Deep Voices: June 2024
The 15 best songs of the month
This edition of Deep Voices features the best songs of June. I wrote a bit about the casual brilliance of a soon-to-be (already?) pop classic, and then individual notes on all 14 of the other tracks. There’s rap, house, Italian mumbling. All the good genres.
At the end of each month, Deep Voices will explore the best songs of the previous ~30 days, exclusively for paying subscribers. If you want to support Deep Voices and get access to these best-of playlists, subscribe here. Thanks so much!
Last year, I said that Astrid Sonne’s “Do you wanna” was the best song of 2023. It’s a simple song, composed mostly of Sonne singing over a booming drum loop and an anxious swipe of violin. “Do you wanna have a baby?” she sings. “I really don’t know,” she answers. I liked its honesty, its uncertainty, its directness. Lyricism, it turns out, is a perfect place for autofiction.
Sonne’s song is in direct conversation with Charli XCX’s “I think about it all the time,” in which she wonders aloud if she should have a baby. “I’m so scared I’m missing out on something,” with its tinge of selfishness, is a brave thing to admit in terms of procreational daydreaming. It’s not only about a desire to be a parent, but about the fear that she might not get to be. “Would it give my life a new purpose?” she asks. Of course it would. She knows that. The question isn’t that, but is it the purpose she wants? You can’t undo being a parent in the same way you can most other major choices. Parenthood is a commitment. Can she have her freedom as well as a child? To answer (as a parent, but not as a mother), I’d like to borrow from both artists’ rightfully conflicted questioning: You can have both, but of course you can’t.
Putting subject matter aside, I think the bare approach to mixed emotions Astrid Sonne and Charli XCX so expertly utilize is best exemplified on the deeply moving Lorde remix of Charli’s “Girl, so confusing.” The remix has two verses, first Charli’s, then Lorde’s. They’re speaking to each other, and to themselves, as they make the subtext about their frenemy status the text, and, in the process, elucidate the societal factors pushing them to feel pitted against the other. A revelation of the invisible hands pushing a narrative neither of them wants. Lorde’s verse is especially raw and, listening, I felt really heartbroken for her, for how paralyzed she seemed:
I was so lost in my head/ And scared to be in your pictures/ 'Cause for the last couple years/ I've been at war in my body/ I tried to starve myself thinner/ And then I gained all the weight back/ I was trapped in the hatred/ And your life seemed so awesome/ I never thought for a second/ My voice was in your head.
The song feels less like a confession and more like an unburdening. Lost in my head, at war with my body; neither the spiritual nor the physical provides refuge. At the end of Charli’s verse, where she wonders if Lorde is rooting for her downfall, she says with some earned presumption about our own mysterious selves, “And you can’t tell what you're feeling,” and then responds with the song’s only bit of assumption, “I think I know how you feel.” Is acceptance not all we ever want? It’s so hard to be vulnerable, to admit diffidence. None of these songs are looking for a conclusion; certainty is impossible. Describing the direction of life’s contradictory rivers of change is the most difficult thing to do accurately, because writing accurately requires at least a semblance of a point of view. That these singers can so powerfully describe our vaporous states of being is a miracle. Moving targets are targets nonetheless; they are superior markswomen. “I really don’t know.” Neither does anyone.
So I think “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” by Charli XCX and Lorde is my favorite song of June. Below are Apple Music and Spotify playlists with 14 more songs I loved this month, with writing about each. A bunch of them don’t have words, which is perhaps the smartest way to say what you mean.