Oliver Kalb has spent his last two albums as Bellows, first 2016’s Fist & Palm and now this year’s The Rose Gardener, using deceptively buoyant-sounding, subtly electronic pop songs to mine the depths of his own psyche. On Fist & Palm, he documented the ugly deterioration of a friendship by placing as much responsibility on himself and his own failures as on the other party. By the album’s end, he fully acknowledges the role he played in the relationship unraveling - “Odd, how long I lasted, angry, full of hatred,” he sings, going on to ask, “How did I make it so hard to love me?” - but the question of whether anything can be recovered is left unresolved. The Rose Gardener opens on a narrator embarking upon the frequently excruciating work it takes to become a better, kinder, more productive human. In “Housekeeping,” Kalb sings about enacting changes both internal (teaching himself to “love this body, even when it hurts”) and external (“clear[ing] [his] life away” of “superficial things” and people with whom he has “no connection”).

As necessary as such work is, this private reckoning with oneself can be isolating, and there are times when Kalb finds himself plunged into despair. On “The Tower,” he voices his frustration with living in a way that is not creatively fulfilling: “I used to dream in so many ways/Now I only dream of persisting/Of day after day existence.” By the end of the song, he’s desperate for support. “Deep in the stars or wherever you are/Please pull me up/I need your arm,” he sings, his voice transformed into a tiny and muffled alien whine, a fading satellite signal seeking out companionship in a lonely universe and finding nothing but dead air. Following this, “Count ‘Em Down” is a literal reboot, as Kalb attempts to definitively cut “every single tie that [he] hold[s]” and start fresh. But perhaps some ties are worth maintaining. Notably, the album’s final sound is laughter shared amongst bandmates, a subtle reminder that maybe self-repair doesn’t need to come at the cost of the people with whom you truly do connect “in the basic human way.”



For devoted fans, PC Music princess Hannah Diamond’s long-awaited debut album, Reflections, may come as a slight disappointment. After many delays, it features only two songs that weren’t previously released as singles. But it’s important to remember that Hannah Diamond has never been a typical pop artist following the usual release strategies. In a way, she’s more like the real-life manifestation of the sort of intergalactic pop sensation imagined by a movie released at the height of Y2K frenzy (think Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century). Her visual aesthetic is firmly rooted in an idea of the future cultivated by a culture sending Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera to the top of the charts while frantically prepping for the possible end of the world. From this perspective, it only makes sense that she would release a debut that plays more like a greatest hits compilation: she’s not yet a star in our timeline, but all her songs have gone number one in the holographic alternate universe she inhabits.

Reflections is the sound of a synthetic heart breaking over and over again, and the effect is remarkably human. A. G. Cook and Easyfun build weightless, crystal-clear glass domes of twinkling synths for Diamond’s electronically shape-shifting voice to dance inside. Although she expresses very personal sentiments, her lyrics reflecting on the feelings provoked by someone you’re hopelessly in love with failing to truly see you, they’re often filtered through the lens of technology. She calls herself “the picture saved on your screen,” a digitized avatar with memories she can “replace and delete” who’s “got your face in a book, baby.” These songs simultaneously paint a portrait of a girl rejected by the boy she desires and a pop superstar worshipped by masses and understood by no one. The true genius of Hannah Diamond lies in her duality, and Reflections perfectly encapsulates her ability to be both a girl we can all relate to and a mythologized larger-than-life fantasy at once.



In the past, I’ve admired Katie Dey’s work more than I’ve actively enjoyed listening to it, but that all changed with her surprise-released third album, solipsisters. Here, she tempers her experimentation by writing more conventionally-structured songs. The end result is essentially bedroom pop warped and twisted into lush electronic dreamscapes, where Dey’s wavering, heavily processed voice, though more centered than in the past, broaches the layers of sound like a hesitant ghost. The alien beauty of it all initially masks the album’s intensely personal and frequently painful lyrical content, which documents Dey’s conflicting and ever-evolving relationship with her own body and how accurately it reflects her true identity.

The album’s most digestible song, “stuck,” is accompanied by a music video in which Dey fashions her long hair into a braided beard before cutting most of it off. It’s bizarre at first but turns cathartic once you witness Dey’s giddy reaction. “I was born inside this body and I’m stuck there,” she sings at the song’s beginning, “When I look at myself, I can never tell who I am.” By the end of the song, this statement is repurposed as a question: “If we abandoned our shells, do you think anyone could tell who we were?” The video answers by illustrating that when Dey abandons her shell via physical transformation, she’s an even truer version of herself than before, freed (at least temporarily) from the song’s earlier tension. As for what anyone else thinks? “Best not to worry about it.” The rest of solipsisters also hinges on this theme, as Dey obsesses over her perceived flaws (“My soul sings in higher octaves than my larynx will allow”) while at the same time telling herself it will all be okay (“I’m finding a way to gently alleviate the surface pain . . . I can’t think like I am only this shell”). She may not always believe herself, but the ability to persevere regardless is what motivates her to keep pushing forward, even when it feels like an uphill struggle.