Teen, talking ’bout teen things…

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[4.60]

Josh Langhoff: With chiming guitar and promises of belonging, a Derry teen beckons others to her isle of nihil, where everyone sits around multitracking in reverberant caves. Once the beat kicks in her offer seems tempting, but getting there is a heartfelt slog.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Remember Heathers? I miss Heathers. Remember Birdy? I don’t miss her.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: So. Fucking. Twee.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: “The teenage heart is an unguarded dart” is the suspiciously gnomic opener, delivered with the seriousness of one who knows from experience and might even find something in it to be punctured by. The guitar smears are less inscrutable and more profound: spectral smudges on this song’s black silence. It’s a dark one could get lost within. Bridie Monds-Watson’s voice is still high enough to be plaintive and adolescent enough to be amateur. There’s not a lot here; in this case, the less, the better.
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Micha Cavaseno: Archy Marshall is now the first person to experience having a more fully formed version of himself look slight compared to his own shadow-life.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The guitars glisten, the pianos tinkle, the voice treats vowels like precious baubles. Someone forgot the drums though.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Her voices bends without breaking; the source-to-delta arrangement picks up complexity, but she’s still on the still-small-voice tip. I’m still not a fan of martial folk, even at quarter-speed, but the guitar and drums provide a pleasant clash of echoes. Despite all this, it’s still not a rallying cry. It’s barely a cry.
[5]

Megan Harrington: Near my parents’ house there’s a nature trail that’s the platonic ideal setting for an early morning run or late afternoon dog walk. After months spent dodging strollers and leashes and packs of friends spread four wide, I am always excited to get out by a lake and maybe run into a deer. That is until I’m a quarter mile down the trail and so alone and definitely no one will hear me scream and murderers. “B a Nobody” has that same tiny, creepy stillness. It sounds like some ancient forest spirit that’s emerged to kill city dwellers who thought they were tough enough to handle suburban wildlife. 
[7]

Madeleine Lee: When I was at my parents’ house two weeks ago, I threw out my high school diaries. I didn’t bother re-reading them, because I already knew what was inside: every detail of my day (because each one was crucial), the occasional song lyric (because I felt some words as if they were my own), and more than occasional 5-page, single-paragraph bursts of anxiety (because high school was ending soon, which meant every choice I made in high school would affect the entire rest of my life, which meant the entire rest of my life was over). It’s this last type of entry that “B a Nobody” most reminds me of, with its fatalistic sigh that “we’ll never amount to anything.” The song as a whole is a bit too thin for me to latch onto, but I do get the feeling: SOAK sounds young, but already feels old, and my high school self probably would have written the chorus a few times in her diary.
[6]

David Sheffieck: Somewhere out there, I like to think some depressed and alienated teen is quietly singing along to this, lying on their bed and listening through cheap headphones, drawing strength and confidence and companionship from SOAK’s disaffection. I like to hope there is, at least: this needs some kind of purpose to justify itself, from its vaguely atmospheric production to lyrical angst so generalized it could fit anywhere from a terrible breakup to a shoe commercial. It sounds pristine, if hollow — but there was a time when I needed songs I could imprint any and every trauma on, just as much as I needed songs that spoke specifically to me. 
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