Heart to Gold – Free Help | Album Review
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Memory Music
The day after the election, the high in New York was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the forecast regardless of who won. The highs will continue to rise each winter regardless of which party is in power. The hopes you have for the future will stay in your mind, the work you do to improve the world will continue, and the things you love you will continue to do regardless of the temperature and political situation. Why?
On Heart to Gold’s third LP, Free Help, they grapple with how to confront that march to the inevitable. Throughout the record, Whiteoak ping-pongs between despondence and exuberance. The stunning opener, “Surrounded,” encapsulates both feelings as Whiteoak sings with his back to the corner as enemies and regrets of wasted time and embarrassing memories close in. But the moment you hear the “oohs” on the chorus, you can’t help but grin. “Surrounded” is like the best Menzingers songs, filled with disdain at having to do this all over a-fucking-gain, but you hope for remission as you push your best friend in the pit and scream along.
Listening to Free Help has made me think about de-transitioning. When Whiteoak sings “I have been suffering for too long” on mid-album highlight, “Belonging,” it calls to mind when a kid at work tells me I can’t be a girl because I look like a boy or that my voice is too deep for a girl. When I see my mom still has me listed as my dead name on her phone. I ask myself what this is all for? Why do I suffer these indignities when it would be easier to return to the closet? I’m tired of explaining my existence. What stops me is remembering the spiritual death of the closet. I suffered through that too long to give up the flush of euphoria I feel when I try on the new dress I bought for my birthday, the community I’ve found who love and understand me, and the intimacy I’ve longed desired with female friends over the dejected feeling that comes from others being indecent. I may not belong in others’ expectations of the world, but I belong in the world I’m building. It’s all there in the pre-chorus for “Can’t Feel Me” when Whiteoak sings, “Sometimes the highest highs / at times the lowest lows.” Those are the breaks.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been finding comfort in the transition from “Pandora” to “Blow Up The Spot.” The former track, full of space and meditative lyrics, is an ode to being uncomfortable, existing in the human position of struggle. America conditions us to mimic water and find the path of least resistance from cradle to grave, but the beauty of life is in the uncertainties, in the closet doors opened. When the latter track explodes out of the lingering outro of “Pandora,” I want to throw myself around the room screaming along. I feel such a sense of relief when the bridge of “Blow Up The Spot” comes in after a brief pause. It’s simply the best feeling an indie rock song could give today.
I was reading an interview with the novelist Sally Rooney in the New York Times, where she was asked explicitly about how to live a meaningful life in the face of historical crises like the genocide in Gaza. Listening to Free Help, I was reminded of this line she said: “I suppose I tell myself that in the midst of all of this, people need not become so incredibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that we’re facing as to feel that life itself is no longer meaningful and that there’s no reason to go on.”
Free Help is the sound of looking at the enormity of the problems and refusing to let them win because you can’t let anything steal your joy, your reasons for being, or your hope and will for a better tomorrow.
Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her burner account on Twitter @Lilymweber.
