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Lauren Sanderson sits down with Medicine Box for an interview about her album 'Lauren,' a surprise Fred Durst DM, and owning the possessive lesbo energy she's never held back.
Tyler, the Creator just changed his Instagram bio to two words, and now everyone thinks a jazz album is on the way.Tyler, the Creator just changed his Instagram bio to two words, and now everyone thinks a jazz album is on the way.
"Fireproof" is a song about the exhausting loyalty of loving someone who doesn't need saving. Mitski captures that particular ache of pouring everything into a person who somehow stays untouched, while you're the one burning up. It's devotion told from the losing side, and it never stops feeling urgent.
"Old Lovers" lives in that specific agony of bumping into someone you used to love and pretending it's fine. Tom Odell and Wesley Shultz of The Lumineers walk through a reunion that feels casual on the surface and devastating underneath, tracking every small gesture and loaded silence as two people try to figure out what they still are to each other.
"Amateur at Best" is a song about loving someone with everything you have and still not being enough. Brenn! captures that specific kind of exhaustion where effort and outcome stop matching up, and the person you're doing it all for doesn't see it the same way you do. It's honest without being bitter, which makes it hit harder.
"Perhaps We're a Storm" sits with the dizzy feeling of being mid-transformation, caught between who you were and who you might become. Fruit Bats wraps that uncertainty in soft pastoral imagery and open-ended questions, and somehow it doesn't feel anxious. It feels like wonder.
Jesse Welles turns the American political circus into a darkly comic folk ballad, dragging the NRA, tech oligarchs, and media grifters through a carnival funhouse where nothing quite adds up and everyone's got an angle. The song doesn't rage at the machine so much as laugh at how thoroughly the machine has eaten itself. It's satire with a country twang and a gut-punch underneath, the kind of song that makes you cackle and then go quiet.
"Stars Stay Awake" is a song about being trapped in someone else's gravitational pull, fully aware the relationship is destroying you and completely unable to stop. The Army, The Navy use celestial imagery not to romanticize love but to describe its physics: the way certain people don't just attract you, they keep you in orbit long after the world between you has started dying. It's one of those songs that's honest enough to be uncomfortable.
"Dollar Bill" strips everything down to a single uncomfortable question: what's the difference between love and transaction? Jack White builds the song around that tension with almost nothing, a handful of words and a riff, letting the gaps do as much work as the lyrics. It's minimal on the surface and unsettling underneath.
"Ritual" is a song about anxiety that has turned inward and started feeding on itself. The Warning map the experience of catastrophic thinking not as a flaw to fix but as a compulsion that has become identity. It's uncomfortable because it's precise, and precise because it's honest.
"Emotionally Unavailable" is a portrait of someone who keeps the world at arm's length not out of coldness, but out of fear. The London Suede trace the quiet logic of self-protection, where paralysis feels safer than risk and loneliness becomes preferable to the pain of reaching out. What starts as observation ends as confession.
"See Out Loud" lives in that narrow gap between 5 AM and the rest of your life, where sensation is sharper than thought and the usual instinct to hold yourself together stops making sense. Interpol build a song around a single pivot: from someone trying to manage an experience to someone surrendering to it completely. It's not a love song exactly, but it's one of the most honest things you can feel about another person.
"Tunnels" is a song about the strange peace that comes from narrowing your world down to almost nothing. Finn Wolfhard sketches a day in loose, vivid fragments, the kind of afternoon that feels both completely ordinary and quietly falling apart. The recurring image of closed tunnels is not a metaphor for being trapped. It is a metaphor for choosing the smaller, safer view on purpose.
"Breathless" is a song about the quiet exhaustion of being the one who always shows up. Josh Conway lays out a relationship built on one-sided devotion, where love is given freely and endlessly but never returned in kind. It's the kind of song that doesn't explode with anger; it just tells the truth, steadily, until it lands.
Kelsey Lu turns letting go into something stranger and more honest than a typical breakup song. The person being released isn't fully real anymore, more memory than presence, more ghost than lover. What makes the song hit hard is that Lu saw the ending coming from the very beginning, and chose to leave anyway, on her own terms and before death made the choice for her.
"Drive" is a song about the terrifying honesty of loving someone before you know if they love you back. Fousheé captures that suspended, weightless moment of showing up at someone's door and saying the quiet part out loud. It's intimate and urgent, like a confession you've been rehearsing alone finally finding its voice.
"Arteries" is a song about the impossible gap between knowing something is over and actually feeling free of it. hey, nothing capture that specific ache where leaving doesn't mean letting go, where resentment and longing live in the same breath, and where the person you wanted to be for someone else quietly outlasts the relationship itself.
"Better Man" is about standing in your own way and knowing it. Slow Pulp captures that specific exhaustion of repeating the same mistakes while watching yourself do it, like a photograph you can't stop staring at. The song doesn't offer a way out. It just sits inside the feeling until leaving starts to sound like the only honest answer.
"Thanx Again" is not really a song. It's a spoken outro that closes out an album by naming the people, the places, and the losses that made Sublime possible. Warm, funny, and quietly heavy, it ends with a moment of silence and a recording of Bradley Nowell's voice that hits harder than any chorus could.
Some feelings don't make sense sober, and Suki Waterhouse isn't pretending otherwise. "When I Get Drunk (I Want You Boy)" is a bracingly honest confession about wanting someone who treats you badly, dressed up in all the dizzy warmth that wanting can feel like before reality kicks back in. It's not a breakup song or a love song exactly. It's something messier and more honest than either.
"Until The Sun Explodes" is Sublime at their most tender and haunted, a song about owing someone everything while barely being able to hold onto the memory of them. It sits in that strange grief where love and loss have fused so completely you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. The narrator keeps encountering the person everywhere except where it actually matters, and the weight of that accumulates into something quietly devastating.
A brief voicemail fragment, almost throwaway, but packed with Sublime's whole spirit: urgency, humor, and the instinct to live loud while there's still time. It's less a song than a snapshot, the kind of message that only makes sense years later. Short as it is, it says everything about how Bradley Nowell moved through the world.
"247-369" is a song about the exhausting ritual of numbing out, the kind where you know exactly what you're doing and do it anyway. Sublime's narrator is already checked out before the night even starts, burning through cigarettes and hitting it harder just to survive being around people. By the time the outro lands, there's nothing left isn't a confession, it's almost a relief.
"What For" captures something most breakup songs won't admit: the moment you've already emotionally left but can't be bothered to make it official. Sublime builds a portrait of someone who knows exactly what they need to say and keeps finding reasons not to say it. It's not dramatic, and that's what makes it sting.
"Come Correct" is a loyalty ultimatum dressed up in swagger, the kind of song that sounds loose and fun until you realize how seriously it means every word. Jakob Nowell and G. Love trade verses about the cost of being fake, flaky, or straight-up disrespectful to the people who matter. It's a Sublime lineage track that earns its place not through imitation but through genuine heat.
"Froggy" is a song about longing for a kind of effortless, carefree existence you can see clearly but can't quite inhabit. Sublime paints a portrait of someone who floats through life untouched, then turns the lens inward on a narrator who is very much touched, very much struggling, and reaching for whatever makes the weight lift. It's funny and a little sad, the way the best Sublime songs always are.
"Figueroa" is a song about memory as punishment, the kind that feels too good to let go of even when it hurts. Sublime leans into Spanish to capture something that English can't quite hold: the specific ache of loving someone you've already lost and knowing you caused the loss. It's grief and guilt and desire all folded into one phrase, "sublime maldición," a beautiful curse that becomes its own kind of devotion.
"Gangstalker" drops you inside a mind that has completely lost its grip on what's real, and it never once blinks. Sublime build the track around a narrator convinced they're being hunted, and the genius is how the song holds genuine sympathy and quiet tragedy at the same time. It's funny until it isn't, and that tension is exactly the point.
Less a polished song than a captured moment, this track drops you into a room where someone is just saying what they actually think, loudly and without apology. It is devotion expressed the way real devotion sounds: messy, profane, and completely sincere. Sublime gets their flowers here not in a press release but in the way a friend talks after midnight.
"Casino Toarmina" is about the specific ache of meeting someone at exactly the wrong moment. Sublime captures the feeling of a real connection forming in real time, and then watching it dissolve under the weight of a life already waiting back home. It's a vacation song with a gut punch hidden inside it.
"Trey's Song" sits in that painful gap between wanting to love someone and knowing you can't stay long enough to follow through. Jakob Nowell sings about a sweetness that's right there in front of him, but a past wound keeps him from reaching for it. It's a song about self-sabotage that's honest enough to not pretend otherwise.
"Evil Men" is a confession that refuses to apologize cleanly. The narrator knows his damage, names it out loud, and somehow finds a dark pride in the wreckage. It's one of the most uncomfortably honest portraits of self-aware destruction Sublime has ever put to tape.
"F.T.R." opens with the uncomfortable thrill of someone celebrating an act of violence, then dares you to keep nodding along. Sublime wraps a genuinely unsettling premise inside a groove so infectious it almost works as a trick. The song is about how good feelings can be completely disconnected from morality, and how confidently someone can broadcast that without flinching.
"Personal Hell" follows a man who lies, cheats, and buries his crimes under the justification that he's providing for his family. Sublime sketches him with almost no judgment, which makes the portrait sharper and more unsettling than any condemnation would. The song's real question isn't whether he's a bad person. It's whether consequence can even find someone this good at disappearing.
"Favorite Song" is about what happens when your own escape routes run out on you. Jakob Nowell and Skegss map the slow erosion of joy that comes with going too far, where the music that used to save you starts sounding hollow and the person in the mirror is harder to recognize. It's a confession dressed up as a party, and it hits harder than it should.
There are no verses here, no chorus, no resolution. Just a voice remembering out loud, piecing together a person from stray details like a dalmatian in a van and red hair and a baby in someone's arms. Sublime's "Maybe Partying Will Help...Pt. 1" is the kind of tribute that works precisely because it refuses to be tidy about it.
"Backwards" captures that specific kind of exhaustion where you're doing everything and accomplishing nothing. Sublime and FIDLAR build a portrait of someone grinding, partying, and unraveling all at once, stuck in a loop they can't name until the word finally arrives. It's funny and bleak in equal measure, which is exactly what makes it land.
"Can't Miss You" is a song about wanting to stop wanting someone, and failing completely. Sublime wraps a genuinely messy emotional situation in a breezy delivery that makes the contradiction sting harder. It's the kind of song that sounds like summer until you actually listen to the words.
"Wizard" drops you into a restless, chemical haze where the line between seeking help and seeking escape has completely dissolved. The narrator is stuck, not just in a place but in a state of being, unable to go home and unable to stay where they are. It's a song about that specific limbo where every door looks like a trap and the only guide available is a guy selling pills in a dark bar.
"Ensenada" is a getaway fantasy dressed up as a breakup song. Sublime frames the split not with heartbreak but with relief, trading domestic weight for border-town freedom and making the whole thing feel like a party you weren't invited to. It's reckless, funny, and oddly honest about what some people actually want when a relationship stops fitting.
"cigarette smoke" is about the specific exhaustion that sets in after a relationship that quietly fell apart. Olivia Rodrigo captures the moment you stop mourning and start resenting, when you want the memories to rot so the grief finally has somewhere to go. It's a breakup song less interested in heartbreak than in the slow anger of realizing you were the only one who really showed up.
"Expectations" is Olivia Rodrigo doing something she does better than almost anyone: turning personal embarrassment into a battle cry. It's a post-breakup anthem that's honest enough to admit the mistake before celebrating the lesson, and funny enough that the self-awareness never tips into self-pity. By the end, the standards she's setting feel less like demands and more like hard-won clarity.
"less" sits in that quiet, devastating space where a relationship hasn't exploded but quietly deflated. Olivia Rodrigo captures the specific grief of being loved by someone who knows you well enough to let you go, and hating them a little for being right about it.
"what's wrong with me" sits with a feeling most people have had but few want to name: the creeping suspicion that a relationship is making you sick. Olivia Rodrigo frames it as a medical mystery, running through symptoms before arriving at the uncomfortable diagnosis. It's a song about the moment denial starts losing the argument.
"begged" is a quiet gutpunch about the gap between the love you're getting and the love you actually need. Olivia Rodrigo captures something most people won't say out loud: that staying patient and grateful starts to feel like a lie when you know you had to beg for the bare minimum. It's not about a dramatic breakup. It's about the slow, suffocating ache of a relationship where you're already losing.
"the cure" is Olivia Rodrigo sitting with a painful truth most people spend years avoiding: the right person cannot fix the wrong internal wound. It's a song about knowing you're loved, knowing that love helps, and knowing it still isn't enough. The honesty in it is almost uncomfortable.
"Purple" starts as a love song and quietly becomes something more unsettling. Olivia Rodrigo maps the way two people merge until the edges blur, using color as both a metaphor and a warning. By the time the outro arrives, the sweetness has curdled, and the question hanging in the air is whether this is love or just the absence of yourself.
"my way" is Rodrigo at her most territorial, a song about the specific kind of irritation that comes from watching someone try too hard to steal what's already yours. It's not heartbreak or jealousy. It's the eye-roll of someone who knows she's winning but is increasingly annoyed that she has to say it out loud.
"u + me = <3" captures that specific electric feeling of a new relationship where everything feels inevitable and you almost don't care if it's reckless. Olivia Rodrigo writes a love song that knows its own irrationality and commits anyway. It's sweet without being naive, and hopeful in a way that actually stings a little.
"maggots for brains" captures that specific kind of longing that doesn't feel romantic at all. It feels like decay. Olivia Rodrigo turns the absence of a partner into a full-body rot, and the result is one of the most uncomfortably relatable portraits of codependency in recent memory.
"honeybee" is Olivia Rodrigo at her most quietly terrified, writing a love song that keeps flinching at its own happiness. It captures that specific feeling of being so deep in something good that you can't stop bracing for it to end. The sweetness is real, but so is the dread underneath it.
"stupid song" is Olivia Rodrigo at her most lovesick and self-aware, chasing a feeling so overwhelming that language itself feels inadequate. The song lives in that specific ache of wanting someone you haven't said anything to yet, where every small detail becomes charged and every quiet moment turns into a fantasy. It's a crush song that understands exactly how irrational crushes are, and loves that about itself anyway.
"drop dead" captures that specific, almost unbearable feeling of meeting someone you've already decided you're in love with before they've said a word. Olivia Rodrigo writes the crush not as a gentle flutter but as a full-body emergency, equal parts euphoria and dread. It's one of the most honest songs about infatuation in recent memory because it doesn't romanticize the feeling so much as survive it.
Love Spells talks his debut album, the Blush collective, dancing as honesty, and why Texas never really left his sound.
Linus Hablot sits down with Medicine Box at Medium Sized Backyard to talk new music, dream tours, and why playing live with a band is helping him finally finish the songs he's been sitting on for years.
"Back Home" catches Yeat at a strange crossroads: everything he hustled for is real now, but none of it feels the way it was supposed to. The flex is genuine, the paranoia is genuine, and the numbness underneath both is the most honest thing on the track. It's a victory lap where the runner keeps glancing back at the starting line.
"Kill The Geese" is Joji at his most quietly unraveling, circling a breakup through blurry images of malls, rain, and empty pockets. It's a song about performing indifference so hard that the effort becomes the confession. The more the narrator insists they're fine, the more obvious it is they're not.
"FTC" is one of those songs that hides a love confession inside a rejection of everything that isn't love. Joji strips the narrator down to a single preference, and that simplicity hits harder than any grand romantic gesture could. It's a two-minute argument that the right person makes everywhere else feel pointless.
"Do You Know The Devil" finds Vince Staples in a rare moment of raw vulnerability, tracing a life spent too close to darkness and desperate for a way out. It's not a song about evil so much as about exhaustion, the kind that comes from carrying weight you never asked for. Vince doesn't pose as a saint or a sinner here. He just sounds like someone who's been in the fire long enough to know it by name.
Vince Staples takes the most patriotic phrases Americans know and wrings them dry until all that's left is the irony. "Only In America" holds the promise of freedom in one hand and the reality of survival in the other, and it never lets you forget those two things have never been the same. It's a song that sounds like a celebration and feels like a funeral.
"The Big Bad Wolf" is Vince Staples dismantling the fairy tale that Black Americans were ever safe from the state. Built around Slick Rick's chilling chorus and a relentless accumulation of historical and personal violence, the song refuses comfort at every turn. It is not a protest song in the traditional sense. It is a reckoning.
"White Flag" finds Vince Staples exhausted by every war he's expected to fight at once: racial violence, street life, love, and the performative allyship that surrounds all of it. The chorus isn't defeat. It's the clearest-eyed thing he says on the track. By the end, surrender stops feeling like weakness and starts feeling like the only honest move left.
"I Built You A Tower (a)" is about the exhausting architecture of obsession, the way we try to manage overwhelming feelings by giving them a private, contained space, only to watch that containment collapse entirely. Ben Gibbard writes about building a mental prison for someone who ends up ruling the whole building. It's one of those songs that knows exactly how foolish the narrator looks and refuses to let them off the hook for it.
"Envy the Birds" captures that specific anguish of being trapped inside a fight you can't escape, watching it spiral while your mind searches for an exit. Death Cab for Cutie turns the image of birds in flight into something almost desperate, a longing not for freedom exactly, but for silence. It's a song about how words, once launched, can't be recalled, and how the safest place starts to feel like nowhere at all.
"How Heavenly A State" sits with someone in the moment they stop fighting, and asks what it actually feels like to watch that happen. Death Cab for Cutie write about death not as tragedy but as threshold, finding something almost sacred in the surrender. It's a song about the gap between what grief looks like from the outside and what the dying person might have found on the other side.
"Punching the Flowers" is a portrait of a man so committed to his own suffering that tenderness becomes something to destroy. Death Cab for Cutie trace the slow erosion of a relationship not through cruelty alone, but through willful disconnection, the quiet violence of someone who mistakes numbness for depth. By the end, the damage is done and the question of whether any of it was love feels genuinely unanswerable.
"One Thing Right" is a quiet declaration of love built entirely on honesty about everything else falling short. Bedouine doesn't pretend to have life figured out, and that's exactly what makes the song so disarming. It's not a grand romantic gesture but something rarer: a person who admits they're lost, then points to the one thing that makes sense anyway.
"There Goes The Night" is a song about holding on to who you used to be before the world asked you to grow up and apologize for it. Cold War Kids build something that feels like a memory you're still living inside, part eulogy, part celebration, and completely unashamed. It's about the nights that shaped you, the people who were there, and the stubborn refusal to let any of that go quiet.
"We Might as Well Be Strangers" sits in the quiet devastation of a friendship or relationship so far gone that even the grief has faded. Weezer's Rivers Cuomo and Wednesday's Karly Hartzman trade perspectives on the same collapse, arriving at the same hollow conclusion from different directions. It's a song about losing someone and then, worse, losing the part of yourself that cared.
"Life's a Dream" traps you in a cycle before you even notice it happening. Modest Mouse builds something hypnotic and quietly devastating out of waking, forgetting, and going back to sleep, turning ordinary human inertia into something that feels cosmic. It's a song about how we lose ourselves not in dramatic moments but in the endless, unexamined repetition of days. And somehow, at the end, it offers something that feels almost like comfort.
"Jilt" opens inside a blur of alcohol, bloated mornings, and expensive things gathering dust, then slowly clears into something sharper: a man waking up to himself after years of drift. Clarion turns the foggy post-excess moment Koreans call 현자타임 into a full confrontation with identity, asking whether the person you've become would embarrass the person you used to be. The answer is never comfortable, but the question is the whole point.
ivri's track is a slow-burn confession about the exhaustion of shapeshifting for someone else's comfort, until there's nothing left to give and no real connection to show for it. The narrator doesn't lash out or grieve loudly. They just arrive at a wall, stripped bare, and admit it's over. It's the quiet devastation of realizing that being everything for someone guaranteed you'd end up meaning nothing to them.
"Cotton" is Vince Staples stripping everything back to one honest confession: that music holds him together when nothing else can. Against a backdrop of street violence, absent faith, and love that can just as easily destroy you, the song makes a quietly radical argument that a record spinning on a turntable might be the most dependable lifeline there is. It's tender in a way Staples rarely allows himself to be, and that vulnerability is exactly what makes it hit.
"Nightshift Superstar" is a song about the seductive pull of something that costs you everything. Muse frames addiction or fixation as a person, a performer, someone who only exists in the dark and leaves you hollowed out by morning. The tension between glamour and destruction is the whole point, and the song never lets you forget that both are true at the same time.
"Fight Like A Girl" is a song about flipping the script on someone who thought they had the upper hand. Amy Lee and K.Flay take a phrase historically used to demean and weaponize it as a declaration of dominance, walking the line between righteous fury and cold precision. It's a confrontation song, but the real power move is how calm and inevitable it all feels.
"Wide Open Heart" is Evanescence at their most nakedly hopeful, a song about surviving long enough to feel something again and choosing not to look away from the pain that got you there. It doesn't promise that things will be okay. It asks whether we're willing to stay present anyway, and it makes that question feel like a form of courage.
"Forever Without You" is a song about surviving someone who almost took you down with them. It tracks the full arc from consuming, destructive love to a hard-won clarity that feels equal parts relief and grief. Amy Lee doesn't romanticize the loss or the relationship. She just tells the truth about both.
"Self Destruct" is Evanescence at their most confrontational, turning personal exhaustion into a broader reckoning with systems and people that keep us sick. Amy Lee's narrator isn't just falling apart, they're watching everyone fall apart together, and asking who actually wanted it this way. It's a song about the violence of denial, and the strange relief of finally naming it.
"Calm Down" is not a plea for peace. It's the sound of someone who has been holding everything together for too long finally setting it down. Amy Lee delivers the song's repeated command with a calm that cuts deeper than any outburst could, building toward a threat so quiet it lands like a door clicking shut.
"About Us" is Evanescence at their most politically furious, tracing the slow realization that the systems and figures people put their faith in were always indifferent to their suffering. Amy Lee writes from inside the wreckage, not above it, making the anger feel personal even when the targets are massive. It's a song about complicity, exhaustion, and the moment you stop trying to pull someone back from the edge they ran toward themselves.
"How Do I Heal" sits inside a paradox: healing requires letting go, but the narrator refuses. Amy Lee traces grief not as something to move through but as something to live alongside, finding in loss not an absence but a presence that still guides, still speaks, still keeps the light on.
"Sanctuary" opens in apocalyptic chaos and lands somewhere far more defiant than despair. Evanescence builds a anthem not around rescue but around the refusal to need it, where surviving together is the only shelter that holds. It's raw, communal, and completely clear-eyed about the world it's set against.
"Afterlife" is what it sounds like when someone stops begging to be saved and starts daring fate to finish the job. Amy Lee writes from a place so wrung out and haunted that death stops being a fear and becomes almost a dare. It's not a suicide note or a surrender, it's a portrait of someone who has simply run out of reasons to flinch.
"Rapture" is about the specific kind of freedom that only comes after you've been lied to long enough. Amy Lee writes about finally seeing through someone who hid behind power, money, and manufactured shame, and choosing the light not as comfort but as a declaration. It's a song about surviving someone, not just leaving them.
"Who Will You Follow" is a confrontation with a force that hollows you out so completely you stop recognizing your own reflection. Evanescence builds a case for waking up before you disappear entirely, tracing the line between devotion and destruction with unsettling precision. It's a song about the terrifying moment you realize the thing you gave everything to was feeding on you all along.
"Tell Me When You've Had Enough" is a song about endurance pushed past its natural limit, where survival stops feeling like strength and starts feeling like a trap. Evanescence builds a portrait of someone ground down so completely that the question of when to stop fighting becomes almost impossible to answer. It's raw, defiant, and quietly devastating all at once.
"Beautiful Lie" is about the moment you realize you've been slowly destroyed by a relationship built on someone else's delusions. Evanescence captures the exhaustion of someone who finally sees clearly but has been paying for another person's refusal to wake up. It's not a breakup song so much as a survival reckoning, raw and unapologetic about the damage done.
"Do That Again" lives in that brutal in-between space where you know a relationship is over but your body hasn't caught up with your head yet. Malcolm Todd captures the specific ache of someone trying to do the right thing while craving one last reason to undo it. It's a breakup song where the farewell keeps getting interrupted by desire, and the tension never fully resolves.
"Good Bye" sits in the strange space between heartbreak and hope, where saying goodbye doesn't actually mean it's over. Malcolm Todd traces the full weight of a relationship, from a shy first hello to imagined children in the yard, and somehow turns the most painful moment into a quiet promise. It's grief and certainty sharing the same breath.
Malcolm Todd's "Lonely Song" is a wry, aching portrait of being 22 and quietly falling apart while pretending otherwise. It treats loneliness not as a dramatic collapse but as a low hum beneath all the performative fine-ness, the kind you joke about because admitting it straight feels too heavy. Sharp, self-aware, and a little funny in the saddest way.
"X's & O's" is that feeling you can't talk yourself out of, no matter how clearly you see it coming. Malcolm Todd writes about the specific kind of person who makes you forget your own rules, not because you're blind to the risk, but because part of you doesn't care. It's self-aware desire at its most honest, and that's exactly what makes it hit.
"Gun To My Head" is Malcolm Todd forcing himself to say the thing he's been dodging: leaving someone he loved for a career that turned out to be lonelier than he expected. It's a confession that only comes out under pressure, and the pressure is entirely self-inflicted. Todd strips away the bravado of success to show what it actually looks like up close, which is hotel rooms, bad dates, and a chest that still wants someone specific lying on it.
"Ain't That The Truth" is the kind of song that catches you mid-thought, halfway between clarity and self-deception. Malcolm Todd writes about someone who knows exactly what they should do and keeps finding reasons not to do it. It's honest without being dramatic, which makes it cut deeper.
"Malcolm In The Middle" is a song about the specific dread of loving someone who loves you back, but not trusting it to last. Malcolm Todd writes from that liminal space between closeness and doubt, where a perfect moment feels more fragile, not safer. It's tender and anxious at once, the emotional equivalent of holding your breath while someone sleeps next to you.
"I Saw Your Face" captures the specific pain of loving someone enough to disappear from their life. Malcolm Todd builds a quietly devastating portrait of a person who spots an ex in public, freezes, and then walks away, not out of cowardice, but out of sacrifice. It's a breakup song where the wound is self-inflicted on purpose, and that's what makes it sting.
"Breathe" is Malcolm Todd at his most nakedly honest, caught between knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. The song maps the tension between restraint and want with surprising specificity, grounding big emotional stakes in a hotel suite and a pair of legs on a shoulder. It's intimate in the way only real confession can be, and it lingers.
"Free.99" is about the cruel joke of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. Malcolm Todd untangles the aftermath of leaving a relationship that felt suffocating, only to find that the space left behind feels worse than the weight ever did. It's a song about regret dressed up as liberation, and the two-word title says everything: this freedom cost nothing, and it's worth exactly that.
"Obsessica" is a song about desire that knows it has no defense and doesn't really want one. Malcolm Todd traces the whole absurd arc of infatuation, from self-aware horniness to spiral-mode attachment, and somehow makes the sheer ridiculousness of it all feel completely honest. By the end, the obsession hasn't narrowed to one person. It's exploded outward into a roster.
"Jean Skirt" is a small song that does something big. Malcolm Todd captures the exact moment before things tip over, when the heat is mutual and everyone in the room knows it. It's a story told almost entirely in clothing and sweat, and somehow that's enough.
"Snake the Drain" is a song about the slow, grinding exhaustion of loving someone who shows up with charm instead of effort. Devon Again frames intimacy and frustration inside the same domestic space, making the case that sweet words and real partnership are two completely different things. It's not a breakup song exactly, more like the moment right before, when you've finally stopped being moved by the apology.
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a Music Magazine based in Los Angeles, CA.
