Halfway through his set, Harry's assistant comes over to check on you, and you end up chatting for a few minutes about how you've been. She speaks to you like there was some club you were a member of and she missed your meetings. Although neither of you references the breakup, or acknowledge in another life you had a lot more to do with each other, the unspoken things weigh on your chest. You find yourself wiping away a quiet tear when she walks back over to the main group watching Harry.

Of course, that's when he teeters over to your side of the stage and looks straight at you. His expression falls instantly, and you're sure that he only meant to glance at you in passing, but what he sees has him doing a double-take and fixing his gaze on you for two lines of the song he's midway through. He tugs on the collar of his shirt and Harry's eyes are desperately trying to read what you're thinking, just like that day he told you he loved you at the end of the breakup, as though you'd forget everything that came before it.

You stick your thumb out to him and give him your best fake smile. Like he might be led to believe you were crying about something else. As if you hadn't just pulled his attention from a room full of people who'd paid for his attention tonight. At that moment you think the fact there's a secret love and life between you must be too obvious to everyone else. There's a connection, something whirls around the room between you and it feels threatening and perilous to how you've been trained to think things have to be.

You wait until Harry turns and goes the other way across the stage before you push off from the wall and walk out.

At first, love was an encouragement between you. It was approval, a showing of appreciation. Love was a promise that was just for the two of you. A declaration that validated everything you were doing together. Love was a feeling that proved what every action meant.

Then, love was a bandaid, was a line used in desperation to fix something unfixable, and you walk the world with skun knees now because of it. Love was never just love. It was used to fix the wrong things.

And in the end, nothing healed at all.

The fifth lie was that he'd always fight for you.

Harry promised you that the two of you would make it work.

You'd make up after every argument, big or small. The little ones that were those tiny bickerings in the car which somehow roared into yelling matches. Or when one person's grumpiness from the day leaked into your evening together. You always expected his call or the long sigh that would precede his apology. You never got halfway home to your house if you left his after a row. He'd call and beg for you to come back, that nothing was worth you physically leaving being near him. You left knowing before the night was done the two of you would reconcile.

Until it was That Fight you were leaving after. The one that began The End.

It started because Harry was overseas for a few weeks. While he was away, you suggested the two of you going on a holiday together during the summer. An anniversary trip. From the other side of the world, it was easy enough for Harry to worm his way of out of it. He went off on a tangent about there being no holidays (rest) for the wicked and then got you talking about something else until you forgot how you'd been sold on the idea of lying on a beach with him for a week.

When Harry got home, you had it stored in an unhappy little pocket in your mind. Top of the agenda for when he returned.

"Can we talk about the holiday thing again?" You asked his first night home.

He sighed against you, his body gearing up for a reunion that didn't involve speaking, lips attached to your neck while his hands danced around the band of your bra, "Do we have to right now?"

"Well," your instinct was to back away from the tension rising between you, "I'd like to."

Harry pushed his hair up off his face and briefly looked at the ceiling, "I don't see how we can, babe. It's too hard, logistically. Just take a week off work and stay with me here."

"I already stay here," you counter, "I'm talking about a holiday somewhere. A beach. Or a ski resort. Something fun and different."

"Those places are all busy," Harry complained, his hands off you. He started to pack the dishwasher from dinner.

"I just want to go away with you, do something normal, you know?"

He clipped the side of the sink with a dinner plate and swore angrily under his breath, "Fuck."

"Don't get angry."

"I'm not fucking angry," he growled, tossing your forks into the plastic crate, "I just fucking got home, and you're straight into this. No 'I missed you so much' or 'It's so great to see you'… Just straight into going on a holiday as if I have endless time to mess about."

"What do you mean? We've just eaten dinner together, you told me all about your trip. I said I was happy to have you home!"

"Yeah, well, feels like you just don't give a fuck that I'm back."

You frowned at him starting to get annoyed yourself, "I cried on our FaceTime call on the weekend because I missed you! You have a lobotomy since then?"

"Don't yell," Harry instructed quietly like he was chastising a child for not controlling themselves.

"What's this about, Harry?" You asked. "Why is it such a crime for me to want to go away with my boyfriend?"

He sighed again, "It's not."

"Right," you crossed your arms over your chest and wondered how many times he could wipe down the chopping board.

Probably one more time.

"So …"

"So what?" Harry repeated, "What do you want from me?"

His words and their harshness shocked you, and that was the exact moment you started worrying this was going to turn into Something Else. Not just a Normal Fight.

"I want you to tell me why you're so annoyed by this?"

It would have been so easy for you to break down and scream about how insane it was that you were talking about celebrating your first anniversary with him and the relationship was still a secret. How badly you wanted to throw that out there, but there was a wise fear in you which said that would be a death wish. (That fact haunts you today, how you knew he'd never step out with you. There wasn't any hope in you or promise from him it wouldn't always be that way. You knew your place and where the boundary line was, don't push past this point. And you always behaved. Never peeped out of your box.)

"It's like you don't even need me," Harry said bitterly, "You're so fucking independent. What's the point?"

"What are you talking about?" You gushed, nearly swallowing your tongue when he turned back to look at you for the first time.

"You don't need me," he accused, "You've always got one foot out the door."

"I don't," came your defence, but you both knew it was the truth. You were halfway out the door because you hadn't been invited all the way in yet.

"You don't want this life with me," Harry shook his head, "You've never been happy where we are. Relationships don't work that way, you can't just keep demanding the same thing hoping you'll wear me down. That's not fair."

Tears shake out of your eyes slowly as your body catches up with what he's saying, "Harry."

"It's not fair!" He repeated loudly. "You can't keep on about it."

About what? You want to ask him because you hadn't mentioned a holiday until the week before. That's not what he was really angry about. He was talking about The Secret. And his guilt was showing. His anger was misdirected, aimed at the wrong thing. He muttered something to himself you didn't hear.

"I didn't hear that."

"I said," Harry looked up at you, and when your eyes clicked together you saw surprise rise and then quickly disappear as if he hadn't expected to see you there. "I said, I don't think we can keep doing this."

"You don't think we can keep doing this?" You repeated it because the words hardly sounded like English the first time you heard them.

I don't think we can keep doing this.

Harry stood across from you with no expression on his face. And it took a few moments for him to own up to what he said, but he does. He nods his head once, awkwardly, and then nods again.

"We can't keep doing this," he tells you, sounding defeated, and then his voice rises again—in pitch, not in volume—"But I fucking love you!"

But I fucking love you.

As if that was enough.

It was days of you expecting a call, and a make up that never came. Expecting the fight for your relationship Harry promised you he'd always put up. You wanted him to prove that you were someone he couldn't do without. You hated the thought of him walking around his house and not feeling the absence of you as some impossible weight he couldn't bear.

"Y/N!" Your name sounds out behind you, but you keep walking, an instantaneous decision that pretending not to hear her might work.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't.

Harry's assistant keeps chasing you down the hall she initially led you through, calling your name and eventually getting you to stop and turn around because, well, you can't keep pretending she's not there forever.

"I'm just finding a loo," you lie.

"There's one this way," she points over her shoulder, in the direction you both came from, "Harry said if you tried to leave I had to go with you, which, for my own dignity I'd really prefer not to have to do."

You find yourself scoffing, "Who said he's in charge of how long I stay?"

Her expression softens somewhat, "He just wants to see you after."

How dare he think he can control this still, you think.

You know she's not the person to be frustrated with. You should be frustrated with yourself first, for coming, and then with Harry for deciding he could orchestrate this … This whatever it was. Still, you find yourself biting out your reply, "He saw me from stage," you tell her bitterly.

"And he'll have seen that you're not there anymore," she replies patiently,, "It'll throw off his focus if he's worried you've gone home halfway through."

You fall into step beside her but can't give him the win, "Quite frankly, it's not my concern or responsibility anymore if his focus is thrown or not."

She wordlessly points out where the bathrooms are just in front of you. You're trying not to make eye contact with anyone who's in these backstage hallways. They feel like ghosts from a life that's not yours anymore.

The first time you met any of Harry's People you'd felt absolutely mortified. The whole thing felt awkward to you, meeting assistants and managers and creative directors. Putting faces and humans to jobs done for Harry. He was a lot of people's boss, and it made you uncomfortable because you'd not seen that side to him before. You knew things like how hot he liked his showers and what yogurt he liked on his muesli in the morning.

That first—and only—step into his professional world, was in a venue just like this one where Harry was filming a music video for a few days. The stage was set up like it was for live a show, and you overheard someone saying setting up for a shoot was more involved than for an actual performance. Harry wanted you to see what this part of his world looked like and despite them not fitting in either of the Friends or Family categories you'd laid out for People Allowed To Know About You, his "Team" were people Harry felt safe introducing to you. (NDAs were a powerful thing) He led you through the hallways by the hand and stuck his head into every room with a cheery, 'Hullo, just bringing Y/N around to meet everyone.'

You remember one person declaring they were happy to be meeting you. Harry was too young to be married to his job, they said with a relieved tone, That it was good he'd found his Someone. Harry beamed at that, looking down at you as if thinking, Yeah, I have found my Someone.

Now you stand back in the pit side of stage, and Harry looks down at you with a hesitation that makes you more uncomfortable than when you were watching him film that music video. His assistant has brought you back to where his team are standing, and you feel more than one set of eyes take stock of you returning, a shared glance between a manager and the girl shadowing you. A wide-eyed exchange that says, That was the last thing we needed. When Harry comes to the side of stage between songs, he's hunting for a bottle of water, but you can see he's come to that side because his eyes are focused on hunting for you.

When he sees you've returned, he slowly takes a sip of water, eyes not leaving yours. You feel like he's admonishing you in his head, seeing how weak you were, that you ran away after a little eye contact. There's a distaste there, you think, and as he's putting the cap back on the bottle, Harry opens his mouth like he's going to try to say something to you, but he stops. He frowns at his hands as he puts the bottle down and then turns away, bringing the microphone back up to his lips and slipping back into entertainer mode.

"In a lot of ways, I hate this next song," he starts slowly, speaking over the band as they begin to slow down the tempo of the night. A smoke machine whirls to life and pumps out a few big clouds, shrouding the stage behind Harry. "I really hate it."

He pauses. And your insides freeze in your chest. You're hanging off his every word, just like every other body in the room. Harry stands right on the front of the stage, toes almost touching the drop off. He's looking out at the audience and lets the microphone hang at his side. Makes no move to keep talking. Was he looking for someone out there, or was he running over what he was about to say in his head? Rehearsing it, making sure it was exactly what needed to be said.

Where you used to see thoughtfulness you now see calculation.

Give nothing away. Sell only the product. Push the song. Let people come to their own conclusions.

"This is a song about," he says carefully, a crack to his voice that sends adrenaline shooting straight down your legs, "About regretting that you've hurt someone. And about the helplessness of wishing you could make them forget what you said, but … Knowing you can't take it back."

You watched Harry trail around to the upright piano on stage and sit himself down on the stool. He stares at his hands hovering over the keys for a moment too long, but you're sure Harry's audience would let him take a hundred more. You see what perhaps they don't—the hesitation. You'd witnessed it enough to spot it, even across the stage in the dark from thirty feet away.

He's not sure about playing the song.

You think about contacting him by telepathy. Saying, I'll leave so you can go back to your show. You don't have to pretend I'm not here, I'll just go. Like I wanted to. Like I tried to.

But he plays it.

You've not heard it before, but the rest of the room has, and they sing along with him. You hear a couple of thousand people sing with your ex-boyfriend about him regretting the way he treated you. And you're almost able to talk yourself out of believing it's about you, you can nearly reason with yourself that it's kind of vague. Other than naming the cafe he'd sat in the car park of a hundred times waiting for you to return with a takeaway, it could be about anyone, really.

But he sings out a line and looks straight at you, and his eyes say it's yours. The song. The apology that's not been said yet.

I get the feeling that you'll never need me again.

His voice cracks again as he sings it. And the hurt part of you says it's just a vocal technique Harry's trained to call on at any time. It doesn't speak to anything other than a creative choice on his part. But the vulnerability is hard to ignore, the low hanging, remorseful unease in the room. He fumbles a string of notes on the piano as he sings and you're hit by the overwhelming need to make him stop.

Witnessing whatever he's currently feeling with this song is more uncomfortable than you've ever been, and a switch in you to protect him flicks on. You look around at his assistant, his manager, trying to see if there's even a hint of anyone else feeling like this moment needs an intervention, needs to be stopped.

The song ends. And you're glad.

Harry takes a few moments on stage to get ready with a guitar for the next song. He doesn't come over to your side of the stage for a drink, or to ask the roadies for anything. Instead, he flies straight into the next section of the set. Seemingly recovered from the heavy moment you felt as though you nearly drowned in. He'd never sung about you before.

Nothing remotely personal about your relationship ever left Harry's house.

And you find yourself wishing it would all just go back there.

The sixth lie was that he wouldn't break your heart.

Harry did though.

He broke your whole life.

So when he comes off stage at the end of his gig, there's little in you that wants to hang around. As soon as the lights go down and you see Harry's silhouette cross the back of the stage and hop down the stairs to the floor, your gut churns, and you wish you were one of the people in the rest of the venue. The ones now turning and slowly filing out of the building. Going back to their lives peacefully.

Instead, you're ushered behind the curtain again, into the small area that's immediately buzzing with life. You watch Harry as if he's moving in slow motion though. As soon as his boots hit the concrete floor somebody is tugging the suit jacket from his shoulders and swapping it for a grey hand towel that he uses to wipe down his face. His hand pushes his hair up over his head as he smiles at a handful of people, and then his eyes find yours. The smile drops, and he takes a steadying breath in.

"Y/N," he says loudly. Straight. Without expression. It's a statement, but also you sense a question there too. As if you might not turn out to be the person who was standing there. He holds your gaze over and through the people walking around and in front of him. He's handed a bottle of water and offered a second one which he takes, "Y/N," he says again, pulling his head back to beckon you over.

You roll your lips together when you've made it to the vacant space in front of him. Harry passes you the extra water bottle and cracks the lid off the one he keeps for himself. You grip yours with both hands but don't make any move to open it. Standing in front of him didn’t feel like you thought it would. It’s less of a kick I in the gut, and more a reinforcing of things that you’d figured out since being without him.

"Hi," he says hesitantly, briefly looking at someone behind your left shoulder. Then, you feel his eyes back on your face.

You speak to his forehead, not ready to have things inside you unlocked by eye contact, "Hello."

"This way," Harry says after a moment, running the towel down his sweaty face again.

He leads you down a hallway, wiping his face on the towel two more times as he walks. Harry continuously looks over his shoulder at you to make sure you're still following him, as if there was somewhere for you to hide in the concrete hallway. When he gets to his dressing room door, he kicks it open and holds his arm out to let you in first. The room smells like his cologne, a whiff of his final moments before going out on stage and a time portal back to mornings you'd spritz it on yourself before leaving the house, it was your scent then too. There was a small sofa and table, a long mirrored table with his laptop open next to a stack of papers, his screen saver bouncing back and white photos across the locked screen. His overnight bag and its contents were sprawled out over the floor in the corner next to where you can see his phone charging.

"You look good," is the first thing he says to you. Trying to pull your attention probably. Maybe hoping to get on the front foot charming you. You could tell him he looked good as well, particularly in the cream suit they had him in tonight, but you were sure there were no shortage of people who already had.

"Your show was good," you deflect away from the personal, eyes tracing the bottles in the corner of the table, "Great setlist."

"Needs a shakeup, if we're honest. Getting stale," Harry shrugs, and you see it in the mirrored wall. He's still standing by the closed door, watching you walk into the centre of the room and take stock of what's around you. "How have you been?"

"Fine."

Harry coughs uncomfortably, "Thanks for coming, wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

You sense Harry realising this conversation was going to be exactly as difficult as feared it might be, he nods his head and moves over to the sofa but doesn't sit down, "Did you want a seat?"

"I'll sit here," you perch yourself on the chair in front of his laptop, crossing one leg over the other and hitching your elbow at the back so you're facing Harry. Keeping the room between you.

Harry sits on the arm of the small, burgundy sofa, and tosses the towel onto the seat next to him, "Looked like you were a little upset there for a moment."

"My boots are new," you quip, kicking your top foot out towards him, "Blisters."

He sighs again, and you start to feel chastised, but there's a more substantial part of you that stubbornly bunkers on down to playing this role, taking power when you'd never had it with Harry before. He knew it wasn’t blisters that had emotion welling up in you during his set. But just the same it wasn’t his place anymore to be privy to your feelings. And you weren’t going to let him gallantly try to take it. You weren’t old friends who could pick up where you left off. You were broken lovers.

"I just thought we could do with talking," Harry says finally.

"You could have uninvited me, you know, I assumed—Well, it's not like I've been expecting to still attend any of your shows the last six months. This one didn't have to be different."

He almost looks hurt, "You live here."

"How was Italy, Harry?” you turn the conversation around abruptly because you didn't like where it was going, and he was starting to frustrate you. You didn’t need him pointing out you lived in this city alone now since he left. As if you didn’t know.

Where watching him on stage hit you with longing and heartbreak, memories you found yourself irrevocably attached to, being in the same room as him now is only making you see the real Harry. The one who's so good at rearranging the energy in the room to make you feel you need to give more of yourself. The one who's an expert at asking a leading question and relying on the other person to be vulnerable first, lead the charge out the gates.

The man who lied to hide you every day for nearly a year, even when it was hurting you more than protecting you. The hurt from him was worse than the invasion of your privacy would have be. The distrust you felt didn't counteract the security you were still afforded by anonymity. The way you felt you still had something to prove—something to earn from him—and that you just needed to earn the right to your place in Harry's life.

"I've missed you," he said finally, "Just …"

"You've been lonely?" You raise your eyebrows at him.

"What?" Harry's defences click into place, "No, it's not that—obviously yes, I've been lonely—but also I just—I miss you."

You start nodding, and your gaze drifts around the room, "Yeah, I … What exactly do you miss, Harry? Because—I mean, it was kind of shit, don't you think?"

"Shit?" he looks horrified, "What was shit?"

"Harry," you say simply, telling him to cut the bullshit with your expression. "Come on."

"I loved you," he declares loudly, proudly, “We had a great time together. I don't think it was kind of shit at all."

That's when you feel tears come to your eyes. Of course he didn't think it was shit. He still didn't see where the problem was. Couldn't see it. He would go right back to That Fight and keep going the way you had been if he could. Harry would keep living that life with you, he would have kept on going the same way. You'd still be the secret. A fight about a holiday would have resolved itself with compromise and make-up sex, and you would have gone right back to sneaking out of venues and pretending not to know him in crowded rooms.

Your lips turn up in a smile of sorts as your tears beg to fall but don't, "You haven't changed," you state with a small, incredulous laugh, "You've not figured it out. Nothing's changed," you repeat, shaking your head.

Harry's confusion is plain, and if he thought your tears were because you miss him there's something like a flicker of doubt, as if he's reading what's in front of him again and maybe getting a different story.

"You can't have a life with someone who doesn't want anyone to know you're in their life," you state simply.

And that was it, really. That was the nuts and bolts of it.

The secrecy eroded any meaning your relationship with Harry had. The doubt that cast. The burden on you to continually prove yourself, to audition for the role every day only to never graduate from understudy.

You watch Harry's throat constrict tightly as he thinks about the words that come from his mouth, "I loved you," he repeats, "I didn't want anything outside of us to fuck us up."

"You can't control the world that way, Harry," you're observing him carefully, "You definitely can't control people that way. I get why we started that way, but a year in, Harry? A year."

He looks at his feet, and it's the first bit of remorse you've ever seen him show over it.

"I know you loved me," you keep going, "But you can't use that as some bandaid for the lying, for the hurt that was. You can't erase the consequences because you thought you were protecting me or us or yourself. The truth doesn't cancel out the hurt of the lie."

Harry's still starring at his boots, "You could have said something."

You blink once.

"Fuck you," bursts out before you can stop it, and Harry's eyes snap up to yours, you laugh at his nerve and rise to your feet, "Fuck you, Harry. I couldn't have. I felt like I had to earn it. Like maybe I was one gold star away from getting there. And then when I did push it, you ended it."

"That's not—

"—It is," you insist, shaking your head at him, "You put all your insecurities and shortcomings on me and then had the nerve to tell me you loved me as if I was the defective cog in the wheel. As if you saying you loved me put all the onus on me spoiling it."

"I'm a private person—

You put your hand up to silence him, turning on your heel to face Harry as your pacing halts, "Stop. I don't … I don't care," you breathe out simply, "I really don't. Our relationship wasn't The One. It's one we'll both learn from for the ones that are coming. I hope you learn from it," you add quietly, "Because I have."

"Y/N," Harry says your name like it's an idea he's unsure of.

"That song wasn't about me, was it?" You ask because on stage he said it was about regretting hurting someone and there's been no hint of a 'sorry' from Harry since.

His brow creased, "It is. I am. I wanted you to hear me play it tonight. It's for you."

You smile, the idea that you've grown beyond this situation blooming inside you, "You've not said it."

"What?"

"You haven't said you're sorry," your head shakes again, a fresh wave of your new perfume—the one that's just yours—filling your nose, "You've said you missed me. And that I look good, but you've not said you're sorry. You can put an apology into the song on stage, but you can't admit you were wrong to the person you wrote the song about."

His shoulders sink, just the slightest amount, and you know that you've seen enough. You've said enough. He's not going to have an epiphany on this, not in this conversation with you. You've gone as far as you can with this. As far as you're willing to.

"I'm going to go," you take a step forward, "Thanks for the song, your voice sounded really nice on it."

And you walk passed him with just a final wave and the slightest touch to his shoulder. He doesn't move from his seated position, but his neck cranes and he watches you leave. Eyes hunting your back for answers, like the manuscript for what just happened might show up there. But it doesn't, and you slip out the door, the clip from your shoes fading from his hearing quicker than he wanted it to.

Your insides are shaking by the time you make it out onto the street. No part of you wants to turn back and look up at his name in lights again. You're done with seeing the best of everything in him. Harry's one of the shitty boyfriends you'll tell someone about one day in the future, and they'll call him a dickhead with anger dripping from their tongue, promising to never treat you the same way.

And they won't.

You'll both have bumped and bruised your way into each other's lives, and there'll be a satisfying click with them there wasn't with anyone else. You'll have journeyed through all the maybes and not-quites, and you'll land in that forever place with the person who wears the badge of Yours with a fervour nobody before them has.

And Harry … You'll go and be Nothing to Him.

My inbox is here

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ifuckinglovestvincent · 4 years ago

Text

St Vincent: “Pour a Drink, Smoke a Joint... That’s the Vibe”

Ding dong! Daddy's Home

By Johnny Davis

19/03/2021

Annie Clark, known professionally as St Vincent, picked up a guitar aged 12 after being inspired by Jimi Hendrix. During her teens she worked as a roadie and later tour manager for her aunt and uncle, the jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Originally from Oklahoma, she moved to Dallas, Texas when she was seven and later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for three years, before dropping out.

Clark worked as a touring musician with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, before releasing Marry Me, her first album as St Vincent, in 2007. By her fifth album, 2017’s Masseduction, she had become one of the most celebrated artists in music, the first solo female artist to win a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album in 20 years.

She became unlikely Daily Mail-fodder around the same time, thanks to an 18-month relationship with Cara Delevingne, and later Kristen Stewart. Her ever-changing music, dressing up-box image and head-spinning well of ideas have seen her compared to David Bowie, Kate Bush and Prince. To complete the notion of her being the "artist's artist", in 2012 she collaborated with David Byrne on the album Love This Giant.

Indeed, she is surely one of few performers today who could stand in for Kurt Cobain with what’s-left-of-Nirvana, performing “Lithium” at their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, as well as cover “Controversy” at a Prince tribute concert in 2020, with such guitar-playing fireworks its author would surely have approved.

Following the glam-influenced pop of Masseduction, St Vincent has performed another stylistic handbrake turn. Complete with a new image – part-Warhol Superstar, part-Cassavetes heroine – she has mined the textures of the music she loved most as a kid: the virtuoso rock of Steely Dan, the clipped funk of Stevie Wonder and blue-eyed soul of mid-Seventies' David Bowie, on her upcoming album, Daddy’s Home.

The title refers to Clark's own father, locked up in Texas for 12 years in 2010, for money laundering in a stock manipulation scheme, one in which he and his co-conspirators cheated 17,000 investors out of £35m. It is also, in typical Clark style, a bit of saucy slang.

Back on the promotional trail, Clark Zoomed in from Los Angeles one morning recently – fully caffeinated and raring to go. “My vices?” she pondered. “Too much coffee, man…”

What question are you already bored of being asked?

There’s not one that’s popping out. There’s no question where I’m like “Oh God, if I ever hear that again, I’ll jump off a building.” I’m chill.

I mention it because prior to releasing your last record you put out a pre-recorded “press conference”, seemingly to pre-empt every inane question the media would throw at you.

It’s so funny. It didn’t really occur like that. Originally that was supposed to be a legit green screen conference. Like, “I’ll just answer these questions ‘cos when they need to have me on ‘The Morning Show’ in Belarus they can have this and put their own graphics behind it”. But then when my friend Carrie Brownstein [collaborator and Sleater-Kinney vocalist-guitarist] and I started writing it and it became very snarky. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that “Oh, that might be off-putting or intimidating to journalists” I just thought "This is silly”. So anyway… I understand.

We're curious about your dad and the American legal system.

I have had a lot of questions about that. For some reason it didn’t occur to me how much I would be answering questions about… my hilarious father!

How do you view his time in prison?

Just that life is long and people are complicated. And that, luckily, there’s a chance for redemption or reconciliation, even after a really crazy traumatic time. And also anybody that has any experience with the American justice system will know this... nobody comes out unscathed.

You recently presented an online MasterClass: "St. Vincent Teaches Creativity & Songwriting". One of the takeaways: “All you need are ears and ideas, and you can make anything happen”. Who’s had the best ideas in music?

Well, you’ve got to give credit to people who were genuinely creating a new style – like if you think of Charlie Parker, arguably he created a new style. This hard bop that was just absolutely impossible to play. It was, like, “Check me out – try to copy me!” So, that’s interesting. I think Brian Eno, for sure, has some great ideas about music – and obviously has made some of the best music. Joni Mitchell – completely singular. I mean: think about that. There are some people who are actually inimitable – like, you couldn’t possibly even try to imitate them.

It’s a brave soul who covers a Joni Mitchell song. Although, apologies if you actually have.

No, I have not. And there’s a reason why not. Come on – Bowie. Bowie never repeated himself. David Byrne also didn’t repeat himself. He took all of his influences of classic songs and the disco that was happening at the time, and the potpourri of downtown New York music from the mid- to late Seventies… and synthesised it into this completely new, other thing. I mean, that’s impressive. Those are the ones we remember.

How hard is it not to repeat yourself?

It’s whether people have the Narcissus thing or not. Like, it’s always got to be a balance where you’re, like, “Well, I need to believe in myself to make something and be liberated. But I can’t look at that pond of my previous work and go ‘Oh you! You’re gorgeous!’” So I don’t go back and listen to things I’ve done. I finished Daddy’s Home in the fall and it was, like, “This is done” and it felt great. I loved the record and it was so fun to make. But what I did immediately afterwards was to write something completely different. But then I don’t know, ‘cos there are people who do the thing that they do just great. And you just want to hear more songs, in the style of the thing that they do great.

Right. No one wants an experimental Ramones album.

Exactly. Or, like, or a Tom Petty record. I don’t want a tone poem from Tom Petty! I want a perfectly constructed, perfectly written completely singalongable three-chord song.

The new album has a very “live” Seventies feel. I’d read that some of the tracks are first takes. Can that be right? It all sounds very complicated.

That’s not right. I should say [rock voice] "Yeah, that’s right, we just jammed…" But, you know, I’ll be honest. There are some vocal takes in there that are first takes. But it really is just the sound of people playing. We get good drum takes. And good bass takes. And I play a bunch of guitar and sitar-guitar. And it’s the sound of a moment in time, certainly. And way more about looseness and groove and feel and vibe than anything else [I’ve done before].

Amazing live albums, virtuoso playing, jamming – those were staples of Seventies music. Have we lost some of that?

I mean, I can wax poetic on that idea for a minute. In the Seventies you had this tremendous sophistication in popular music. Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan and funk and soul and jazz and rock…. and all of the things rolled into one. That was tremendously sophisticated. It just was. There was harmony, there were chord progressions.

What else from that decade appealed to you for Daddy’s Home?

It reminds me of where we are now, I think. So, 1971-1976 in downtown New York, you’ve got the Summer of Love thing and flower children and all the hippy stuff and it’s, like, “Oh yeah, that didn’t work out that well. We’re still in Vietnam. There’s a crazy economic crisis, all kinds of social unrest”. People stood in the proverbial burned-out building. And it reminds me a lot of where we are today, in terms of social unrest, economic uncertainty. A groundswell wanting change... but where that’s headed is yet to be seen. We haven’t fully figured that out. We’re all picking up pieces of the rubble and going “Okay, what do we do with this one? Where do we go with that one?” Being a student of history, that was one of the reasons why I was drawn to that period in history.

Also: that’s the music I’ve listened to more than anything in my entire life. I mean, I was probably the youngest Steely Dan fan. It didn’t make me that popular at sleepovers. People were, like, “I want to listen to C+C Music Factory” and I was, like, “Yeah, but have you heard this solo on [Steely Dan’s] ‘Kid Charlemagne’”? That music is so in me. It’s so in my ears and I feel like I never really went there [making music before]. And I didn’t want to be a tourist about it. It’s just that particular style had a whole lot to teach me. So I wanted to just dig in and find out. Just play with it.

Is there a style of music you don’t like?

That I don’t like?

You're a jazz fan...

I love jazz. Are you kidding me? I was that annoying 14-year-old who was, like, “Yeah, but have you listened to Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth?”

That does sound quite precocious for a 14-year-old.

It’s annoying. Just insufferable. [Thinking aloud] What music don’t I like….? Here’s what can happen. And I feel like it’s similar to when an actor has some lines in a script and they’re not very good – not very well-written – so they overcompensate by making it very dramatic and really overplaying it. I would say that is a style of music that I don’t really like. Where somebody has to really oversell it and it all feels… athletic. Instead of musical or touching.

Did you put your lockdown time to constructive use?

If you need any mediocre home renovations done, I’m your girl. It was fun. I did – let’s see now – plumbing, electrical, painting. Luckily there’s YouTube, so you can more or less figure it all out. I did a lot of that stuff and I have to say it was such a nice contrast to working on music all day. Because when you’re working on music you have to create the construct of everything. You’re, like, “I need to make this song. But what is this song?” Everything is this kind of elusive castle in the sky thing. But then, if you go and sand a deck, you’ve done something. It feels really good. And it’s not, like, “What is a deck? And who am I?” You’re just, like, “This is a task and I get to do it and I can see how the mechanism works I understand it it’s not esoteric – it’s simply mechanical". I can do something mechanical. I loved it.

Which bit of DIY are you most pleased with?

Painting the kitchen cabinets. That’s a real job. We’re talking sanding. We’re talking taking things off hinges. We’re talking multiple coats. The whole lacquer-y thing at the end. That. I’m, like, “That looks pretty pro”.

What colour did you go for?

Oh, you know, it’s just a sort of… teal. But classy teal.

Of course.

Yeah. The wallpapering wasn’t as successful. But, you know, that’s fine. So that was really fun. And then I also went down a history rabbit hole. I realised I had some gaps in my knowledge about the Russian Revolution and life under the Iron Curtain and the gulags and Stalin and Lenin. So, I went down that hole. And then I was like “Oh I forgot – I haven’t read any Dostoevsky”. So I have been working on his short stories – which are great. And then Solzhenitsyn I really liked – I mean liked is a strange word to use for The Gulag Archipelago. I read Cancer Ward… All of them. I recommend all of it. And then, before that, it was a big Stasi kick. I can’t remember the last time I had time to brush up on the Russian Revolution.

There’s a lyric on “The Laughing Man”, “If life’s a joke… then I’m dying laughing”. It’s also on your new merchandise. What do you think happens when we die?

Nothing.

This is it?

Yeah. I mean, I understand that it would be comforting to think otherwise. That there might be a special place. It would be nice! The thought’s never really been able to stick for me. I would say that we are made of carbon and then we get subsumed back into the Earth and then eventually we become life again – in the carbon part of our makeup.

Well, that sounds better than an endless void.

I don’t think it would be an endless void.

In what ways are you like your mum and dad?

Let’s see. Well, my mother is a precious angel who has unwavering optimism. She is incredibly intelligent and also very nonjudgmental and able and happy to explore all kinds of possibilities. Saying that, though… it’s sounding not like me at all. I’m like my father in that I think we have very similar tastes in books, films, music and a very similar sense of humour. My mother’s so kind that it’s hard for me to… Her level of kindness and decency is aspirational to me.

How famous are you, on a scale of one to 10?

God, I mean, like, “TikTok Famous” probably a one, right? I’m gonna say – I don’t know about the number system – but I’m going to say I-occasionally-get-a-free-appetiser-sent-over famous. Which is a great place to be.

What do you look for in a date?

It’s been so long since I’ve been on a date. You know, I once read something, it might have been something cheesy on a card, but [it was]: if you don’t like someone, then the way they hold their fork will bother you. But, if you like someone – or love someone – they could spill an entire plate of spaghetti on your lap and you wouldn’t mind.

You play a zillion instruments. What’s the hardest instrument to play?

Well, I can’t play horns or anything like that. The French horn is supposed to be really hard. I don’t like to blag… but I’m an incredible whistler. Like, I can whistle Bach.

Is Bach a particularly tough whistle?

I think… yeah. It’s fast. And noodly.

What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we're out of lockdown?

I’m gonna get a manicure and a pedicure and a massage. Massage from a stranger. Any stranger.

What about a night on the tiles?

I will probably attend a dinner party.

That sounds quite restrained.

It sounds hella boring. Sorry.

Clubbing?

No, I don’t really go to clubs. I think in order to go to clubs you have to be a person who likes to publicly dance. And I don’t publicly dance. I mean I would feel too shy to dance at a wedding. But for some reason I will dance on stage in front of 10,000 people.

That’s why alcohol was invented.

Exactly! But I swear I would reach the point of alcohol sickness before I would be drunk enough to dance.

The effects of drugs on creativity: discuss.

Unreliable. Really unreliable. Sometimes after a day’s work in the studio you’re like, "I’m gonna have shot of tequila and then sing this a few more times, and then play". It’s okay but you peak sort-of quickly. You can’t sustain the level without getting tired. And then I would say that weed just makes me paranoid and useless. Every once in a while some combo of psychedelics can get you someplace. But, for the most part, you either come back to [the work] the next day and you’re, like, “This is garbage” or you get sleepy or hungry or distracted and you’re not really doing anything. I’ve never had opiates. Or coke or whatever. So I don’t know. I can’t speak to that. But with the slightly more G-Rated [American movie classification: All Ages Permitted] thing, it doesn’t really help.

What do you have too many of in your wardrobe?

I’m not a hoarder. I tend to have one thing that I get really obsessed with and then I wear it every day. Some people, having a whole lot of things gives them a sense of safety and security. It gives me anxiety. I can’t think if there’s too much visual noise. If there was a uniform that I could wear every day I would absolutely do that. And at certain times I have.

Like Steve Jobs?

Or, oh God, what’s her name? The Theranos lady… Elizabeth Holmes!

The blood-test-scam lady?

Well, I guess it was unclear how much of it was self-delusion and how much of it was, you know, actual fraud.

Another black turtleneck fan.

And – again, this is unconfirmed – she also adopted a very low voice like this in order to be taken seriously as a CEO.

Like Margaret Thatcher.

Did she have a low voice?

She made hers “less shrill”.

Oh yes. Yes!

What movie makes you cry?

The Lives of Others

That’s a good one.

Right. I rewatched that during my Stasi kick.

I’ll be honest, your lockdown sounds even less fun than everyone else’s.

I mean… Look, I had to educate myself. I went to a music college [Berklee College of Music] where I tried to take the philosophy class and the way that they would talk about it… it was taught by this professor who was from one of the neighbouring colleges in Boston. And it was very clear that he really disliked having to talk Kierkegaard to a bunch of music school kids. He was just so bummed by it. I’m trying to learn, “What’s the deal with Kant?” and he felt he had to explain everything only in musical terms [because he assumed it would be the only thing music students could relate to]. Like, “Well, you know, it’s like when Bob Marley…" I’m, like, “No, no, no! I don’t want that!” So I had to educate myself. This is where its led me.

Where should we ideally listen to Daddy’s Home?

Put it on a turntable. Pour yourself a glass of tequila or bourbon – whatever your favourite hooch is – and smoke a joint and listen to it. I think that’s the vibe.

Daddy’s Home is released on May 14

#have u covered Joni mitchell? Annie clarkson: ‘I have not’#OKAY MA’AM WHATEVER U SaY MA’am #st vincent #annie clark #interviews #marfa was a dream #Apparently #and that one time she posted her singing jm in the car #also that time at Newport folk festival with doveman #‘maybe that’s her shtick this time around’#’to be full of shit?’#’yah’#that’s hot

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skymoriii · 3 years ago

Text

Always Home Always Yours. Chapter One: Wasting Away

Always Home Always Yours by Skymori Summary: Diluc Ragnvindr and Kaeya Alberich have known they were soulmates long before their names appeared on each other’s wrists. But it will take more than some magic skin tattoos and a couple of hearts on the cheek in order to get these two back together. Perhaps a trip to Snezhnaya is just what they need to win back each others trust. Or, wherein Kaeya is the ultimate tease, Lisa is a mastermind, and Diluc becomes a crossdresser. All for the greater good, of course. Read Chapter One Below or Read on AO3 Words:4645 Fandoms: Genshin Impact

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence (later on)

Categories: M/M

Characters: Diluc, Kaeya, Jean, Lisa, Barbara, Rosaria + more to come

Relationships: Diluc/Kaeya (Genshin Impact)

Additional Tags: Canon Universe , Reconciliation, Reconciliation Fic, Diluc and Kaeya Reconciliation (Genshin Impact) ,Crossdressing ,Crossdressing Kink , this whole thing is a crossdressing fic with plot and a happy end, Action & Romance, Blood and Violence, KaelucTop Kaeya/Bottom Diluc (Genshin Impact), Severe Mutual Pining, tags will be updated as the fic goes, content warnings before each chapter, Eventual Smut , diluc in a dress, Diluc in so many dresses, Soulmate AU, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soft Dom Kaeya, Fluff, Diluc and Kaeya being soft with each other, Diluc and Kaeya are Not Siblings (Genshin Impact), and by that i mean that we respect the original CN writing of their relationship here

Chapter Notes: The first thing I need you to know is that this entire thing was written with THIS SONG on repeat, and if you would like to fully experience this chapter with your whole being, please listen to it while you read. Click here or search Hold Me Just Because by Madeon. So much of this fic is written to/inspired by Madeon's music and his Good Faith album in particular, and other songs from other artists will make appearances as the fic continues. The second thing I need you to know is that CW; This chapter is primarily composed of sads and angsty feels, because its about establishing everything in-universe and how that has personally impacted Diluc and Kaeya. BUT FEAR NOT!! All the sour will be balanced out with sweet, all the wounds will be healed, and after this chapter things will be lighter/fluffier/ have much more happy to them. This is very much Not an angst fic. Please bare with it, there are only good things to come Once again if you haven't already please listen to this song while you read, and enjoy!

They say that for every human born, there exists another for whom that human is connected. For no mortal shall be given a life without also being given someone to share it with.

Soulmates. They came in all different shapes and sizes. Some singular, some multiple. Some platonic, some romantic. Some stretching the very concept of what a soulmate could be, but still Soulmates nonetheless; Two people who were tied together by destiny and Celestia to be together, and to be there for one another.

And so it was that everyone had a soulmate, somewhere in the world. It was the matter of locating that soulmate, which made things difficult. Even with a marking on the skin, a sign in the sky, or a whisper in their dreams, finding one’s special person could be exceedingly difficult. In a world where the gods granted rare individuals the Visions to wield their power, rarer still did two people find their soulmates.

Diluc Ragnvindr and Kaeya Alberich have known they were soulmates long before their names appeared on each other’s wrists.

They had known it in the gardens and vineyards where they played together. In the hills and valleys where they had explored between rocks, trained between camps, and chased crystal flies in the dense forests. They had known it in the many nights they had spent in each other's rooms, giggling and playing when they should’ve been asleep. Known it in the softness of their space and the lingering of their touches. Known it on that dark, stormy night long ago, when Diluc had first reached his hand out to that lost little boy in the rain and pulled him out of the darkness with his light.

They were only children, when they fell for each other.

Common knowledge held that when someone turned 20 years of age, your soulmate's name would appear on your wrist, and the signs of love would appear to guide you towards each other.

And so it was with all the more reason, that they tried not to speak of it. To not acknowledge what was between them and bring it into existence; For nothing would hurt worse than to love and to know that the one you were loving was not the soulmate you were destined to be with. Alas, they were but teenagers -- Impatient and in love and unstoppable. Much too young and much too dumb to know how to keep away from each other.

Neither of them could have imagined themselves loving anyone else. And neither of them could have foreseen how suddenly things would change.

They’d spent all their time hoping that their childhood loves would become their lifelong ones. That one night was all it took to make them wish everything back.

Diluc left to seek answers, truth, and vengeance. Kaeya remained to pick up the pieces of what little he had left. In Mondstadt, one of them would see the next couple years filling the space the other had left in a city that was never his own, and filling his heart with drink when there were no people left in the pub to distract it with. In the far north, the other would spend his next years carving a path of blood in cold, clean snow. A flare in a pitch black cave, lighting up the darkness only to find that the hole he had been digging was impossibly deeper to climb down.

And each night, when Kaeya was laying down in his flat, and when Diluc was fresh out of Fatui to distract from the need for sleep, they hoped they were wrong. Hoped that they had simply been the dumb children that they were, and that the feeling of wrongness and emptiness in their chests meant nothing. That the calm feeling of knowing beyond knowing would fade conveniently into nonexistence. Hoped that when they both turned twenty, the names that would appear on their wrists would not be each others.

And somehow, knowing without knowing, that the names that would appear couldn’t be anyone elses.

Diluc turns 20 in April, two years into his journey through the north. His determination to forget his birthday backfires on him, and instead he finds himself itching at his wrist like the ghost of Kaeya’s lips were still pressed to it. He determinedly ignores it as best he can, but Diluc is anxious and impatient. Twitchy with hypervigilance. The fatui are monitoring him closer than ever now, and each day grows more challenging. He doesn’t hold out for long. When the day passes, he gives into temptation and looks at his bare wrist, and finds not but a single pink heart in its place.

A place-holder. A confirmation that your soulmate was out there, alive and well, but not yet old enough to receive their own sign of love.

Diluc stares at it for a moment, before putting his gloves on and forging back into the unknown.

----

Kaeya turns 20 the same year in November, and when the clock strikes midnight on the 30th, they both feel it from across Teyvat.

Diluc awakes with a jolt to a warm feeling encompassing his wrist. His chest heaves in short breaths and his eyes flare wide to look for a threat-- Fearing for a moment, out of survival instincts and nothing else, that the warmth at his wrist might be blood --Only to see his wrist and find a bright blue light blossoming there instead. A small show of snow and crystal projecting outwards, right where the heart used to be.

Placing himself in a constant state of fight or flight had evidently worked too well as a distraction. He’d been running and fighting for so long that he hadn’t even realized how much time had passed. But the moment he feels a familiar chill run up his wrist and over his chest, he knows today can’t be anything else but Kaeya’s birthday.

Snowflakes and frost patterns dance whimsically above his wrist, but they aren’t coming from outside. What’s happening now is absolutely tied to his soulmate, and realization hits him like a slap in the face when he remembers that now, Kaeya too, possesses a Vision.

His heart races. He’s not ready. He doesn’t want this , but reality continues to spite him as Diluc watches in equal parts hope and horror at the sensation of words being written into his wrist.

“No. Please ..” He whispers softly into the air, “Anyone but him...”

The sound of ice crackling echoes from the script being etched into his skin, yet the sensation doesn’t hurt. Slowly, the light from the soulmark fades, and Diluc places a hand over it before he can read it. Knowing without knowing, the same way he’s always known, exactly who’s name is waiting for him there.

After a moment Diluc slowly removes his hand from his wrist, and the tears come softly falling down his cheeks. Still glowing with a faint blue light, written in a lovely cursive, is the name ‘Kaeya Alberich’.

What a sick joke, Diluc thinks bitterly. A tumultuous scowl taking his features even as his chest aches with need to see him again. He hates him, he hates him, he hates him -- He has to, he needs to. Kaeya betrayed him, lied to him. Played him as a fool for years just to get close to Crepus. Everything they had, everything he was, it had all been a lie.

But he knows that if Kaeya Alberich was not the person he’d thought he was, if he really posed a threat to himself or Mondstadt, if he truly never loved him at all-- Then his name would not be there, staring up at him from his wrist.

His teeth clench, his chest shudders and a choked sob falls from his throat. It hurts . He didn’t want proof that Kaeya was good. He wanted to hate him for toying with his life like a plaything. For turning his world upside down. Not for being all the best parts of it.

Fuck, he misses him so much, and there shouldn’t be any energy left in him to cry. There’s not, really. His stores of food and water have been getting lower as the Fatui have made his mission more and more difficult. Yet somehow, the tears still come. Falling limply onto his wrist for a moment before his expression twists into pain and Diluc yanks it away, unable to look at it anymore.

He can’t think about this right now. Can’t hold the truth of his lies and his secrets and the inexplicable proof of his love on the inside of his wrist and know that he was good, while the still-aching wound from his deceit burns raw and painfully in his chest.

Diluc gives himself time to recuperate. And then, when Dawn comes, he ventures right back out into the fray.

---

Kaeya is drunk when the same phenomenon happens to him. He had been promoted to Cavalry Captain just a few days ago, and the timing of the whole thing couldn’t be poorer. Each reminder of Diluc is more salt in the already aching wound, and Angels Share is running low on Death Afternoon. Taking home as much as he can carry, Kaeya tries his best to get black out drunk in one last futile effort to run away from the inevitable, trying to stave off an experience he doesn’t want to have; One last sordid attempt to run away from the memories he’s not ready to relive.

But his alcohol tolerance betrays him, and Kaeya knows his time to drink himself unconscious has run out when he feels a familiar warm flame drawing letters into his wrist. A bright red light shining out in the dark of his room, bursting forth like Dawn itself on his skin. Flame and feather glow beautifully before his eyes, and Kaeya is momentarily taken back by it's visage.

Slowly, the sensation of sun stroking letters into his wrist fades, and with it, the light. Everything in Kaeya begs him not to look, but his body moves on it’s own. He brings his wrist closer to candle-light and reads, in traditional script, the name of the one he has loved since he was abandoned here all those years ago.

“Diluc Ragnvindr” reads the neat, loopy calligraphy on his wrist. The words still glowing with warm fiery embers on his skin, as if burned there, before settling into a dull charcoal color.

Kaeya smirks, jaw tightening. His entire body going icy and still, before beginning to tremble. Expression stretching into a painful smile, even as he starts coughing up a sob in his throat. His eyes fill with tears, and Kaeya can’t believe what an idiot he is. He had one job , which he failed utterly to do. Had one friend, who he failed utterly to keep. And now his soulmate -- Something Kaeya was sure he’d never receive in the first place, due to his heritage -- had been revealed to him, only to become a cruel reminder that he had already laid him to waste the same way he’d laid to waste all the other good things in his life.

And he’d been given so many good things, he had-- None of them he deserved, and still he’d ruined all of them. Kaeya shakes out a bitter laugh, only to hear it transform into wet, agonized sobs. Tears flooding down his cheeks as he grips his wrist tightly in one hand and brings it to his chest. He misses him so much. All he can think about is regret, and wishing he’d never told Diluc at all-- Thinking, selfish and needy, that perhaps if he hadn’t, he might still be with him. Or perhaps if he hadn’t been so childish, demanding understanding on the same night he’d implicated himself in his fathers death-- Refusing to apologize even when Diluc was the one who needed him most. Archons, there were so many chances he had to make things better, and he failed to take advantage of even one. He could’ve held it in just a little longer-- Could’ve said sorry while he had the chance-- And why, oh why, did he ever let Diluc leave alone?

On a night where most young people would be celebrating the first sign of their soulmate, Kaeya Alberich spends his hating himself more than ever before.

Two more years pass. Diluc Ragnvindr returns to Mondstadt.

He comes back without warning, word, or announcement. Not a single letter of his company precedes his return. The only precursor to his homecoming is the inevitable stray rumor of passersby and traveling merchants, who happen to cross his path or recognize him whilst coming and going from Mondstadts neighboring countries. All in all, leaving the citizens of Mond under-prepared to welcome him back.

Jean had wanted to receive him at the gates with a formal welcome as a knight, but she’s in the middle of a meeting when he passes through the entrance way, and Diluc does not plan to stick around long enough for her to find him. He’s just there to re-establish his presence with the local vendors in the area on behalf of the winery, and leave.

It’s Kaeya, always with his ear to the ground, one foot on the stage and one behind the curtain, who makes the fullest use of the preceding rumor-mill. He predicts that Diluc may not want his return to be the loudest, despite the crime that it would be for it to go unnoticed. Anticipating a quick return and a quicker retreat. It forces him to keep his eye tight on the entry point for days at a time, because Diluc won’t make it easy for him and simply send a falcon the Ordo’s way.

What he doesn’t expect is for a mysterious vigilante to show up in Mondstadt the very night before, and make it even harder. The sudden appearance of this unnamed hero unintentionally taking up both his and his knights attention-- As well as the attention of the rest of the city-- And leaving Kaeya run ragged the next day with sleeplessness. The night prior, he’d been woken up by his men claiming to have caught sight of the dark-clad figure, only to find he’d left behind a pile of neatly tied-up crooks and criminals in his wake. The whole thing had caused such an uproar that Kaeya was still nursing the headache from it, and that was without mentioning how much investigative work and report backlogs he was now being assaulted with.

It made matters of attending Diluc’s return all the more complicated.

It’s his Knightly duties that keep him bound to overseeing the head of the Winery's return safely-- Or that’s the excuse Kaeya tells himself, when he can’t force himself to pass this task onto Vile or any of his best men, and can’t make his feet carry him away from his seat overseeing the main gates.

It’s been two years since they learned they were soulmates, and two more since Diluc left. Four years would surely be enough to prepare him for this.

But the moment Kaeya’s eyes lock onto that familiar head of flame-red hair, he can lie to himself no longer. It’s been four years, and the sight of him is distant and cold and aching in his chest. So different yet so unchanging. Just as beautiful as the day he left and lost him-- Regret and sadness and anger and terrible, unforgiving yearning flooding into his gut at just the sight of him.

The clothes he wears are the only foreign thing to him. Covered from fingers up to his necktie, all black from the fur of his coat to the heel of his boots, like he’s overcompensating for something. Making him look bigger than he actually is, while imposing a sense of professionalism that Kaeya knows does not belong to the world of business. It appears he’s changed in more ways than one, and Kaeya finds the sharpness of his mind working against him as it automatically sets to unravel these small mysteries-- His lost love, a topic his mind could never stay away from if he’d tried.

Kaeya can’t tear his gaze away. His chest feels so tight and raw that he might as well be breathing out of a straw. “Archons, I was never ready,” He thinks to himself, breathless. Doing his best not to stare before he has a heart attack or Diluc notices. Whichever comes first.

Kaeya sips his drink from his table next to Blanche’s General Goods and does his best to quell his impending heartache. He could walk away now and save himself some pain, but he’s already there. He’s not going to hurt less tonight by leaving early, so he might as well see this through to the end.

For the most part, Diluc doesn’t seem to notice him, nor is Diluc doing anything particularly interesting or unexpected. He stops by the adventurers guild first, and leaves before too many members can come out to lift him into bone-crushing hugs for his safe return back. Then he makes his acquaintances with The Cats Tail, who are happy to receive their old competition back. After a brief conversation, Diluc predictably makes his way up to Good Hunter.

Kaeya realizes belatedly that a crowd is beginning to form around Diluc. Husbands and wives and other local business families have steadily come out to flock around him and reminisce, no doubt asking him how his trip was and remarking on how much he’s grown. The little crowd growing bigger and bigger with each passerby that recognizes him and comes to say “Hi”. Kaeya smirks. It ought to make a great shield to cover his presence-- That is up until Blanche, the shopkeep not five feet away from him, recognizes him from across the plaza.

“Oh my goodness, is that Master Diluc?!” She asks excitedly. Perfectly unaware of the trainwreck she’s about to cause.

Kaeya’s eye widens in pure horror, and he raises a hand out as if to stop her. “Wait, Blanche don’t-!”

“Master Diluc!!!” She yells from all away across the plaza, waving her arms and successfully drawing the attention of the entire crowd over to them. “Yoohoo! Over here!! Come say Hello!!!”

Suddenly the shield Kaeya had so masterfully taken refuge behind had become a spotlight, and he scrambles to get up before it’s too late. Sirens flare in his head as footsteps near. His chair skirts loudly as he pushes himself up from his seat-- Getting stuck on one irritatingly curved metal leg of the table before it will successfully let him go, heart racing as he struggles to free himself from it. By the time he’s gotten his long legs out from the cramped space, he’s no longer looking where he’s going, and runs right into the crowd only to crash face first into someone. Fortunately, the crowd is much too dense to knock the other person to the ground.

“Oh, my most sincere apologies, I didn’t see where I was go- ing..” He starts on automatic, but his words lose traction as he looks down to see exactly who it is he’s run into.

From beneath him-- Yes, beneath him-- Stands the very same Diluc Ragnvindr he’d been anticipating so anxiously this entire day. Rubbing his nose where it’d evidently hit Kaeya’s jaw, before looking up to have the exact same terrifying realization as Kaeya is now. His large red eyes snapping up in shock before moving to a familiar expression of conflict, cheeks going red with what Kaeya can only assume is anger.

“..Kaeya.” He says tonelessly.

Kaeya swallows dry, hearing his name. Seeing him so close for the first time in years. For a moment, he can’t breathe. They were the same height when Diluc left, (had been since they were kids) but as Diluc stands before him now, it’s more than obvious that that’s no longer the case.

Somewhere along his journey Diluc must have stopped growing, because now Kaeya stands over him with a staggering five inches, forcing Diluc to look up at him to meet his eyes, and the new perspective makes Kaeya’s heart flip flop inappropriately in his chest.

He’s never seen Diluc at this angle before, and he’s not ready for the onslaught of feelings and ideas that hit him all at once. Oh, the ways he could tease and torment him with this-- Things he’d never even dared to think of before, with the trench of guilt and anger so present between them-- It had Kaeya reeling where he stood.

And from the way Dilucs face was reddening and the frustrated furrow of his brows-- The exasperated, disbelieving, angry, yet oh so incredibly flustered expression on his face-- Kaeya knows he must be going through a similar experience, and smiles at the fact that he can still read him after all this time.

It’s not long though, before their moment is interrupted. Belatedly, Kaeya hears the crowd whispering among themselves and realizes that the people have stepped back to give them room. Making a circle around them and speculating loudly, with Diluc and Kaeya standing right in the center.

It draws his attention away from Diluc for a moment, and as he listens he hears the distinct whisper of the word “soulmate” repeating again and again.

When he looks back at Diluc, he’s not sure how he missed it in the first place. On the right side of Diluc’s face, sitting right below his eye, is a bright pink heart. One which glows faintly off his skin, as if alive.

A soulmark.

Not all soulmates got soulmarks. Some had more than one. This, evidently, was another of theirs. And from the way people were whispering, Kaeya was willing to bet he had one on his cheek too.

Diluc’s eyes seem to follow Kaeya’s to the crowd, widening as he no doubt goes through the same realization. Suddenly Diluc slaps a hand over his left cheek, and Kaeya barks out a laugh. “Wrong side, dearest.”

Diluc inhales a sharp breath and covers his right cheek with his other hand, turning as red as his hair. Fist clenched at his side and shoulders raised up to his ears as he seethes, “I will kill you.”

Kaeya doesn’t even try to hold back his laugh. It breaks free from him with a slight feeling of hysteria, and he can’t help it. He’s too anxious not to. “Oh, you will, will you?” Kaeya teases, more out of habit than intent. He knows he’s mad-- Kaeya’s mad too-- But it’s Diluc, and his energy is heat incarnate. Kaeya can’t help but get warm. Can’t help but want to get a little closer and see just how hot he can burn.

But now’s not the time. People are causing a scene, and Diluc looks seconds away from making good on his threat. “I suppose I’d better take my leave then.” Kaeya says mournfully, and makes sure to rake his eyes up and down Diluc’s shorter stature one last time, committing it fully to memory.

“Goodbye, Master Diluc. It was nice to see you again.” He says sincerely, doing his best to maintain his composure before turning on his heel and walking off.

As Kaeya cuts briskly through the crowd and does his best to disappear from it, the hearts from their cheeks fade-- Leaving only one very red Ragnvindr standing alone in the middle of the crowd.

Holding back a growl, Diluc pivots around and stalks past the crowd, ignoring as many shouts and calls as he can as he hastily makes his way back to his horse, riding back to the winery as fast as his steed can take him.

For weeks following the incident, Diluc curses Kaeya’s name in between bedsheets and huffed breaths, tormented as much by their meeting and their heights as Kaeya himself. If it were possible to control growth like that, Diluc would be convinced Kaeya had done it on purpose. As if it wasn’t enough to see him fulfilling Diluc’s old role as Cavalry Captain (A sight that has a conflicting amount of pride welling up behind his sternum), the man now jaunts around with an open shirt, flaunting his chest for everyone to see, unprotected, and that’s not even to speak of the lovelock that hangs over his heart-- It’s impossible not to think about, but that doesn’t stop him from trying anyways.

From then on rumors of Master Diluc and Cavalry Captain Kaeya’s fated soulmates spread like wildfire throughout Mondstadt. Few had seen it, and fewer still can corroborate it, but that doesn’t stop the information from reaching just about every local in the city.

Everytime the two are close the hearts appear once more to draw them near, so Kaeya and Diluc wordlessly agree to avoid each other in public as much as possible. This helps keep them both from becoming targets for which others might use as blackmail, as well as helping to keep the nature of their relationship private; But more conveniently, it’s one more excuse for them to prolong their stalemate.

Many Months Later

A little bad weather has never been enough to deter Diluc, nor has it ever been enough to deter the Dark Knight Hero. All the same, the last Ragnvindr makes an exception to his heroic duties for one special occasion.

The time is 1:56 AM. Outside it is pouring rain. The worst of which is flowing down the wineries tall glass windows in thick streams and rivulets, so cloudy with cold that one cannot see past it, save for the occasional burst of lightning. The thunder that follows would be enough to deter anyone from going anywhere tonight. The hour, even more so. But Diluc knows she will take advantage of it in order to reach him, as one of the few whom were aware that he’s not often awake for the day hours.

Diluc had sent his staff home long ago in preparation for tonight. Foregoing his office altogether in favor of the foyer, where several large pieces of paper sit over the dining table. One, an expansive map of northern Teyvat. Another, a calendar marked with several consecutive dates in the month of May.

Diluc trails a finger over the dates, expression pensive with thought. There is plenty of time to prepare, but nothing can be taken for granted. What’s to come may not fix everything, but it’s an opportunity they cannot afford to lose.

This mission could mean everything for Mondstadt.

Staring down at him from the second story, the large antique grandfather clock strikes 2, it’s bell ringing out loud into the silence of the winery. Diluc barely manages to hear the knocking at the front past it, and steps away from planning and schematics to answer the door. Deftly, he undoes the latches and opens the door to let her in.

“Good evening, Master Diluc.” Greets Jean, as she steps into the winery.

Diluc closes the door behind her, taking her rain-slick cape and hanging it for her. “You’re right on time.” He comments.

“Of course,” She says, more of an acknowledgement than a conversation. Neither of them are here for small talk.

Jean pivots on her heel to face him and produces a single letter from her person, lips quirked up into a knowing smile as she holds the letter between her two fingers. Diluc doesn’t need to read it to know that it is addressed to The Order of The Knights of Favonius, and stamped with the royal seal from Zapolyarny Palace. “I believe we have business to discuss.”

“Yes,” Diluc agrees, stepping up to the table and pulling out their chairs with a small smile of his own. “We most certainly do.” Next Chapter (coming soon)

#Kaeluc #Kaeya Alberich #Diluc Ragnvindr #Genshin Impact #my fic

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path-of-my-childhood · 5 years ago

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Why Taylor Swift's 'Reputation' Is Her Best Album

By: Joe Lynch for Billboard Date: August 22nd 2019

Back in November 2017, Billboard celebrated Taylor Swift's singular pop catalog in the days leading up to the release of her sixth LP, Reputation, by asking five writers to argue for one of her five studio albums as her best. Now, before the release of her seventh album Lover, Billboard's Joe Lynch takes on Reputation itself, and how the album was misunderstood upon release but has since revealed itself to be her most mature, accomplished work to date.

You don't really expect a Taylor Swift album to open with a fuzzy, fat bass line that nearly rumbles the teeth out of the back of your mouth. Which is why when her sixth album Reputation opened with the maximalist industrial pop of "...Ready For It?," casual listeners were confused, Swifties were challenged, and haters were given a bounty of fresh ammo.

And that was exactly what she wanted.

When Reputation arrived in 2017, the media was neck-deep in an exhausting thinkpiece war about what Taylor Swift meant to pop culture – and Twitter was aflame debating whether she was a saint or a snake. Realizing she could no longer choose to be excluded from these narratives, Swift did the next best thing: She owned them. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, and by the time Reputation arrived, Swift was ready for real risks.

Think she’s a treacherous viper? Taylor’s not arguing with you - in fact, she’s hissing and poised to strike on lead single "Look What You Made Me Do." Wanna call her a fake? Turn your eyes to album opener “...Ready For It?” for proof, where she slithers into the skin of Goth Taylor, fresh from a trip to Hot Topic. As if to double down on accusations of inauthenticity, she morphs into Trap Taylor on the album's second track, "End Game." Not only did Swift rap, but she invited soft-rock torchbearer Ed Sheeran to spit next to one of the genre's guiding lights, Future. This wasn't just a creative risk - it was Taylor giving harshest critics a hand-wrapped gift and daring them to come after her.

Of course, if Reputation had been one stylistic detour after another, it would leave you with whiplash. In truth, the album openers are sonic red herrings - the Old Taylor wasn't quite as dead as she'd tell us on that lead single. Most of Reputation caters in reflective synth-pop that isn't a far cry from 1989: the lilting "Delicate," the coyly seductive "Dress" and the playful "Gorgeous" are far more representative of the overall LP. And while the tone is darker, the machine-precise hooks and indelible choruses from 1989 and Red return on Reputation, too. Are the peaks quite as high? If we’re talking karaoke sing-alongs and wedding dance floors, no - the best cuts on those two K.O. Reputation's highlights. But while those albums are fixated on love and loss, Reputation sinks its teeth into something far more interesting: the thrill and purpose of an artist hellbent on freeing their mind from the expectations of others.

Admittedly, part of Reputation's genius lies in context - you need to know the public image battle that preceded it to fully appreciate the maturation Swift shows as a lyricist. While some bemoaned the loss of Swift the Poignant Couplet Composer starting with her shift to straight-up pop on 1989, the truth is that Swift's deft turns of phrase never disappeared - it's just that we're preconditioned to privilege lyrics when they're paired with acoustic guitars vs. synthesizers. Which is a shame, because on Reputation, Swift's words deliver vivid Polaroid shots directly to your brain: "The ties were black, the lies were white"; "We can't make any promises now, can we, babe? But you can make me a drink"; "I bury hatchets but I keep maps of where I put 'em"; and "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere."

More important than her pen remaining pointed, however, is the fact that for the first time on an album, Taylor sounds like an honest-to-god human. She's been brilliant since Speak Now, but there's a difference between intelligence and emotional intelligence. On Reputation, Swift has finally realized that being right or getting the last word isn't the most important thing. You might be the messy one, the lost sheep, the sinner, the seducer. A real grownup can acknowledge that sometimes, they are the bad guy (a lesson Billie Eilish was clearly taking notes on throughout). And as long as that isn't your entire existence, that's fine.

When she gets deliciously petty on "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," you don't get the sense that she thinks it's justified – but she's relishing playing the part of an asshole for a minute (perhaps not coincidentally, that's a role the song's presumed target famously toasted back in 2010 when she was still concerned with presenting as Best In Class).

But the real crux of the album is found in "Gorgeous," which sees a frisky Swift romanticizing her drunken attempt to cheat on her boyfriend because a dangerously attractive stranger has entered her field of vision. A stentorian moralist might lash her for abandoning the mantle of 'immaculate princess' in favor of becoming a tipsy twentysomething torn between cheating on her partner or cuddling her cats, but one is a hell of a lot more relatable than the other. She's acknowledging that stumbling, both physically and morally, is part of life. Her motivations here are muddy and a little embarrassing - and never before had Taylor Swift sketched out such a fully-formed, fallible version of herself in a song.

And that's what makes Reputation the most mature, fascinating and ultimately satisfying release from Swift so far. Prior to this album, you might describe her songwriting as "romantic," "longing," "poetic" - all wonderful things, but adjectives you could readily apply to many celebrated songwriters. Not so with Reputation. Here we have a top-tier talent embracing her contradictions, acknowledging her flaws and refusing to let you judge her. In terms of pop music, moral grey areas are rarely painted in such screaming color.

#remember Billboard's series before rep came out - well this is a continuation #and it's also the only stance I accept =)#reputation album #...it is a really special one =)#so show some love and respect to rep #billboard #article #reputation era #taylor swift

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vroenis · 5 years ago

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Reaching Out, Reaching In

It would be criminal not to use ABIIOR for the lede given I’m going to quote Matty albeit not quite verbatim - nevertheless - buy this album, it’s incredible.

But of-course, I’m going to start by talking about

I mention BT a lot; he enters the lists often in my writing, in my discussions. Like many artists in my collection and listening rotation, I seem to be really into an artist for a period of time and then reach a cutoff point where I stop being into them. This probably happens for most people, I don’t know, I’ve not asked most people, but I do want to be very careful of not living in the past or rather dying in it. Still, I like to keep finding new things or rather I’m compelled to. I enjoy things that continue to grow older each second time passes, but I always thirst for new creations by all artists of all ages, whether they bring to bear the experience of years, or they’ve only been around for a few. The point is everyone is here on this wild ride and art is their response to the stimuli; it’s what comes out of us in abstract and semi-abstract, re-translated and it forms these amazing emotional and often transcending connections and multifaceted responses in us and by us I mean me.

I’m getting distracted.

In the last and understandably downcast piece on my deathbed playlist, there are three key BT albums and it’s worth noting the years he released them;

2006 - This Binary Universe

2012 - Nuovo Morceau Subrosa

2016 - _ (untitled - there’s a story, you can look it up if you like, it’s more or less just referred to as the character *underscore*(verbal))

There were other albums in-between but naturally those don’t make the list as far as what I want to be hearing if I’m half or unconscious or in a delirium on my way to imminent death. In 2019, BT released two albums;

October 2019 - Between Here And You

December 2019 - Everything You’re Searching For Is On The Other Side Of Fear

You may remember I wrote a whole lot about 2009 - 2019 and these albums were absent.

If you go to the wiki for BT, which are his initials for Brian (Wayne) Transeau, you’ll see a wonderfully rich history of a stupendously talented musician and immensely intelligent individual. He is part of a collective of people most wouldn’t know about (which is perfectly fine, to be honest) who are responsible for the digital audio revolution that has completely changed the way we create, record, produce, publish and distribute music as we know it. There are parts of that people may think are negative and some elements certainly are, but the net benefit is unquestionably positive even if only on the sole subject of accessibility. Accessible digital audio has put creation and power within reach of everyone and of-course this means there’s a glut of material available, but it also means we catch sight of more amazing art rather than never see it, or it not seeing the light of day. I lean on humans seeing it and saying that directly rather than speaking in abstract. The light of day is literally us - we humans, seeing the expressions of one-another and hopefully remunerating appropriately so that we can continue to live and improve each other’s lives.

I have always had and continue to have immense respect for BT. He began writing This Binary Universe when his daughter was born, and as she grew, continued working on the album with this tiny infant often in his lap as he worked. He wrote it from creation in 5.1 surround sound, rather than all other “surround sound mixes” being done in retrospect from the stereo stems. It is an astonishing work and See You On The Other Side may very well be one of the greatest pieces of music in history. When I first listened to TBU in 2006, I had a myriad of emotional responses and I certainly didn’t have as much knowledge of BT’s creation process and background for the album at the time, but I can appreciate that shortly thereafter upon learning it, it probably does form biases in how I feel about the album. This will be important to the discussion later. Nevertheless, the album feels massively injected with specific intent and yes, surely every artistic work is regardless and we’ll get there. This is going to be personal but all writing is - that doesn’t warrant further discussion, we should always be making that assumption.

I follow BT on Instagram and saw him build his awesome new studio, an amazing space for all his gear and synths and something any music professional would love to have in some way... which I may check in a moment, or perhaps not so soon but I hope I don’t forget to come back to that. I will say that I do like it. It is a wonderful playground of vintage, rare and new synths, of super powerful computers with extremely new software and plugs, of high-end analogue desks and outboard units, extremely nice monitors and custom designed absorbers, panels, racks and furniture. It is an absolutely amazing space.

After the studio was finished, he did some collabs with some other artists and folks, some of which I also follow on Instagram whose setups are wildly different so it was nice to see some cross-over. He also interspersed with increasing regularity work on his albums which included clips of 100+ piece orchestras and often DAW session captures of the stems and him working on them. It was all pretty cool and the tiny snippets he posted were rad.

In October 2019, I was travelling to visit family due to cancer treatment, something that’s been at the centre of my life for well over 18 months, and I have my first full listen-thru of Between Here And You on an early morning when the rest of the house is asleep. It’s pretty great, sonically I like it a lot. I don’t have the same response to TBU but I don’t expect to, I should give it a chance, but it still doesn’t elicit a really significant response in me. At this point it has to be said that on the same trip, I have my first full listen-thru of Telefon Tel Aviv’s Dreams Are Not Enough, having slept on its initial September release, and that might be enough to give context to how I responded - it may have been where my head was at and remains to this day. I couldn’t shake it tho, as I still really have an affinity for TBU and I was wondering what was up.

Fast-forward to December and the release of Everything You’re Searching For Is On The Other Side Of Fear, and I do not respond to this album at all. It has some decent BT synth and sample work in it that exhibits his amazing talent, but it’s cut with orchestral and choral music that to me is indistinct from any other contemporary material available on a Pandora channel playing similar genres. I hate the sound of myself being so critical of someone I admire so much, because for someone who can write bangin’ trance and intricately complicated micro-rhythms and sample-chopped music, someone who writes their own freaken’ software and who edits audio down to the sample because their attention to detail is so specific and demanding - for that same person to be so talented to also be able to write scores and choral vocal arrangements is immense. I’m sure it all means so much to BT and I’m so proud of him for creating what to him must be an amazing work. I’m not trying to say anything negative about the work itself...

But I just don’t respond to it. Almost all the other music I’ve been listening to over the last 10 years including very recently, feels like it’s been created in response to extremely personal experiences that haven’t all been great - singular or accumulations of events that have precipitated significant introspection, and the art that has resulted from it for me reflects it clearly. BT’s two albums feel like... a very fortunate and privileged guy who’s had a lot of time and opportunity to play with his gear, record it and release it. The title also sounds presumptuous as if to position that systemic poverty and oppression and struggle outside of ones’ control can be solved by the oppressed simply stopping being afraid and I border on hating it every time I read it... - and that sounds so horribly mean because it is, I don’t intend for it to be mean. I need to check my expectations and I need to respect that Brian is still doing what he wants to do and he doesn’t owe me anything, least of all in something as abstract as how something sounds and whether or not I like it, because ultimately that’s all I’m talking about here, no matter how obscure I want to make the discussion. The intent of the title, especially - I’m certain - isn’t to diminish those who suffer, and I should be careful in my reading of it. So keeping myself in check, I’m here to explore the rest of my response, and I’m going to try and give further context.

Coldplay

I’ve no problem telling you I like Coldplay. I guess if you knew more about my musical background, it’d be less of a surprise, tho if you’ve been following along, it’ll make sense. If you’re reading this journal backwards, it may or may not, depending on how much I write about production in the future. To cut a long story short, like many bands I’m almost not at all into the band themselves and almost entirely into the production that surrounds them. Meow meow meow, all the art purists will bang-on about how music is about the performers but producers and engineers are artists in every way as much as performers are, and even bands or individuals who “just perform” with their instrument and no-one else on stage and no technicals (screens, lights, unseen backing musos etc.) still have a myriad of people surrounding them without which they can’t execute their working careers. Anyway, feel free to remain ignorant of those facts if you like and be all “pure performers”, no problem - magic can be real for you.

I lost track of Coldplay at after their 2015 album A Head Full Of Dreams. I’m less emotionally invested in the band and totally don’t mind that they’d up until that point releasing more or less the same sound for four consecutive albums. I really like the sound and if you pay close enough attention, it was actually evolving nicely, enough for me at any rate. I’d forgotten all about the band which is easy to do when you don’t really pay attention to pop-music and the activities therein, and then a couple of months ago (January maybe?) by whatever divination of the YouTube algorithm, a video titled Coldplay: Everyday Life Live in Jordan came up in my recommendations - a thing I was until then, unaware even existed. I’d no idea what the band was doing and I’m always keen to give them a shot, so I clicked-thru.

Moments ago I said I was happy with the band doing the same sound over and over again, and when I listen back to those albums, I’m still fine with them - let’s call it the Viva/Prospekt’s/Dreams anthology. Several things struck me about Everyday Life. Given my personal experiences of the last ten years, my struggles and the struggles of everyone around me, both personal and the cultures I observe and choose to observe, watching these four guys geared up in these ruins in Jordan looked stupendously privileged and a massive flex of wealth and influence. It looked like money buying good photography, framing and impossible location kudos and style. The sound in culture to my personal experiences also felt irrelevant.

And now I can finally talk about

The 1975 - Reaching Out, Reaching In

I now don’t remember whether it was at the ABIIOR concert in Melbourne, September 2019, or in one of the many interview snippets on YouTube or an article - I’m fairly sure it was his voice, so I either saw him say it in a video or he said it at the concert or both. Matt Healy said something along the lines of...

“... I know our last album was very inwardly focused... but A Brief Inquiry is very outwardly focused... it’s more about the world... and you... and us...”

That is not at all what he said verbatim but it was something very similar to that so I desperately hope a 1975 fan drops in and corrects me or can find a clip of him repeating it. Anyway there are a lot of really good things to extract from that, firstly from what it means about The 1975′s music and the culture that forms around it, and then about the discussion I’m having.

BT, Coldplay and The 1975 all live in my Ultimate folder on my hard-drive, but while BT and Coldplay fall where they will alpha-numerically as far as directory structure is concerned, The 1975 have the auspicious honour of having leading zeros in their text so they appear first. This is so that I never have to scroll all the way down to T in any program or utility (like my car’s head unit) to find them. Worth noting that composer Yoko Kanno is 01 and Underworld are 02.

The album that preceded A Brief Inquiry... was released in 2016, titled I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It, an intentionally Emo title, I believe or at least hope, and it is definitely an inwardly focused album in the themes indicated by its lyrical content. It’s to date one of my favourite albums of all time, superbly performed and produced and overflowing with emotion - there’s some truly heartbreaking sound and words therein. I feel like this album is a perfect inclusion with the others in my Circa 2009 - 2019 piece that was somehow vaguely about how much of a struggle those 10 years have been. I guess it’d be difficult to get a notion of that if you’re not familiar with the music and material, but all of that music is introspective - it’s all about reaching in. As mentioned above, the art these artists are producing is the result of deeply intimate experiences, some they share directly with us outside of the abstract of art - relationships, family loss, drug addiction, mental health - but many that they don’t so clearly telegraph and leave us with the abstract; the art.

A Brief Inquiry.../ABIIOR certainly is about reaching out, even when the lyrics do seem to be personal, but to me as an individual, it feels to reach out in the right way - that is to say *I* feel it’s reaching out to a world *I* identify with, in a way that *I* agree with or find agreeable. The songs in ABIIOR are about misunderstanding, they’re about not giving up, making mistakes, desperation, honesty, the chaos of the destruction of modern society. One of my all-time favourite songs has sprung from this album and has become anthemic for me - Love It If We Made It and I’m going to embed it;

youtube

And now I feel I want to say that naming an album “Everything You’re Searching For Is On The Other Side Of Fear” and also performing a concert in ancient ruins on the top of a mountain during a picturesque sunrise in Jordan with expensive drone photography both feel to me like also reaching out but in ways that I don’t like and agree with, that feel irrelevant and/or culturally inappropriate but I use the term culturally to mean my personal culture; the culture I see myself fit into as an individual that interacts with others, the struggles we seem to share as a collective.

I feel as tho Coldplay once did reach out in the good way I’m trying and possibly failing to describe, or perhaps just trying to frame from a position I prefer. I felt they had a more grounded sense of community with everyday people which makes the irony of their most recent project more apparent. It may well be that I just don’t like what these artists are doing any more and that’s fine. Sometimes we might feel entitled to a sense of righteousness, to validate our distaste for something on a more grand cultural level, to co-opt others into our critique so more fingers can point and collectively say “See?! That thing you’re doing really *is* BAD! More people said so!” but I really am keeping myself in check and not wanting to do that. I think I’m writing this journal to explain myself to myself - yes, to log my justifications because I believe in them, but also ensure I don’t turn into an arsehole.

Still - I stand by my criticisms because they’re important. I don’t know why in-particular these few examples struck in this way when others didn’t. I bought a bunch of Anjuna music that has nothing to do with culture and emotional response in the ways I’ve discussed them and I love them. Sometimes music is about bangin’ beats and euphoria and that’s OK. Still, the world isn’t entirely a joyous place for me at the moment and hasn’t been. There are positives to celebrate, but I have never been one to only log my celebrations. In particular from a mental health perspective, only documenting positives is incredibly hazardous and I condemn the practice. As much as these entries are laced with darkness and difficulties, each one also contains the things that assist me in surviving, keeping me nourished and navigating this often hellish experience of life. Ultimately of all my skills, seeking out art I identify with is the most valuable survival skill I have, it is the only one that matters.

Love is a kind of art, there’s nothing abstract in that statement - the love between people is artful, in any and all forms it takes - hence the tags; Art Worth Dying For, and Art Worth Living For.

#music #The 1975 #A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships #ABIIOR #BT #Telefon Tel Aviv #Dreams Are Not Enough #Coldplay #Love It If We Made It #art worth dying for #art worth living for #chrono #2020 #writing about music

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voodoochili · 5 years ago

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My Favorite Albums of 2019

As we bid adieu to a decade and a year that many of us would like to forget, let’s take the time to run through some albums that deserve to stay in our rotations at least until the onset of the imminent apocalypse. It’s a cliche, and we say it every year, but as bad as 2019 might have been in the real world, it was an excellent year for music. I listened to at least 300 albums this year and found at least 150 that I liked! Here’s the stuff that made me think, made me happy, and made me drop my jaw last year.

Some themes I found in my listening--I really like rap music from L.A. and Detroit; A few artists who I admired more than loved in the past came out with albums that I completely adored; the nebulous genre often called “afrobeats” or “afropop” has the highest hit percentage of any international scene since dub/reggae in the 1970s (the African Heat playlist on Spotify might be my actual album of the year); a lot of my favorite albums this year came from people who are clearly the product of music schools; my top four contains two excellent bedroom pop albums, and two excellent treatises on race relations in the USA.

I made a Spotify playlist with highlights from my albums list: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6S9kSm5xG3U1vPxhVyBpQc?si=0PHLV0-XQOyNY3XAVRzzAA

And in case you missed it, here’s my list of the year’s best songs: https://voodoochili.tumblr.com/post/189890284724/my-favorite-songs-of-2019

THE BEST:

10. glass beach - the first glass beach album - the first glass beach album combines chiptune synths, frayed emo vocals, jazz piano, and suite-like song structure into an exhilaratingly chaotic mishmash. Mix it with a strong dose of theater-kid earnestness and the result is the most ambitious debut album of the year and possibly of the decade, providing a peek into an alternate dimension where Los Campesinos! wrote the La La Land soundtrack. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t if glass beach didn’t buttress their boundless invention with well-crafted songs, like “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1,” the suitably bonkers intro, the prog-pop opus “bedroom community,” and “cold weather,” which shifts from ska-punk to math rock and back in 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

9. Jenny Lewis - On The Line - Long one of indie’s pre-eminent songsmiths, Jenny Lewis’s On The Line is her most personal album yet, digging deep into her childhood trauma and emerging out the other side with pearls of cheeky wisdom. Jenny’s lived more lives than most, enduring an entire career as an in-demand child star before ever even picking up a guitar; when she reached her teenage years, she learned most of her earnings fed directly into her mother’s heroin habit. Some songs like “Wasted Youth” and “Little White Dove” confront it directly (“Wasted Youth” takes the form of a conversaqtion between Lewis and her sister about their late mother), while other songs like “On The Line” and “Rabbit Hole” are testaments to the strength Lewis gained after fending for herself for so long. Appropriately for an album so focused on the past, Lewis enlists the help of rock legends like Ringo Starr, Don Was, and Benmont Tench, whose organ lends a lush poignancy throughout the album, and transforms opener “Heads Gonna Roll” from a pretty ballad to a genuine tearjerker.

8. Burna Boy - African Giant - West African music continued its quest for global hegemony in 2019, flooding the airwaves with passionate, uptempo party music. Though it was a massive year for artists like Mr Eazi, Zlatan, and do-everything superstar Wizkid, the year belonged to Burna Boy of Nigeria, his sonorous deep voice lending authority to each extravagant boast. Following up last year’s promising Outside, African Giant unleashes Burna’s full potential, drawing a through-line between Africa’s past and present--his use of multilingual lyrics, outspoken politics, and supernatural sense of rhythm updates the famous formula of Afrobeat founding father Fela Kuti for the new era. Aided by frequent collaborator and unheralded genius Kel-P, whose lush and genre-bending beats perfectly complement Burna’s melodic strengths, African Giant was 2019’s most reliable mood booster, presenting standout singles like the irresistible “Anybody,” the ambitious and easygoing “Dangote,” and the romantic club anthem “Secret,” before taking time to explain the history of colonialism in Nigeria on “Another Story.”

7. The Comet Is Coming - Trust In The Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery/The Afterlife - With a long list of collaborators and an even longer list of influences, London-born saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ musical ambitions can’t be confined to a single form or style. While his work with Sons of Kemet emphasizes percussion-heavy Caribbean influences and radical spoken word poetry, Hutchings aims squarely for the stratosphere with his The Comet Is Coming project, which continued its progressive jazz odyssey with two worthy albums in 2019. Elevated by the interplay between Hutchings (calling himself King Shabaka), synth wizard Danalogue, and drummer Betamax, Trust In The Lifeforce of Deep Mystery is a mesmerizing cycle of songs. Boasting titles like “The Universe Wakes Up” and “Super Zodiac,” each song searches for (and finds) a trance-like groove, transporting listeners to the far-flung locales of the song titles before reaching an emotional conclusion. A more contemplative, but still ceaselessly propulsive follow-up, The Afterlife is music for the “stargate” sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, providing a more optimistic counterpoint to Trust while refining the trio’s unique group dynamic. Together, the two works make an immensely satisfying head trip, offering a thrilling soundtrack for the end of the universe and whatever comes next.

6. Moodymann - Sinner - “I don’t even know what you need, but I’ll provide,” grunts Moodymann on Sinner’s simmering opener “I’ll Provide,” “Cause I got something for all your dirty nasty needs.” Possibly the most singular and beloved figure in a Detroit electronic scene overflowing with singular and beloved figures, Moodymann is known for sublimely tasteful DJ sets and sprawling solo works that fuse house music with elements of R&B, gospel, blues, and funk. By his standards, Sinner is slight, spanning only 7 tracks and 44 minutes, but it benefits from a tight focus, showcasing Moodymann’s effortless creativity. Throughout the project, the artist born Kenny Dixon approaches familiar elements from odd angles: jazzy changes and burbling Fender Rhodes invade an intoxicating two-chord vamp on “Downtown”; fellow Detroiter Amp Fiddler adds soulful auto-tune to the blissful “Got Me Coming Back Right Now.” He even manages to find a fresh way to incorporate Camille Yarbrough’s “Take Yo’ Praise,” most famously sampled by Fatboy Slim, into one of the album’s hardest-charging tracks.

5. Polo G - Die A Legend - Way back in 2011, long before he became rap’s first Pulitzer Prize winner, Kendrick Lamar took a moment to explain his ethos on the outro to his breakthrough Section.80 tape: “I'm not on the outside looking in/I'm not on the inside looking out/I'm in the dead fucking center, looking around.” It was a bold statement, but one that Kendrick’s managed to live up to, and finally we’ve found another artist with the ability to achieve all-seeing perspective on record: Chicago 20-year-old Polo G.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been blown away by a new rapper like I was by Polo G in 2019. He possesses a rare combination of melodic mastery and writerly observation, painting a vivid (if bleak) picture of his life on the South Side. His debut project Die A Legend is packed with unflinching observations about the reality of his situation, he touches on his former pill addiction on “Battle Cry” and he reminisces about talking to his younger sister through a prison phone on “Through Da Storm.” As dark as the subject matter can get, Polo never crumbles under the pressures of poverty or fame, staying afloat with crisp melodies that mix the emotional honesty of Lil Durk with the radio-ready slickness of Wiz Khalifa. He’s already mastered the art of the rap ballad, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

4. Helado Negro - This Is How You Smile - This Is How You Smile overflows with warmth, inspiring a feeling I don’t often get from music. Listening to it feels like a long-awaited return to a physical place of comfort--a childhood bedroom, perhaps, or a reading nook in a favorite library. Our tour guide is Roberto Carlos Lange, an expert sound designer whose plainspoken, pleasantly nasal voice might be the friendliest sound in music today. The album is comforting, yet unpredictable, with songs that range from synth folk to bedroom pop to ambient field recordings, and feature lyrics that vacillate between English and Spanish. Highlights include the bouncy “Seen My Aura,” calling to mind a collaboration between The Brothers Johnson and Ariel Pink, the sweeping and mesmerizing “Running,” combining trap drums and Budd/Eno piano, and my favorite, the devastating acoustic ballad “Todo lo que me falta.”

3. Jamila Woods - LEGACY, LEGACY! - Jamila Woods has a gift for expressing complex intellectual and musical ideas in deceptively simple ways. Her melodies are like nursery rhymes, her lyrics are cutting and conversational, and with LEGACY, LEGACY! she delivers a fiery blend of artistry and activism that rivals peak Gil Scott-Heron. These songs are bold and truthful, tackling heavy subject matter with a delicate touch, commenting on cultural appropriation on “MUDDY” (“They can study my fingers/They can mirror my pose/They can talk your good ear off/On what they think they know”), sexual assault in “SONIA” (“I remember saying no to things that happened anyway/ things that happened/I remember feeling low the mirror took my face away”), and the value of protest on “OCTAVIA” (“It used to be the worst crime to write a line/Our great great greats risked their lives, learned letters fireside/Like a seat on a bus, like heel in a march/Like we holdin' a torch, it's our inheritance”). With songs named after her artistic heroes (a convention that has become a bit trendy, as Rapsody and Sons of Kemet have pulled similar tricks for their recent projects), LEGACY! LEGACY! Is Woods’ audacious attempt to establish herself as an heir to that formidable tradition--one that succeeds without reservation.

2. Raphael Saadiq - Jimmy Lee - A force of nature with one of the most underrated back catalogs in the game (he made hits with Toni, Tony, Tone in the 80s, was a major force behind Neosoul in the 90s and 00s, and produced Solange’s A Seat At The Table in 2015), Raphael Saadiq’s latest is his most powerful effort yet, inspired by the tragic tale of his older brother Jimmy Lee, a heroin addict who died of HIV. Jimmy Lee tries to find the universal through the personal, taking a deep look into how drug addiction can tear a family apart. Throughout the project, Saadiq approaches his brother’s illness with radical empathy, singing from his perspective on the dangerously alluring “Something Keeps Calling,” and the zonked out “I’m Feeling Love.” He uses his personal tragedy as a springboard to talk about larger issues on the twinkling, self-explanatory “This World Is Drunk,” and the seething spiritual “Rikers Island.” The album veers from style to style, connected with a sound effect that mimics a channel changing on an analog TV, encompassing Prince-like grooves, languid quiet storm, simmering funk in the late Sly Stone mold, and taking detours into hip-hop and traditional gospel. Connecting it all is Saadiq’s raw passion, echoing the pain of everyone who’s lost someone to substance abuse, and singing as if his tenor is the only weapon powerful enough to end the epidemic.

1. Yves Jarvis - The Same But By Different Means - There’s a song on The Same But By Different Means called “Constant Change,” in which Jean-Sebastian Audet layers his voice into a cacophonous symphony and repeats the title phrase for 30 seconds til he reaches an abrupt crescendo. In his first project under the name Yves Jarvis (the 22-year Montreal native used to record under the name Un Blonde), “Constant Change” is his animating philosophy, guiding each second of the most surprising masterpiece of the year. A thrilling and unpredictable effort, The Same But By Different Means overflows with sonic and melodic ideas, shifting and beguiling with unexpected shifts and sounds. The album gets its power from this fluidity--sounds burst into the mix and fade away without notice; songs mutate from one genre to another (traces of freak-folk, tropicalía, funk, and a lot more) within the span of 2 or 3 minutes. It’s a hazy, dream-like collage, at times evoking the likes of Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and Nicolas Jaar; the least expected sound-a-like occurs on “That Don’t Make It So,” which could easily be mistaken for an outtake from D’Angelo’s Voodoo. No hour of music in 2019 was more calming, yet more invigorating than this one--an eclectic and restless monument to Audet’s creativity and an addicting, absorbing soundscape. I listened to hundreds of albums this year, but none of them hit me quite like this one.

THE REST:

11. Cate Le Bon - Reward 12. Big Thief - U.F.O.F./Two Hands 13. Vampire Weekend - Father Of The Bride 14. Jay Som - Anak Ko 15. Raveena - Lucid 16. American Football - American Football 17. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains 18. Kelsey Lu - Blood 19. Pivot Gang - You Can’t Sit With Us 20. Gunna - Drip Or Drown 2 21. Great Grandpa - Four Of Arrows 22. G.S. Schray - First Appearance 23. Bandgang Lonnie Bands - KOD 24. Marika Hackman - Any Human Friend 25. Mavi - Let The Sun In 26. Spellling - Mazy Fly 27. SAULT - 5 / 7 28. Juan Wauters - La Onda De Juan Pablo 29. 75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real 30. Maxo Kream - Brandon Banks 31. Brittany Howard - Jaime 32. J Balvin & Bad Bunny - Oasis 33. Rio Da Yung OG - 2 Faced 34. Desperate Journalist - In Search Of The Miraculous 35. Angel Olsen - All Mirrors 36. 03 Greedo - Netflix & Deal/Still Summer In The Projects 37. Doja Cat - Hot Pink 38. Lambchop - This (Is What I Wanted To Tell You) 39. Sada Baby - Bartier Bounty 40. Rucci - Tako’s Son 41. Floating Points - Crush 42. Bat For Lashes - Lost Girls 43. Young Thug - So Much Fun 44. Samthing Soweto - Isphithiphithi 45. Kim Gordon - No Home Record 46. Sandro Perri - Soft Landing 47. Anthony Naples - Fog FM 48. Quelle Chris - Guns 49. Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won’t Hold 50. Tyler, The Creator - IGOR

Honorable Mentions:

Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Hiding Places Caroline Shaw & The Attaca Quartet - Orange Leo Svirsky - River Without Banks Martha - Love Keeps Kicking Nilüfer Yanya - Miss Universe Drego & Beno - Sorry For The Get Off The Japanese House - Good At Falling Tree & Vic Spencer - Nothing IS Something Spielbergs - This Is Not The End Fireboy DML - Laughter, Tears & Goosebumps Dee Watkins - Problem Child Daniel Norgren - Wooh Dang

TOO MANY MORE TO NAME--could’ve listed up to 80

#Burna Boy #polo g #yves jarvis #glass beach #raphael saadiq #jamila woods #helado negro #moodymann #jenny lewis #the comet is coming #shabaka hutchings

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fmdtaeyongarchive · 5 years ago

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↬ i just wanna free somebody.

date: early 2019.

location: n/a.

word count: 1,641 words not including lyrics.

summary: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification for free somebody.

it begins at the start of the new year in the confines of an old bc entertainment studio that ash is very familiar with. he wants to try writing something different than anything he’s ever written before. that’s what he tells his producer friend (can he call him his friend yet? senior? colleague? colleague sounds best).

well, he wants to write a lot of things different than what he’s every written before, but he has to start with something, he expands in the low light of the studio. he can’t pump out an endless stream of creatively challenging songs just because he wants to. ambition is a taste he’s come to enjoy again, after years of lacking it, in the form of song creation, but it won’t do well to bite off more than he can chew.

it feels like he takes too big of a bite anyway. a few sessions with other producers and composers go by with only stray scraps of songs to show, most of which hadn’t been contributed by him, and ash starts to doubt his own ability. he’s not at the point where he can reinvent the wheel, he laments on one late night (not that time is easy to tell within the dark, soundproof rooms of the studio unless he pulls out his cellphone to check its digital clock) and the producer he’s found to keep him company one night looks at him silently from across the room.

“you’re being stubborn again.”

ash pauses and shakes his head in confusion. he wants to ask what the hell that means, all he’s been doing is trying to expand his horizons which, honestly, is pretty much the exact opposite of being stubborn, but he has too much respect for the other man to argue with him so forwardly. “i’m not trying to be stubborn,” he says instead. he rubs at his eyes and sighs as he stretches his arms over his head in an attempt to drag the fatigue closing in on the corners of his mind out of him. that never works, no matter how hard he tries to turn the metaphorical literal.

“if you want to make something different, it doesn’t have to be something no one’s ever heard before. you’re not going to have much luck with that. the human race is hundreds of thousands of years old and we’ve been making music for a lot of our existence. i’d bet nearly all of it if i was a wagering man. you’re not going to create something completely new and that’s not our job. challenge yourself instead of challenging the entire history of mankind and our artistic accomplishments. you like to act like you can handle every single task you put on your checklist, but you’re one person, taeyong. start acting like it.”

ash nods and he feels like he’s been scolded. he’d known he wasn’t going to be able to create an entirely new invention in the form of a song, but he’d let the reminder of that slip away in his singular vision of wanting to create something groundbreaking instead of more of the same he’d become known for. besides, this is the idol industry. ash loves pop music, but the bc entertainment studio wing isn’t going to be the site of any breakthroughs to change the entire course of music history any time soon. he’s deluding himself if he pretends like it is. there’s ambitious optimism and then there’s an utter lack of self-awareness and ash doesn’t want to wind up as that person too far up his own artistic ass to see the difference.

his ballads have more often than not been the work bc has dubbed satisfactory without as much reworking required, so ash promises himself to stay away from those in his mission to step outside of his comfort zone. but still, it would be pointless to expect himself to create a genre he has no experience making. ash kwon’s attempt at death metal or polka would be a disastrous way to start a new year.

ash spends a few hours listening through the depths of his music library and jotting down ideas for genres and styles he doesn’t find himself creating as often to bring up in the next writing session with some of the other producers. upbeat pop becomes a common theme of what he hasn’t been writing recently. that doesn’t surprise him. ash doesn’t often finish the songs he begins writing that fit that descriptor, as his own sound leans far from upbeat. it wouldn’t fit for one song out of an entire album track list to be a bright party song, and that isn’t what most people he’s worked with come to him to write for them either.

when he sits down with that in mind, he hums through melodies and taps out rhythms with a pen on his desk until he finds ones that grow into a longer form that he transposes onto his computer. it turns into a funky instrumental, a retro 80s dance take (ash is inspired by a uk house song he stumbles upon on one of his forgotten playlists) mixed with enough modern electronic pop to push him beyond the basics. the other composers and producers he brings in to help him throughout the process have to come in to keep him from making the song melancholic or subdued even when the production thins out during the chorus for what he imagines to be a strong powerhouse vocal lead. making it, he knows this won’t be a song for him, and he’s not sure it’ll ever find its way to release by anyone else either — he can’t see any of the usual people he shows his work to seeing it, quite frankly, and he thinks its value would be depleted if it were to be done as a group song—, but that’s something that had been on his list of new year’s resolutions — sell some songs off instead of gifting them to build his profile as a songwriter.

the near-final demo version of the instrumental is decided on among all of the producers and ash asks if he can try to write the lyrics to it. he’s inspired by what they’ve all created together and he wants to write its lyrics too. they agree, and ash spends a few days in his studio dedicating himself to nailing down lyrics. he has an idea of what he wants the words to encompass thematically; the first word that comes to mind when he listens to the song is freedom. ash can envision the song being played at a huge open air music festival mid-spring. thanks to becoming a trainee at thirteen and an idol at sixteen, ash hasn’t been to any of those sorts of festivals, but he does have a glamorized notion of what they’re like in his head.

after a few rough drafts, ash stumbles upon a phrasing that burrows its way into his heart. i just wanna free somebody. it’s a notion ash instantly circles and underlines among the mess of more easily disposable ideas that lean more obviously romantic in nature. freeing somebody is certainly worthy of being a romantic notion and ash plays with that as he scribbles out more ideas that build an image of a relationship, one that’s purposefully vaguely anywhere between a one night stand and soulmates. the specifics of that don’t matter in the context he’s writing because, in his mind, the two people involved don’t care anyway.

when that near-final draft lays in front of him, though, he’s struck again with the feeling that he’s playing it too safe and not stepping outside of his norm. love. wow, that’s a new topic for you, ash, he mentally derides himself.

it’s a few nights later when he’s hard at work on a different song, one that’s supposed to be for his next album but doesn’t feel anything like him that he writes a lyric that pulls his mind back to the track he’d been working on previously.

i hope that you find your true self.

he tacks on the hook to see how well it works in his head before committing to it fully.

i wanna free somebody.

of course that’s the path he could take the song down instead. the other song is quickly abandoned as ash returns to his aptly-named “free somebody” draft. he keeps the verses and most of the chorus, but scraps most of the pre-chorus and fits in the new line in place of what had previously been a repeat of a truncated take on one of the chorus lines. he reworks the parts he’d trashed to fit his new vision better. at other parts, he removes lyrics from entirely and goes back to make the instrumental synths more compelling to stand on their own. music is already freeing; ash can attest to that himself as someone who would rarely use the word free to describe himself.

the first drafts of the song had suffered by being weighed down by ash’s instinct to inject romantic storytelling, but this time, he doesn’t need a full story. he focuses on the goal of freeing somebody for the length of a song instead and it can be a romantic freeing, yes, that is clear from the parts he keeps, but it can simply reflect the goal of the song itself too.

he records his own voice for the demo though he thinks he’s unable to do it justice due to not having the sort of female powerhouse voice he sees singing it one day, but when he gets the news the song has been sold off to gold star media, he lets a small bud of hope blossom that it’ll wind up in the hands of someone capable so it can see the light in all its glory one day. its message had really grown on him.

#fmdverification #beth write something decent challenge failed #&& queued

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extraordinarygirl · 5 years ago

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Feel free to disagree with me, as I’m sure many people will, but I think I’ve finally figured out why I feel so disappointed in Pray for the Wicked.

I know many people find pop punk bands when they’re going through particularly difficult time in their life, and I’ve never had to live through circumstances that were THAT bad, but I would say I found Panic! at the Disco at a fairly pivotal period of my life.

I think I gravitated towards Panic because of a characteristic that runs through a lot of pop punk, which is darker themes with upbeat musical style. A number of songs on A Fever you Can’t Sweat Out tackled topics such as cheating, alcoholism, and loneliness (Build God, Then We’ll Talk; Camisado; But It’s Better If You Do), yet sound as though there is nothing wrong with the protagonist’s life if just listening to the instrumental track. Ryan’s lyrics were thought-provoking and complex; it is impossible to grasp the full meaning on the first listen. The music completely masks the actual emotion that Ryan is trying to convey with his lyrics. Although sometimes annoyingly difficult to unravel (see practically anything on Pretty. Odd.), the deeper meaning of the words Brendon sings has evolved my perception of the songs over time, as I began to understand the real message.

I think Brendon’s problem is that he has no idea how to do what Ryan did. For me, that’s what Panic was, and why I believe that Brendon has lost the right to use the band’s name to release his music. Although he has spoken at length in interviews about how much he struggled with a lack of creative control, that’s one of the sacrifices that has to be made to be part of a band, and part of what makes bands incredible. As a control freak myself, I can sympathize with Brendon, but the collaboration of artists helps elevate music by workshopping it until it is the very best it can be before it is released to fans.

I also hate to say it, but Brendon is really not a great lyricist. While some missed the mark, most of Ryan’s songs had a singular theme enveloped in complicated metaphors, some of which I don’t think he ever intended anyone to decipher. I also recently found out that some of my favourite songs on Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! were written by Dallon (Collar Full, Nicotine, This is Gospel, etc.). Even my favourite song on Pray for the Wicked, King of the Clouds, while inspired by Brendon’s words, wasn’t written by him. I’m sure he collaborated in the lyric writing of most of these songs, but Brendon’s lyrics feel very predictable, boring, and uninspired.

I know there are writers that work with Brendon, but these are his employees, not his bandmates, and I think the distinction is important. Bandmates should have equal footing in decision-making when it comes to songwriting, and they should feel comfortable in respectfully disagreeing with someone else’s ideas if they don’t like them. I fear that the people Brendon surrounds himself with now are “Brendon pleasers”, who just make suggestions, but Brendon has the final say on what goes on the album.

Although Pray for the Wicked does address addiction, the tone is completely different. The “punk” in pop punk is entirely lost in this album. Pray for the Wicked primarily seems to feature radio-ready pop, even in the controversially titled (Fuck A) Silver Lining. One of the Drunks, and Old Fashioned both touch on alcoholism, as the first album once did, and although these songs seem to be more personal than the songs on Fever, they’re also surface level, they’re unoriginal, and for lack of a better term, they’re douchey.

Brendon’s hubris certainly rears it’s ugly head all throughout this album: (Fuck A) Silver Lining, High Hopes and Hey Look Ma, I Made It all imply that Brendon feels entitled to the fame he has achieved, without acknowledging any of the people from his past that got him to where he is today; King of the Clouds, Roaring 20s, and to some extent High Hopes only seem to exist to boast about his excessive cannabis use, which he has become increasingly vocal about; and Dancing’s Not a Crime and The Overpass are so uninteresting, bland and obvious that I’m not sure how someone with over a decade of experience with songwriting could release them in good conscience.

I find the departure from extended metaphors, and complex thought within Panic’s new repertoire so disappointing when I see what has been produced in the past. I know there’s essentially no way that Ryan will rejoin Panic, but I really do feel that he was the driving force that caused them to blow up. That’s why I was so disappointed to see that High Hopes had overtaken I Write Sins, Not Tragedies as Panic’s most streamed song, and probably why I haven’t returned to the album since it’s release more than a year ago.

I’m sure there are Panic stans ready to attack me, but all I can ask is that you please read my points before forming an opinion of me. Whether you like Panic’s new material or not I think we’re on the same side; we want music with heart rather than market appeal. Please remember that I’m not just one of those old fans yelling about how Panic’s older music was better from my rocking chair. I’m still a fan, I’m just disappointed that I now feel ashamed to call myself one, because of the direction the “band” is going. I’m not sharing this opinion to instigate debates or drama with anyone, I’m just expressing these sentiments in case there are other fans who feel similarly and don’t understand why, because it’s taken me this long to figure it out myself.

#sorry this was so much more salty than i expected when i started it #dont send me hate please #p!atd

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boaws · 6 years ago

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BOAWS Top Records of 2018

20 – Bichkraft – 800 (Wharf Cat) You know, I've heard every Bichkraft record and up until 800 (the groups third) I didn't quite really know what to think of them other than...weird? I'd pretty much filed them away in a lump of experimental bands that I kind of dug, but I wasn't terribly sure what the angle was. It seems things have been a bit cleared up for me with 800, a record that is undoubtedly more refined than any of their previous, production wise. I imagine some of this can be attributed to recording with Merchandise member Carson Cox rather than a makeshift studio in a junk ridden field somewhere. However, the bands sound manages to keep a lot of the looseness of a group that would, in fact, record in such an aforementioned manner. I've never thought of Bichkraft to be much on the rhythmic side of things, but the songs on 800 are shockingly catchy at times and bounce along in a nice haphazard manner...even though I have no fucking clue what they are saying. I suppose it could be some really grim stuff, but the songs themselves wouldn't really ever reveal that. Nevertheless, their combination of post-punk and disjointed indie-rock is certainly an interesting one...in that it lies somewhere on the exteriors of both. There are times where I'm picturing late 80's or early 90's music videos with an over abundance of neon and hair for some reason...which may in fact be due to the vocals and the drum machine. It's almost like listening to A.R. Kane if they had been heavily influenced by no-wave. Like I said, interesting and I'm not real confident I've made much headway in figuring Bichkraft out, but at the very least 800 is a pretty good record. Bichkraft – Ashley (stream) BUY IT! 19 – Cloud Nothings – Last Building Burning (Carpark & Wichita) A band many are familiar with and one that has already appeared on these lists a couple times now already I believe. Cloud Nothings find themselves here again on the strengths of their fifth album that doesn't change the formula up much, other than possibly embracing the rawer aspect of their sound for an A-side that blows through five songs in a few minutes before opening up the B-side with the 11 minute “Dissolution”. They are the type of songs that Cloud Nothings have doled out before, but in a far more limited basis...or possibly in bits and pieces, however on Last Building Burning a good majority the album is consumed by that type of raucousness that had only been previously teased. The tunes still seem to incorporate a good amount of the hook heaviness of old, but one might have to dig a bit deeper beneath some of the chaos here to find it, which is fine by me. “Dissolution” ends up being an interesting track in its own, massively sized, right...wherein the band starts off in tried and true jagged fashion only to end up taking a break midway through for some improvisational noisy meandering/psychedelics before latching back on to each other to form a nice apex of noise/melody to cap it off. I'll hand it to them, Last Building Burning is an album that, in a way, I got what I expected but also came out a bit surprised as well. Cloud Nothings – Offer an End (stream) BUY IT! 18 – Gouge Away – Burnt Sugar (Deathwish Inc.) It took me awhile to get around to this one, and by that I mean I just heard it maybe three or so weeks ago, but that is just how things work with me sometimes. Anyway, Gouge Away do a lot of things well on Burnt Sugar. That's about as generic as a statement as one can make, right? But it's kind of true, especially when the takeaway with most is that they are a hardcore/punk band playing songs that are somewhere in between power chord driven noise-rock or 90's alternative and being able to blur the lines between all of that is commendable. How that's really any different than a lot of bands these days? I don't really know, but at the very least Gouge Away pull it together in a much tidier way for some memorable songs that do well in the way of being powerful and noisy enough satisfy my taste for aggro delights of 90's noise-rock. So if that's also your cup of tea, then Gouge Away will likely be of particular interest to you as well. Gouge Away – Fed Up (stream) BUY IT! 17 – Bush Tetras – Take the Fall (Wharf Cat) Another entry from Wharf Cat, which has sneakily become one of my most appreciated record labels over the past couple years. Although, I'd argue it's hard to miss on something like Bush Tetras, but good on them on at least having the initiative to release these five new jams. Dating all the way back to 1979, Bush Tetras material hasn't exactly been plentiful, but it HAS often been good and Take the Fall sees them return in a form that still has them right in step with anything they did during when they were in the thick of the NYC no-wave movement. There is a little more brute force to be found here, with a deep bass slink and a rainfall of atonal distortion that lurch along in a delightfully sleazy way while vocalist Cynthia Sley takes every opportunity to wrap her voice all around it. Take the Fall is every bit as jagged and poignant as any of their past material, but somewhat removed from the time of dub-esque/dance influenced rhythmic nature of their infancy...sitting more firmly in the post-punk camp, but still something that could have only been culled from a specific time and place. Bush Tetras – Red Heavy (stream) BUY IT! 16 – Hide – Castration Anxiety (Dais) There is generally an appeal to me, to some extent or another, for when a record functions primarily in such a primitive manner as one like Castration Anxiety does. Maybe even more so when it comes creeping out of the depths of the darker side of the industrial/electronic world, as Hide does...the duo of visual artist Heather Gabel and percussionist Seth Sher. The ingredients are relatively simple for the pairing, who throw together the monotonous pulse of heavy beats/percussion to largely drive this excursion into brute force, but decidedly steer it down a darker path thanks to the inclusion of some creative synth work. Occasionally dream-like, but probably more so in the nightmarish sense, the synth/electronics are often of the buzzing/scraping variety rather than the ethereal airy gothy qualities that a project like this may initially suggest. Nope. This is definitely more so about leather, dungeons and the sound of anything colliding with metal. And while it could be concluded that Hide had boiled everything down to the coldest possible fraction, there still lies Gabel's vocals which by the end of Castration Anxiety are such an inclusive part of the narrow singular vision at play, that it's easy to forget there is an actual person performing the constant moans and spoken mantras among it all. Dais always seems to do well in finding these particular types of releases, and this one can certainly be added to the list of winners. Hide – Wildfire (stream) BUY IT! 15 – Ian Sweet – Crush Crusher (Hardly Art) I got a late start on Ian Sweet, so late in fact that I completely missed the transition from solo project...to band...back to solo project. So, as it stands now, Ian Sweet is the solo work of Jilian Medford. I did get a chance to hear 2016's album Shapeshifter, however by that point I'm sure everything had already been shifted back to full solo mode. My initial thoughts on that album were a mixed one, a fun and somewhat catchy slab of indie-rock, but ultimately an album that didn't grab me a whole lot aside from a couple songs. However, on Crush Crusher things have dramatically veered towards deeper/interpersonal territory, dealing with issues of anxiety/depression among others. With that comes an album that is actually far more melodic and riff laden than prior heard, but on work as emotionally revealing as Crush Crusher it's not entirely surprising, as there is a lot being unearthed here in a therapeutic fashion. For Medford, I imagine even if Crush Crusher had been met with little to no response it wouldn't have mattered, as I highly doubt this album was really meant for anyone other than herself. Ian Sweet – Spit (stream) BUY IT! 14 – Marriage + Cancer – Marriage + Cancer (Self Sabotage) A Portland based band that showed up this past year with their debut album sporting some nice Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspired artwork on it. While some may be disappointed to learn that this self-titled first attempt isn't as grimy and sadistic as the aforementioned movie, Marriage + Cancer prove mighty capable of being one of those bands that can actually marry noise AND rock; not too clean but also not a room clearer either...although I've rarely turned my nose up at that as well. I think the Jesus Lizard thing gets bandied about with these guys for sure, I mean, I even mentioned it in the initial write up did for this record, but after hearing this over a full year it's almost as if Drive Like Jehu was forced to slow their asses down a bit and then things are just dirtied up some...which may be a large reason I like it as much as I do. I just love big loud ringing guitars, sure...feedback/distortion is pretty a-ok too, but something about that “sound” will always do it for me and Marriage + Cancer seem to have just that. Marriage + Cancer – Six Feet + A Box (stream) BUY IT! 13 – Big'n – Knife of Sin (Computer Students) When you want something done right then seek out someone who has plenty of experience doing the job. If the same can be said about noise-rock then Big'n would be a fine choice to employ. Having made most of their mark during the 90's with a number of singles/splits and two full-length albums, they didn't necessarily get the attention they likely deserved during their initial run throughout that decade. However, after getting back together a few years back now...that's slowly began to be rectified. For the uninitiated, Big'n provide a workman-like quality of noise that bands within the same region often did...like Tar and Shorty...meaning they were, and are undeniably, Midwestern sounding. Maybe one of the magnificent things about Big'n is that nearly 30 years later this band can sound 100% as they did at the very start and are absolutely undeterred in their approach. Essentially, it's a formula of razory guitar work and start/stop rhythms that worked for them then, and it works equally well for them now. It's even amazing how the singers vocals are no less raspy/strained. A time capsule of a band, but in the very best way. The packaging for this EP is absolutely ridiculous too and I love it. Comes in a giant silver zip-lock type case/bag that holds the actual record in a whole other sleeve. Pretty labor intensive I would have to guess, but it provides for a pretty spectacular whole package. When people try and argue why folks enjoy records over any other more convenient medium, I'll kindly (maybe not so kindly) direct them to Knife of Sin as an example as to why. Big'n – Snake Eater (stream) BUY IT! 12 – Viagra Boys – Street Worms (Year 0001) I can't even recall the number of times I watched the video for the track “Sports” on YouTube. I then made practically anyone I thought would even remotely care watch it. I apologize for likely being kind of insufferable there for a bit, but damn if that isn't a killer track and a great video to pair it up with. I guess these guys have been stirring it up for a bit now over in Sweden, but this past year was my first exposure to their brand of off-kilter post-punk, if that's even what one could call it, as there is plenty more going on here with everything from saxophone skronk, a consistent element of dance-punk, and near two minute skit of some absurd dog show. It would be easy to dismiss Viagra Boys as some foreign version of Electric Six, but that would be a fairly big disservice, as there is quite a bit more substance to their music underneath all the foolishness and imagery, to which there is a fairly precise and poignant message of co-existing with everyone else in an immoral society. Maybe one of the less disguised songs, “Worms” is a good indicator of that. No matter, Viagra Boys deliver on the promise of an excellent single with an album that provides more to digest than I think anyone really anticipated. Good stuff. Viagra Boys – Worms (stream) BUY IT! 11 – Casanovas in Heat – Twisted Steel, Sex Appeal (Katorga Works) Announced a couple years ago, Twisted Steel, Sex Appeal just now made it out this past year after a handful of delays that are both label related and just rockin' too fucking hard by the sound of it. While Casanovas in Heat have since disbanded during the albums stay in release purgatory, this is no less a great way to go out as Twisted Steel, Sex Appeal is a power pop gem that absolutely smokes through ten wonderful tracks. Riffs aplenty here folks, and they are cranked the hell up on top of that. It's a shame this couldn't have come out around the time it was originally designated as the album could have had a good chance of really taking off, but nevertheless things happen and you get what you get...and that is 100 copies of an album that kind of just eventually floated out there with little to no fanfare. Kudos to Katorga Works for seeing it through though, despite fates best efforts to crater it. For those that appreciate big melodic power/pop-punk, then this is an album that you have to absolutely track down. The more I listen, the better it gets honestly. I'm sure wherever I place it now won't do it justice a few months from now, which is kind of funny when I think about it in context with how this album was released, huh? Casanovas in Heat – Wet Dreams (stream) BUY IT! 10 – Wrong – Feel Great (Relapse) Wrong would have been one of my favorite bands when I was much younger, if they had in fact existed then. To say that nostalgia is a strong feeling is quite an understatement when I listen to their second album Feel Great, as drop-D taco riffing rock was king to me then, and still even now when I hear it done there are parts of me that get all teary eyed. Ok, probably not to that extent, but it does still stir me a bit and Wrong likely does it better than anyone out there right now...although I don't think there are a whole lot out there to count. While Feel Great doesn't quite capture me like their debut album did, it's still quite the fun and heavy ride through its ten tightly spun tracks. At the very least it helps me forget about the atrocities of post-Stanier/Bogdan era Helmet. So yeah. Wrong – Upgrade (stream) BUY IT! 09 – Pinkshinyultrablast – Miserable Miracles (Club AC30 & Shelflife) I remember writing about an Air Formation album years ago and then got an e-mail from Club AC30 grilling me about how I got the album and so on. Never mind that I enjoyed it and wrote positively about it, but that's cool. No hard feelings right? I'll even consider it kind of making amends by having the good sense in releasing this fantastic nugget of dream-pop/synth-wave/what-have-you from Russia's Pinkshinyultrablast. They are a band that has shown considerable steps forward from album to album, which is honestly quite rare within the shoegaze/dream-pop genre, thanks to a sound that has been so definitively mapped out. Pinkshinyultrablast seem to pay little attention to that on the groups third album Miserable Miracles, by moving towards a more heavily synth based sound that sees the washes of guitar and fuzz take second fiddle to a myriad of dreamy tones and pulsing bass. Undoubtedly a bit influenced by the meteoric rise of vapor/synth-wave (one look at the cover art could have given that away), the band incorporates it well without it ever becoming a tacky or glaring needless inclusion...in fact it sounds as natural as anything they've done before. It's a brighter sound, one not muddled in distortion like past albums, but open and airy...and one that strives to drive the ethereal factor into the red. Miserable Miracles honestly reminds me a lot of the Rumskib album that came out a few years ago and then the number of Keith Canisius solo records that followed it. Those that wish to spend a day in the clouds, this is an album that wants to take you there. Pinkshinyultrablast – Find Your Saint (stream) BUY IT! 08 – Criminal Code – 2534 (Deranged) Didn't see a whole lot on this one, but I quite enjoyed the third effort from Criminal Code, an album that sports cover art that would lead me to believe this was released sometime in the 80's on 4AD. And actually, that's not a bad place to start with 2534, because the band has apparently jettisoned a lot of the jagged straight forward post-punk styling of previous records to drape things in a much darker, but dreamier state of mind. Can't argue with the results though, as Criminal Code take a ride through some of the same musical landscape as The Sound and The Chameleons did before them, certainly presenting more a more melodical side of the band than anyone has likely heard before. At almost a dead even thirty minutes, there is very little dead weight that can be found on 2534, efficiently honing in on the sound they wanted and executing it to a T. While maybe not getting the fan fare of other bands that Deranged have put out over the years, Criminal Code has proven to be a consistently good one and that's worth noting in a pool of post-punk revivalists that at this point is likely as big as the Pacific ocean. Criminal Code – The Subject (stream) BUY IT! 07 – Ovlov – Tru (Exploding in Sound) For a time there, albeit a small one, it didn't seem like there would ever be another Ovlov album. The band had pretty much garnered themselves the reputation of the equivalent to the couple in high school that would be together one week but “done” the next. You honestly never knew if Ovlov was a band or not, and at one point it seemed like they were actually fiirreeal done. However, here we are a couple years later and things have actually been pretty stable in the Ovlov camp after putting out a singles comp and some touring, Tru came upon the listening world late this past year with about as much anticipation from me as you're about to get. For the most part I'd say I'm pretty happy with Tru, it's definitely a bit of a different beast than Am, but all the warmth/thick fuzziness that engulfed me originally is all here...just deployed in a slightly different...tender manner. And maybe a lot of that has to do with Steve Hartlett dealing with the tribulations of handling a full-time band and maybe some overflow from his more introspective side-project Stove. Either way, Tru hits the mark of all the 90's indie/alt fuzz that made that decade so special. Ovlov – Stick (stream) BUY IT! 06 – Exhalants – Exhalants (Self-Sabotage) The Xerox-ish cover art on the debut album from Exhalants had me under the impression that this was going to be some pretty wild noise-punk stuff. While what I received was in fact “noisy”, Exhalants are a far different band than those preconceptions, and while calling Austin, TX their home...almost seem like an anomaly for the area too. Oddly enough, this album sounds mighty upper Midwestern and for a noise-rock band, they are packing a metric ton of melody and riffs into their debut. It's interesting to hear an album that rides a fine line between big sweeping rock elements, but at the same time has the sound and appearance of one that is as every bit grime/filth ridden. Buildings are another band that comes to mind that were close to doing the same thing, but at times are just too polished around the edges to pull it off. Exhalants aren't afraid to cross that threshold of “noise”. And guess what? It turned out great for them. Exhalants – Latex (stream) BUY IT! 05 – Slow Crush – Aurora (Holy Roar) Huge sounding grunge/alternative infused shoegaze...there is a record like this every single year that I fall in love with. The year before it was Lacing, the year before that it was the list topper from Sigh Down One and so on. You could say I'm kind of a sucker for this kind of stuff and that's perfectly fine as I fully own up to it. The draw has always been a contrast between the dream like state that shoegaze tries to emulate into sound but also tying it to a feeling of heaviness. I've probably said it before, but Lilys on In the Presence of Nothing did it about as well as anyone ever will. It's entirely possible to create heavy music but not make it “ugly”, so to speak. So yeah, the allure is a sound akin to what Slow Crush manages to do and a handful of other bands have done over the years. The opener “Glow” is a pretty fantastic track that I kind of wish was a little more representative of Aurora as a whole, but the album steadies itself after that to slow things down for the most part, opting for a little more on atmosphere and swirling feedback. Still, a really nice slice of shoegaze. Slow Crush – Glow (stream) BUY IT! 04 – Conduit – Drowning World (Kitschy Spirit) Like how I go from talking about heavy music not necessarily needing to be ugly? Well, this is ugly. Really really ugly in fact. Ever wanted to know what happened to some of the dudes in Twin Stumps? Your answer somewhat lies in Conduit, which contains a couple of them along with a couple other guys from White Suns and Squad Car. Together they create a similar racket to that of many of the members prior bands...namely Twin Stumps, to which Conduit proudly hoist the torch in the air and trudge forward with their misery stricken lurch of decaying feedback while fishing around in there every so often for a riff or two to whip out and surprise everyone. They even go as far to occasionally throw in an every so brief ambient spot of noise in there just for good measure. One of the definite takeaways from Drowning World is that it might be some of the most uncompromisingly violent sounding music that any of the members have been apart of so far. It's truly a disturbingly disgusting sounding record and I pretty much love every second of it. Even if that's not your cup of tea, it's hard not to hand it to them as they are grinding on with this stuff even after the whole noise-rock revival thing kind of fell off and I can't really imagine there being as big of a receptive audience to it anymore. It's ok though, because I still think Rusted Shut is pretty awesome and it's evident that most of the members of Conduit do too. Of all the records on this list, Drowning World is probably the one the planet deserves the most right now. Conduit – A Hex (stream) BUY IT! 03 – Barlow – In a Strangers Car (Crafted Sounds) So In a Strangers Car was technically released around July...a couple years ago, but I didn't hear it until early last year and it didn't see much in the way of a physical release until then either, so to hell with it...it counts. That and it's far too good to not be in some type of best of list, so I'm parking it firmly here and happy to rain praise for it once again. I don't know if Barlow choose to exist in indie lo-fi obscurity, but their music deserves far more attention than it gets, that I can say for certain. With In a Strangers Car the band throws together a handful of tracks that were recorded over a several year period. In most cases, the patch work like recording process would yield head scratching results, but Barlow soundly weave these tracks together in a way that plays out in the same manner as a fever dream of whirring fuzz and hiss...stops, starts, rewinding and rumbling warbles before songs peak their head out for a minute before vanishing from your memory forever (or until you listen to the record again I guess). I make it through four songs and it feels like I've already heard bits and pieces of at least ten, however it somehow makes sense and trying to pick apart why almost seems silly. The only real option is to just sit back and enjoy it. Barlow – Tirebiter (stream) BUY IT! 02 – Olden Yolk – Olden Yolk (Trouble in Mind) I knew there was something familiar about this record when I first heard it, but obviously my mind kept firing but never connecting the dots. Naturally I turned to everyone's best friend Google and some quick searching there turned up that Olden Yolk was originally a side solo project for Quilt's Shane Butler. Tada! Answer found. I, for the most part, dug Quilt's easy breezy mixture of vaguely psych/folk and dream-pop and Butler's singing on those records only added to the distinct smoothness of it. Olden Yolk have since developed into a full band and this would mark as their debut album, which presents a lot of the same characteristics that would be familiar to Butler, however takes a noticeably larger dive into folk territory. This especially isn't too surprising, given that Quilt's last release was a full on cover album of the brilliant F.J. McMahon classic Spirit of the Golden Juice. The formula works equally well with Olden Yolk, however, possibly even better I would argue. The band might be basing themselves in folk roots, but the success of the album largely stems from the ranges/reaches of the smaller influences that have worked their way in; blurring the image with touches of psych fuzz and drumming that would certainly be a bit unorthodox on any other record. But that combination is what pushes the album outside the box, and at this point, that's the kind of album I want to hear. Olden Yolk – Common Ground (stream) BUY IT! 01 – Fond Han – Wronked (Exploding in Sound) Maybe it was just the whole of 2018 and my abysmal handling of everything concerning my life during those 365 days, but upon hearing Fond Han and their latest album Wronked, it struck me as entirely relatable. As is Wronked, things were at a constant push-pull between chaos and hibernating lulls, the struggles of depression and anxiety are real folks. There have been many albums over the years that have bravely documented such struggles, however I guess Wronked just came at the right time. Not to say it isn't a great album in its own right, because it most certainly is. Fond Han is essentially the brain child of Thomas Baumann, who took what could be considered unfinished ideas/loose ends and expanded on them, or tied them together, to create this ultimately dark but revealing look into ones very own psyche. Not at all surprising, is to find out that the sounds of that are fragmented, uneven, and extremely unpredictable...almost to the point of being full on excursions into noise. There is no real “ebb and flow” to Wronked, because there just can't be. That's not how it works. The escalation of panic and fear isn't a gradual one and Fond Han frames it as such by taking hard 90 degree left turns from the steadily, albeit loose, melodies into heaping low end/feedback that has a hardcore/metalcore slant to it...think Daughters or very early Dillinger Escape Plan. It's likely that Wronked will be highly divisive in opinion, but love it or hate it...it's a fascinating piece of work and one that helps substantially sum up what was a predominately a lost year for me. Fond Han – Dumpty (stream) BUY IT!

#top20 #bestof

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