albums i listened to all the way through
posted this week and every week (47)
Substack overwhelms me. It feels a little too adult right now—something I built last year when I was in a better place mentally and emotionally. I’ve been leaning away from it. I’m in search of something more tangible.
These days, I am in full hibernation mode. I want to curl up in bed and read books and listen to sad music like I’m fifteen again. Tumblr is always open on my laptop. My reading queue is full. (If my Goodreads 2026 Book Challenge is any indication, I’m two books ahead of schedule!) This is a big deal for me. Grad school totally burned me out on pleasure reading. I’m slowly finding my way back, bit by bit.
Currently, I’m really into the topic of death. (Clearly, watching The Pitt has gotten to me.) I checked out all the nonfiction books about life and dying from the library and got to work reading. Erika Hayasaki’s The Death Class has been a fairly good place to start. I think, had I taken an undergraduate course about death, dying, and living, I might have a better handle on my grief at this point in my life.
I keep thinking back to the books I was reading this time fifteen years ago. The well-meaning, God-fearing adults in my life thought it would be a good idea to gift me Heaven Is For Real in the wake of my dad’s passing. I think I started it but couldn’t bear to get through it.
Most everything the adults around me did at the time felt like pandering. There was a lot of walking on eggshells, like I might break at any point. Having come from a small Southern town, I was used to everyone knowing my family’s business. Still, the sudden appearance of the dead dad pendulum isn’t something you can ignore. It hung over me for years, coloring every interaction and piece of media I consumed.
Everyone treated me with pity. I hated it.
To cope, I read and re-read The Hunger Games Series. It was the only thing I could do not to fall head first into depressive oblivion or anxious embarrassment. Something about those books spoke to me and allowed me to process everything without the need to name any of it.
If you try a general search for what kinds of books to get teenagers who’ve just lost a parent, you’ll find a weird array of Reddit posts telling you not to bother with anything nonfiction, or really anything at all. It’s difficult to support someone going through that kind of loss at such an in-between age.
Something I love about The Pitt is how healthcare professionals cope with the omnipresence of death. Because it happens every single day, they develop strategies to live with it and through it. Be it casual humor, a respectful moment of silence, or the acknowledgement that some death just isn’t fair, characters tasked with saving lives for a living know the cost of losing one better than most people.
I am drawn to stories like this because I too speak the language of loss. We all come to know it sooner or later, but facing it head-on is another thing altogether. I’d like to get better and speak it more fluently.
Here are the albums I listened to all the way through this past week:
Dream Nails—You Wish
Overall Vibe: This is an album full of paradoxes. Many things are true at once. I believe in the stars and science. I’m gonna download all the information and implode at the detonation. In a world of conflicting pain & pleasure—joy & misery— how else does one make sense of anything but to write their own confusion confusingly? This album sounds like how it feels to want to scream on a stalled subway train or dance erratically in public. It doesn’t always make sense, but maybe it doesn’t have to.
Why you might like it: If you’re a fan of riot grrrl-adjacent bands and haven’t heard of them yet, you’ll probably like what Dream Nails has to offer. I like their previous release Doom Loop and its furious, activist-focused urgency. I was so stoked to hear this new album but admittedly disappointed on the first listen. This album lacks the ferocious bite I expect from this genre. They went for a more hopeful, exploratory tone, especially on tracks like “The Sign” and “Pack My Wax.” They’re finding their footing in the wake of some pretty major personnel shifts. I really miss Ishmael Kirby on vocals. While I am glad to see he’s doing more intentional work to fulfill his artistic integrity, his presence added something truly unique to Dream Nails that is so clearly missing on this release.
Favorite Tracks: “House of Bones,” “The Information," and “Move Like An Animal”
It’s good. Not my favorite, but it might be for you.
While I appreciate the instinct to lean on guitar-bass-drum punk basics in moments of change, especially for a genre so well-known for its chaotic screeching grit, I prefer when they don’t pull any punches. Just personal preference, but maybe you’ll like it! Maybe I need a few more listens for it to grow on me.
Ailbhe Reddy—Kiss BigX
Overall Vibe: You’re walking down an empty city street, probably blasting The Blue Nile on your wired headphones, missing something you lost ten years ago. You’ll never get it back. You know that, and yet, on nights like these, when the street lights dance around your falling, nostalgic tears, you can almost make yourself believe they’re next to you again.
Why I like it and you might too: Bittersweet sapphic break-up album from an Irish lass with 80s-inspired Eurythmics synths and haunting guitar riffs? Need I say more?
Favorite Tracks: “That Girl,” “Dead Arm,” and “Crave”
I just finished reading Chloe Caldwell’s novella, WOMEN. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, this is a story about a woman falling in love, and falling out, with another woman for the first time. It’s been described as required reading for sapphics in the vein of Stone Butch Blues, Tipping The Velvet, and Ruby Fruit Jungle.
I opted for the audiobook the first time around and really found myself in it, especially conversations surrounding bisexuality and embracing the unwieldy, yet infinitely exciting world of queer women for the first time.
The story itself is about a year-long affair between our narrator and a handsome, yet already taken, butch named Finn. It’s emotional, tense, sensual, and so relatable, it hurts. While Caldwell tells a story as old as time, she does it with devastating meta-commentary well-placed in this stupid era of therapy-speak. It’s honestly reflective in a way I’ve always wanted to be.
Ailbhe Reddy’s newest album Kiss Big does the same thing in just nine short songs. I found it on YouTube this past week by some miraculous accident.
It’s a brief, yet inspired, collection of songs about the end of a long-term relationship between two people—women, I suspect, though anyone can find themselves here. Our speaker has already lost their lover—caught between missing them and knowing they will have to move on someday. Yet, the detailed reflections and ruminations transition beautifully into songs of well-wishes and sincere apologies.
We’ve all done some version of this: untangling ourselves from another person and the person we were when we were standing beside them. It takes longer than we expect, finding beads of grief in the couch cushions years after the inital ending.
So many albums have captured this phenomenon and done it perfectly. It’s nothing new, per se. Yet, Reddy brings something new to an old story. It doesn’t take place in the heat of the break-up, but rather, in the months and years afterwards. It’s like our narrator is watching their ex from an alternate universe—I see everything but know it’s none of my business. Be cruel to me so I can move on for good. It’s a sensory haunting and the layered production stylings only heighten the experience.
I am so glad YouTube threw this one across my timeline.
I think the reason reading suggestions for those grieving miss the mark is because their underlying presumptions do as well: they either frame the loss as something to get over by taking the right steps, or some beautiful lesson in disguise.
I’m no expert, but I think grief and loss is something like getting old—it's going to happen, one way or the other, so all we get to decide is how we're going to do it. I also think it’s a mistake to try to control the experience in some way. A better goal might be to face our grief with enough honesty that we eventually learn to sit not happily, but comfortably enough with it.
It's never easy of course, and while I'm not glad about that, I do think that's for the best. I mean yeah, it's a part of life, but that doesn't make it any less tragic.
As for the Hunger Games, it's only a matter of time before my daughter discovers those. I have a feeling that in a few years, we'll be reading those with her. (Just as well for me; I've seen the movies, but never cracked the books.)
I gave my daughter the Hunger Game series. She ate it up. I then found the "Red Queen" series and she is really enjoying that! I don't know too much about it, but it seemed Hunger Games like.
Oh, speaking of, there is a new prequel to the Hunger Games (coming?) out.