Swim Into The Sound's Staff Favorites of 2021

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Back in the early days of this site, I would feel a strange sense of accomplishment whenever someone would talk about Swim Into The Sound as if it were run by multiple people. I suppose sometimes it’s just common practice to refer to a website with plural terms like “you guys” or “the team,” but it always made me proud that I alone was making something that could possibly be mistaken for the work of multiple people. 

And sure, we’ve had guest writers before 2021, but they were usually few and far between. Previously, guest posts were typically just one-off articles, published once or twice per year. All of that changed in 2021 as a lineup of a half-dozen or so writers solidified into regular contributors over the course of the year.

At the beginning of 2021, I made a resolution to myself to post one article here every week. I’m proud to say that we surpassed that goal and then some, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of these talented writers. In total, we had 22 guest posts throughout the year (23, if you count this one), and I could not be more appreciative of that fact. Without these writer’s talent and hard work, this site would have had long gaps between posts at multiple points throughout the year. Simply put, they helped this site immensely throughout 2021 and really helped Swim Into The Sound feel like a legitimate music blog. 

Another cool thing about bringing in this wealth of outside talent and perspectives is that I can connect the dots a little bit more. On any given week, I receive a number of emails and DMs that I consider “suffocating.” Whether they’re for an upcoming song, music video, or album, these things pile up in my inboxes and bury me alive. Even if these solicitations come from bands or labels that I love, I don’t have the time to personally write about every release that I want to. Now that I have something resembling a staff, I can send these upcoming releases to a group chat and quickly find someone who’s eager to write about this music with the love and care that it deserves. 

Connecting those dots has led to some cool opportunities and extraordinary pieces of writing this year. Amongst other things, our staff wrote awesome album reviews, single write-ups, multiple incredible interviews, premieres, concert reviews, and more. I’m immensely proud of everything that’s been published on the site this year, and I’m excited to see what 2022 has in store for us. For now though, let’s take one last look through 2021 as I turn the site over to our staff to hear about their favorite records of the year.

Cailen Pygott | Weakened Friends - Quitter

It was October 28th when Taylor initially proposed this collection of album of the year reviews. At the time, two albums were neck and neck for my personal first place. As I was busy prepping for multiple re-listens, massive pro and con lists, and an east coast west coast style song bracket to determine who would reign supreme, a thought occurred to me: ‘I should probably wait for the three weeks until Weakened Friends release Quitter.’ This is an album I’ve been expecting to top my year-end list ever since the single “What You Like” came out (holy shit) two years ago. Sonia Sturino is one of a handful of songwriters whose lyrics feel could have been ripped straight from my daily journaling practice if I had kept at it for longer than two days. The way Sturino’s songs express feelings of isolation, heartbreak, and the fear that you, yes you specifically, are fucking everything up is a pure reflection of my inner monologue on my worst days. Am I just projecting? Survey says probably, but this album friggin’ rips all the same. I graduated from a two-year community college music program, and the technical term for these guitars is “frickin’ thick dude.” I’ve believed for years that we as a society don’t talk about Annie Hoffman the bass player enough, but Quitter is also a brilliant showcase of her work as a producer. There’s an ever-rising level of intensity throughout that hits its climax in “Haunted House” and carries through the final two tracks showing off a mastery of compositional arrangement. All of the songs on Quitter stand on their own, but it’s this care and attention paid to the album as a singular work of art that makes it my AOTY. 

Fun fact: My band No, It’s Fine. included a version of “Early” on our 2021 cover album (It’s Nice To Pretend) We Wrote These Songs. Now here are some made-up superlatives to highlight most of the music that shaped my year. Some of these are older, but they’re still important to me, dang it!

  • Best Guitar Solo - Cheekface “Next to Me”

  • Best New song by a Twitter mutual I’ve never met - Pictoria Vark “I Can’t Bike”

  • Band I’d most like to be friends with - Year Twins

  • Favourite band I discovered due to mutual barista rage - Puppy Angst

  • Favorite Rediscovery - The Drew Thomson Foundation - Self Titled

  • Song that made me cry the most times - Rosie Tucker “Ambrosia” and “Habanero”

  • Best podcast soundtrack - Planet Arcana

  • Best band I got into this year only to realize they already broke up - Lonely Parade

  • Album that got me through running 5ks when I still had the motivation to run 5ks - Gregory Pepper & His Problems - I Know Now Why You Cry

  • Song that made me feel better about my body for but one fleeting moment - Durry “Who’s Laughing Now”

Connor Fitzpatrick | Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime

Mdou Moctar is the most important guitarist in the game right now, and 2021 has been his year. I’ve been a fan of his for a few years now, so it’s been rewarding to see him and his band get their shine. Afrique Victime is Moctar’s best work yet. It’s not much of a departure from Ilana: The Creator, but a refinement of what makes their music so special. The album’s got loud shredding (“Chismiten”), hypnotic grooves (“Ya Habibiti”), and heartfelt balladry (“Tala Tannam”). What sets the virtuosic Tuareg guitar player apart from the pack is just how expressive and unpredictable his phrasing is. On the title track, the band spends four minutes developing an entrancing rhythm before Moctar’s guitar drops off only to come back, detached from the rest of the band, in a firestorm of noise and anger while the band continues to play faster and faster. It’s a breathtaking moment that mirrors Mdou’s lyrics of colonial destruction in Western Africa. One of the most frustrating things for me in the coverage of Mdou Moctar has been the knee-jerk reaction to compare him to guitar gods of the past. It’s an attempt to display his prowess as a musician, but ultimately it takes the spotlight away from how singular he is. There is only one Mdou Moctar, and Afrique Victime is his crowning achievement. 


My 10 favorite Bandcamp purchases of 2021:

Joe Wasserman | Mo Troper - Dilettante

I am a sucker for hearing the warm buzz of a tube amp. “My Parrot,” a song about an avian existential crisis, is what sold me on Dilettante despite my already being totally sold on Mo Troper. “Wet T-Shirt Contest” has a rumbling, buoyant bass line while the listener yearns to discern just why the speaker “never [wants] to see those nipples again.” These are just two tracks off Dilettante’s 28-song playlist-as-album/data dump. Troper is masterful in crafting infectious songs that can withstand the test of time, much like The Beatles.


Runner-up: Dazy - MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs
To some, I might be cheating with this one. Only the first 16 songs are from 2021; the rest are off 2020 EPs. Regardless, Dazy’s MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs is another masterclass in to-the-point, effective, worming power pop that is not too sugary. After discovering Dazy while reading an interview with David Anthony, I listened to the album while playing Call of Duty, exercising, doing the dishes, walking the dogs, and pretty much anything else in my life. MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD is upbeat, frenetic, and makes me feel happy, which speaks droves given how the last few years have gone on both the grand and granular levels.


Albums/EPs That Deserve More Attention (in no specific order):

Grace Robins-Somerville | black midi - Cavalcade

Likes: the abundance of exciting new bands coming out of the Windmill Brixton scene. Dislikes: nearly everything that’s been written about them. 

I’ll sit down to read almost any piece about a group like black midi, and here come the critic’s thoughts on Squid, Shame, Dry Cleaning, Black Country New Road, Goat Girl– as though they can’t help but lump all these groups together. Sure, there are some surface-level similarities between the heavy hitters– they’re British, they all make guitar-led post-rock adjacent music that often includes talk-singing, many have worked with producer Dan Carey, and 2021 was a big year for all of them. But in reality, these bands don’t have much else in common, and the tendency to hyperfocus on one band’s niche in a particular scene often overlooks what makes them unique. 

Anyway, now that I’ve hypocritically discussed black midi solely in the context of their contemporaries, let’s dive into my AOTY: the decadent kaleidoscope of controlled chaos that is their sophomore album Cavalcade. My love for black midi is well-documented. Their music often feels like the audio equivalent of this picture in the best possible way. They have a penchant for sequencing their albums in a way that shouldn’t work but somehow does: How better to follow up a satirical prog-rock cautionary tale about a cult leader who gets overthrown by his once-loyal followers (complete with a helicopter feature), than with a bossa nova ballad for German-American film-and-cabaret star Marlene Dietrich? An abrasive punk track about two runaway thieves (who may or may not be chickens?) somehow segues perfectly into a 10-minute pun-based Scott Walker-esque closer about a musician interrogating the integrity of his art. And yeah, the middle of an album is totally the best place for a delicately droning slow-burner inspired by an Isabel Waidner novel. This all might paint an unfairly pretentious picture of black midi, but the real magic of their music is that it never gets quite so esoteric or technical that it stops being fun. If I haven’t convinced you of that, perhaps this Britney Spears cover will.


Runners-Up: 

Jack Hansen-Reed | Home Is Where – I Became Birds

2021 was a great year, and this was shaping up to be a tough decision for me until I Became Birds blew me away. In only an 18 minute “album,” Home Is Where deliver a release that can only be described as an enigma. The record has been (frequently) likened to Neutral Milk Hotel due to its folk influence/instrumentation and unique vocal deliveries, but it would be an injustice to say that I Became Birds is truly following in anyone’s footsteps. This record weaves capriciously between genres, transporting you from insanely cathartic rushes of power and emotion to serene moments of haunting beauty. If you’re a first-time listener, get ready for some goosebumps, because they’re coming.

With a release like this that so boisterously defies singular categorization, you’re forced to describe it by no one else’s labels or descriptors, only through your own experience. First, I have to say that vocally this is a powerhouse performance that continues to impress me every time I go back to it. Somehow, vocalist Brandon MacDonald is able to match the furious range of the instrumentals showcased here and add endlessly to their intensity. More than anything else, to me, this release is a powerful and kinetic journey that would be impossible to achieve without its mix of jarring yet apt lyrics, incredibly expressive tone, and just in general great instrumental performances. I Became Birds stands above the rest as my release of 2021 because it excites me like nothing else this year. It sparks me to go wild at shows, plumb the darkest corners of my mind, and of course, to hear what incredible material Home Is Where is cooking up next.


Runners-up:

  • Like a Stone – Remember Sports

  • Future Suits – Pet Symmetry

  • Pono - A Great Big Pile of Leaves

​​BURSTING THE BUBBLE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO BUBBLEGRUNGE

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Wednesday December 1st was a Big Day For Annoying People. If you’re reading this, I can assume that you’re already aware of its significance, but on the off chance that you’re not, it was Spotify Wrapped, the day that good little Spotify users everywhere woke up to find their yearly listening history compiled into a brightly-colored slideshow of stats. Along with some new features (Have you ever wondered which song would play over the opening credits in a movie of your life, or what color your “audio aura” is?) and some cringey, shoehorned-in buzzwords du jour (“While everyone else was trying to figure out what an NFT is, you were slaying 2021 with your main character vibes!”), were the traditional Spotify Wrapped presents we’ve come to expect-- a playlist of your 100 most-played songs of the year, as well as a ranking of your top 5 artists and genres. The latter category is what I want to focus on here. My own Spotify Wrapped raised a notable question-- no, not “did I really listen to 11 episodes of True Anon in one day?” although I did ask myself that. I, like many other Spotify users, took a look at my top 5 genres laid out in that disgusting “graphic design is my passion” font and asked, “What in the goddamn hell is ‘bubblegrunge?’”

My first encounter with the term ‘bubblegrunge’ was about a week before Spotify Wrapped on the application Stats For Spotify. I assumed it was one of those seemingly algorithm-generated music genres like ‘escape room’-- a similarly puzzling item on my top genres list from last year. On the day that Spotify Wrapped came out, it seemed like everyone on my Twitter feed was both trying to pin down a definition of the genre and ripping it to shreds. A quick glance at the tweets from music fans with bubblegrunge in their top 5 genres and those from artists who’d had the bubblegrunge label thrust upon them initially led me (and others) to believe that it was corporate streaming platform-speak for “pop-punk sung by a woman,” but I decided to investigate further.

Tracking “bubblegrunge” as a search term on Google Trends revealed a sharp uptick in google searches on December 1st, peaking at around 11:00 am (presumably shortly after most Spotify users checked their Spotify Wrapped). When I googled the term a few hours after its peak popularity, I found the following Urban Dictionary definition from 2013:

I assumed that this definition was somewhat obsolete by 2021’s standards. I’ve listened to almost no radio-friendly 90s/early 00s grunge-pop of this sort recently, so if this were the definition that Spotify was working with, it wouldn’t make much sense data-wise for the genre to show up on my year-end list. Most of the artists I’d been seeing in the lists of people with bubblegrunge as one of their top genres were bands that blended modern pop-punk with elements of 90s garage rock nostalgia-- think Kississippi, Charly Bliss, and Diet Cig. I wondered if, in this context, bubblegrunge might refer to what illuminati hotties frontwoman Sarah Tudzin has coined “tenderpunk,” defined by its irreverent yet affectionate infusion of DIY punk. “There’s a sweeter vulnerability to it, and then there’s a tongue-in-cheek, give-no-fucks attitude,” Tudzin explained in a 2019 interview with SF Weekly. 

I searched “bubblegrunge” on Spotify. The first result was Spotify’s official Sound of Bubblegrunge playlist. Among the related playlists linked in its description were ones dedicated to Indie Pop, Midwest Emo, 5th Wave Emo, Philly Indie, and a playlist exclusively dedicated to female-fronted bands in the bubblegrunge genre. This did little to disprove my initial write-off of bubblegrunge as just another attempt from the music streaming industrial complex to push “female-fronted” as its own musical genre. 

Returning to the Sounds of Bubblegrunge playlist, I saw that many of the artists featured on it were ones that I’d expected based on previous context clues. Each of the aforementioned artists had at least one song on the playlist, and other artists with overlapping fanbases were featured prominently as well. Generally, it seemed like a convergence of bedroom pop (Cherry Glazerr, Adult Mom, Sir Babygirl), emo (Slaughter Beach Dog, Radiator Hospital, Home Is Where), pop-punk (Pinkshift, Oceanator, Antarctigo Vespucci), and some folk-infused alt-pop (Lucy Dacus, Waxahatchee, Samia). There was also some straightforward guitar rock like Snail Mail, some more experimental cuts from artists like Spirit of the Beehive, and even a few ska tracks from bands like Bomb The Music Industry and We Are The Union. For the most part, all of the songs included seemed to be from the 2010s or early 2020s. Other than that, and the tendency toward the broad umbrella category of “indie,” I saw little cohesion that would warrant grouping these songs into a defined genre or subgenre. A similar algorithmically-generated playlist titled Intro to Bubblegrunge had a link to Sounds of Bubblegrunge in its description and seemed to offer a smaller sample of bubblegrunge highlights, though its content seemed somewhat indistinguishable from one of the algorithm’s standard indie rock playlists.

I decided that if I was going to do a deep dive into the genre, I had to also look into the users’ interpretations of the ‘bubblegrunge’ label. One of the first user-curated playlists to come up was one that mainly consisted of what I might jokingly refer to as “tiktokcore”-- I’d use the term not as a genre descriptor, so much as a means of categorizing music associated with a certain platform, grouping together artists like beabadoobee and girl in red. Much of the playlist also included big-name contemporary pop artists like Solange and Lorde, as well as some 90s shoegaze icons like Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. Once again, I saw very little cohesion within the genre label; the main commonality tying together all the music I was encountering was that most of it would be at home on a playlist called something like “songs for pretending that you’re the main character.” The bubblegrunge for beginners playlist was a bit more streamlined-- partly by virtue of its brevity, at least compared to the other bubblegrunge playlists that clocked in at 10+ hours with tracklists in the triple digits --and had a focus on late-2010s/early 2020s pop-punk and emo. This playlist, which called bubblegrunge “the best genre!” had a similar blend of emo, indie rock, and tiktok-adjacent alt-pop, with a focus on female vocals. Had there been more inclusion of earlier acts— ones that have influenced the sound of contemporary bubblegrunge —the case could be made for artists like Letters to Cleo, Veruca Salt, and Juliana Hatfield to be called bubblegrunge pioneers.

Though a decent number of non-female fronted acts were featured on bubblegrunge playlists, I was feeling a certain frustration with the “genre,” not unlike the frustration I feel towards the “sad girl indie” movement in music (many of the recommended playlists in featured below the bubblegrunge playlists I checked out were ones along the lines of Spotify’s sad girl starter pack). Much has already been written about the subtle sexism of the “sad girl” label and how it casts a limiting, two-dimensional view of female musicians and their work. Several of the so-called “sad girls” of indie music have publicly criticized the label. In a 2017 interview, Mitski confronted the perception of her as a “fevered priestess,” calling out the ways in which public discussion of female musicians often implicitly strips them of their ownership over their work and disregards their intentionality and technical skill. In a tweet from earlier this year, Lucy Dacus expressed her qualms with “sad girl indie”-- how it often exploits female pain, flattens complex emotional expression by slapping on the vague label of “sadness,” and pushes a harmful narrative that equates womanhood with suffering.

I know that on the surface, it may seem hypocritical of me to point to the inclusion of “sad girl indie” artists like Soccer Mommy and Indigo De Souza on bubblegrunge playlists as my reason for finding the two genre labels similarly frustrating. In doing so, aren’t I feeding into the “women-as-genre” propaganda? Not to mention the various non-female voices included on the bubblegrunge playlists I’ve come across in my investigation. Still, between the cutesy genre name and the algorithmic emphasis on female vocalists, it’s hard not to be skeptical. The other commonalities that make the argument for bubblegrunge to be considered a “real” genre of music paint with a broad brush at best (“post-2010 indie guitar-led pop-rock” is pretty vague criteria). 

This is not to entirely disregard newer music genres as illegitimate-- if someone said the word “hyperpop” to you three years ago, would you have any idea what they were talking about? New genres arise all the time as music evolves-- my issue isn’t with the newness, but with the attempt to put a name to a category that does not exist. What “bubblegrunge” really reveals is how detached corporate streaming platforms are from the artists that they’re featuring (and grossly underpaying). I’m not the first to point out that Spotify Wrapped is essentially a brand’s approximation of personal connection-- they made you a personalized mixtape; look how well they know their artists and users! When they try to put a name to a genre that isn’t really a genre at all, it’s nothing more than a lame attempt to homogenize and generalize a vast variety of artists, disregarding their creative and sonic diversity. Bottom line: corporations don’t define music, musicians do. 

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Instagram @grace_roso and on Twitter @grace_roso.

A Message to The Haters: Raven, The Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness on Being Emo, Growing Up Online, and What To Do When Nobody Gets the Joke

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Originally published in Emo Trash, March 2021 

We have a New Years’ Eve tradition on the internet. Every December- sometimes in May, or August, or October, any time we need a laugh- a 5-second clip makes its way around social media. It’s a video of two girls wishing us a happy new year, decked out in period-appropriate ‘00s goth makeup and lamenting about how much they just don’t care about the holiday.

It’s 2008, almost 2009, and they announce it with little enthusiasm. In the short clip that’s usually shared, there’s a moment of doubt about just how much of the video is a joke. After all, we were like that once, adamant that wearing liquid black eyeliner on our lower lash lines was a good idea and that Tim Burton’s art was just really really cool, okay? 

The video, A Shout Out From Tara and Raven, is a parody that feels close to home. After making it clear that 2009 means nothing to them, they go on to address their “haters”, list off their likes (being goth, Edward Cullen, MCR and AFI) and dislikes (preps, jocks, and of course- haters), to wish us a “crappy new year” as MCR’s “Disenchanted” plays in the background. They remind us that they are Raven, the Acid Bath Princess of The Darkness, and Tara, before signing off. 

It’s the third upload on their channel, xXblo0dyxkissxX, and would have remained lost to the internet had it not gone viral in recent years (It’s worth mentioning that the video currently has 66k likes and 6k dislikes.) Before the two went out with an unintentional bang, they uploaded more videos, including one titled A Message To The Haters, where the two of them blink silently at the camera for four minutes while Ashley Tisdale’s cover of “Never Gonna Give You Up” plays on a loop. 

Behind xXblo0dyxkissxX was a girl named Sarah, who recently admitted to making the videos with her sister as a joke. Now 31 and a professional dominatrix, she’s spent the new year dealing with surprisingly positive reactions to a misunderstood YouTube persona, and figuring out what to do next. Her Twitter bio proudly reads “Fake emo turned adult emo;” we talked about how she ended up there.

How did you get into emo music when you were younger, and how or why did you revisit it as an adult? I feel like a lot of people have really funny stories about the moment they were like, oh my god- this music is scary, but I'm into it. 
When I was emo as a kid I never wanted to call myself emo- I was goth. At the time, this was around 2002, nobody really wanted to be “emo”, I guess. Goths were tough and emos were whiny and angsty and stuff, and I was angsty. I lived in a small town in east Texas, and I think that if I were open about, you know, being emo, people would have just called me goth anyway, there wasn’t that much difference in subcultures there. 

I did grow up in a home where my media was heavily censored, so I wasn’t really allowed to listen to my own music. If I wanted to listen to something, it had to be like, screened through my dad. One time, for example: Linkin Park was a somewhat safe band, for some reason, and one time my dad had printed out some of the lyrics, one of the lines was talking about “walking on eggshells” or something, and my dad sat me down and he was like, “Do you really feel like this?” and it sucked, it really sucked, because I wanted to listen to all of this stuff, and I couldn’t really do it. I was already this kid who, like, wasn’t allowed to watch pg-13 movies….it was very over-protective. I don’t really remember what got me started on the music, but I did have friends with more normal parents and a more normal access to music, and they would share things with me. 

I do remember that in 5th grade I went to this science based summer camp, one of the counselors wore a Dead Kennedys shirt. I didn’t know what Dead Kennedys were, but I just remember thinking, “holy shit, this guy is so fucking cool.” After that summer camp I did start wanting to explore a little more, explore that side of myself. I do know that because everything I ingested was so censored and so limited I didn’t have as wide of a range of exposure as I do now. There is a little part of it that makes it more exciting, in a way.

You get a chance to do it over again!
Yeah, yeah! So, how I got back into it: Tara is my sister. We made the videos to make fun of ourselves for our own emo phases. The videos were my idea, I convinced her to play along. After my emo phase from 12-14 I started getting more into punk. After I got into AFI, I started going back and listening to their older [heavier] albums, but to go from Sing the Sorrow to like, the Casualties and Rancid, especially when you’re fifteen...it’s embarrassing. You start to become a little embarrassed at what you used to be like. 

So, I wanted some sort of career in comedy, YouTube was new, I’d spent some time on 4Chan, I was familiar with trolling. I wanted to troll people, so I convinced Tara to create these characters that made fun of our former selves. At the time, even though we weren’t emo, we still had our fair share of mental health problems; I’ve been depressed and anxious for as long as I can remember. 

After Tara and I stopped filming together, we went off to college, we started doing these rock-outs in the car. We only go to see each other once a year, and it started out as a joke, like, remember those videos we used to make, wanna scream along to Good Charlotte together? So that started out as a joke, and it became one of those things that I started doing on my own as a form of comfort, just putting on the music and listening to it. 

I got started again through Good Charlotte’s first two albums. Those were like a security blanket for me, and I recognized that it was so weird that I was going back to something that I had once been so ashamed of. When I was 21, 22, I had this car that only had a cassette player, and I scoured Ebay until I found those Good Charlotte albums on cassette; I needed them SO badly. So I had my Good Charlotte cassettes mixed in with my Dead Kennedys, I had some Henry Rollins spoken word stuff...it was something I started listening to whenever I was anxious to calm myself down, and it was really comforting. 

That gave way to me exploring other things I liked at the time, and it gradually progressed into an acceptance of “emo.” I started jokingly referring to myself as an adult emo around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2018 that I started to embrace it. I guess the simplest way to explain it would be that I went through an emo phase, was super embarrassed about it, made fun of it, returned to cheesy pop-punk, and slowly grew into an adult emo. I think a lot of that just came with personal growth, just this personal acceptance that I am a very emotional person, and this is the music that I relate to. 

“Emo” used to be kind of an insult.
Oh, yeah!

It’s funny now, but we all took it super seriously back then! I was definitely emo in high school, but if anybody called me that, I’d get really offended. Kids used to get really hung up on social stereotyping, but you don’t really hear people using that language anymore. 
Yeah. 

I remember one time, this must have been 2007, my friend told me, “Robin, you’re skinny so you could be a prep, but you’re just too weird.” and I was like...what does that mean? I know you’ve said your emo phase was more when you were younger, did you notice or take part in any of that stuff, or were the rest of high school pretty normal for you socially? 
Oh, no. I was always the weird one, hands down. To give some examples: In third grade I didn’t have any friends to hang out with during recess, so I just hung out and talked with the teachers….I wanted to be a Herpetologist when I was a kid, I had a glow in the dark Albert Einstein shirt, I was bringing snakes to show and tell. I was never cool, I was never the one that people wanted to hang out with. I’d come to school on Monday and realize that like, all of the girls in class had a sleepover that weekend except for me. I just wasn’t cool, ever. I think that my emo phase, my goth phase was sort of an attempt at protecting myself- but even then, I was the first mall goth at my middle school, so I got made fun of for that. 

Even when I was out of my emo phase, I turned into a weird theater kid. I spent most of my time in high school just writing, writing sketches, writing stories, doing dumb funny shit with Tara, filming videos with my friends. I didn’t have a very normal teenage experience in that I didn’t date, I didn’t go to parties, I spent a lot of time just being creative and being weird and just enjoying all of it. There was a time in college where I fell into a group of nerdy friends, and they were all cooler than me, they dressed better than me, and I thought things would be different if I shopped at Express. So, I shopped at Express, and it didn’t change anything!

Do you think that you and your sister would have received a more positive response if you were making those videos today? TikTok is popular, we have more people, more young women doing front-facing camera comedy. 
Without a doubt, for so many reasons. I think that culturally, things have changed considerably. This also ties into a point about emo: Culturally, a lot of things have changed. I think that younger people are a lot more empathetic, young people are a lot more progressive. They know that you can’t make fun of someone for being gay, they know that you can’t make fun of someone for, you know, being autistic. There’s just so much more basic human decency there. 

Social media as a whole was still pretty new, and especially on YouTube, it was a lot easier to hide behind this separate account and you’d get away with it, but now, youtube is owned by Google, you use Google to sign into everything, it’s a lot harder to get away with that stuff, because your account is tied to so many things. With my generation anyway, we grew up with the internet but it wasn't always there, whereas younger generations grew up with the internet and social media always being there. They were all really new and really exciting when I was a teenager, but because they’ve grown up with these things, they’ve been taught that you don’t get to be a dick to people on the internet. 

Something that I’ve noticed, for example: Azer, a brief costar in our videos, uses they/them pronouns. In the comments section of Instagram or wherever, someone will say something about Azer and use the wrong pronouns, but someone else will reply to that comment and go “hey, just an FYI, they use they/them pronouns!” and then the other person is gonna reply and go “Shit, I didn't know, I’m so sorry!” We would not have done that on youtube in 2007. 

As a whole, mental health has become less taboo to talk about. If people aren’t comfortable talking to their friends in person about their anxiety or their depression or whatever, they can still talk about it online, and I think because people talk about it online more, it normalizes it; it’s okay to have feelings, it’s okay to be an emotional person. So, that brings me back to my point, about emo being cool again. 

Did your online presence extend elsewhere during that time, or was there more of a safe distance between you and others? Did you ever become close with anyone that way when you were younger? 
Yeah, totally. As a not very popular child, all of a sudden being able to meet people online, that was great. I made a friend on Xanga when I was fifteen, we’re still friends, we still talk to each other every now and then….I had multiple MySpaces, I was a pretty early Facebook user. “Raven” was my only real attempt at having a channel. 

Youtube was a lot different back then; you had your flash animations going around like Salad Fingers, you had people uploading their own little skits. Did you have any favorites, as someone making your own content? 
I remember YouTube in 2005, I discovered that there were old music videos there. I didn’t have cable growing up, my media was really censored. When I was fifteen or so I found music videos on there, and that was what really stuck out to me as being like, the most magical thing. There was a period of my life in 2005 where I would watch the music video for the Smashing Pumpkins song “Today,” every day before school. 

That’s a good start, that’s a good one. 
Yeah, yeah! I had like, the lyrics printed out and on my wall. I was talking to one of my friends about this, she was mentioning how YouTube was such a different place back then. The few sketches we could think of were all produced by men. A question she asked me was, “Who was the first woman you saw on youtube being genuinely funny?” We noticed that in those early days, if women were on youtube, they were being laughed at, not laughed with. 

Videos that went viral at the time, they were reinforcing that stereotype that women are emotional, and this is why it’s so funny. An example that we thought of was the Cara Cunningham “leave Britney alone” video. We realized that it got so much traction because here was a person being emotional, and also queer, and not being straight was a bigger thing then, too. So we talked a lot about how homophobia and misogyny led to “leave britney alone.” 

I was looking back through some of those comments, and I know you’ve probably talked about this a lot- but people were really concerned with you being “cringe”. It seems like most of the people who left nasty comments were also the ones who didn’t get the joke, and even then, they were weirdly angry about the idea of a couple of goth kids goofing off in front of the camera. What is so bad about being cringe? Is there anything else embarrassing you did as a teenager outside of youtube? 
I don’t consider my youtube channel embarrassing. I was doing it as a joke, I was doing it to troll people. I think the cringe comments came a little bit later. The initial comments we got were a lot more aggressive. Do I think things would be different today? Yes, I do. I think that some people really didn’t...there were definitely some people who got the joke. We got a number of comments from people who were like, oh my god, you guys are hilarious, this is comedy...The comments that I remember, though, before that, there were a lot that were unnecessarily violent. There were a ton of comments telling us to kill ourselves, that we should have been aborted, Azer was subjected to so much homophobia. I think that because we were young people- and I looked considerably younger than I was- there was also ageism coming into play. Kids aren’t really given an opportunity to be funny unless they’re being funny for other kids. 

I think a lot of that has changed, but back then, people saw those videos, I’ve got a natural intensity, so they assumed. I knew what to do and say to piss people off, and it worked! I was expecting comments more along the lines of, oh my god, ya’ll are posers, you call yourselves goth but you listen to Simple Plan. Instead, people saw young women...at the time, emo kids, alt kids, mall goths, they were everyone’s punchline. You combine all of these things, and it elicited something really vile and hateful from so many people. It was one of the reasons why Tara and I wanted to keep everything a secret for as long as possible. 

There’s a difference between “your jokes aren’t funny” and “oh my god, you are everything that’s wrong with society, go kill yourself you fat, ugly bitch,” and we were getting those comments every single day. What started out as something funny at first, over the course of ten to twelve years, if you’re exposed to that, it starts to become more personal. 

A large part of why we didn’t want to come forward was because we stopped reading the comments a long time ago. We didn’t pay attention because we didn’t want to see that shit again. I only came out in the first place because people had begun to link Raven to my dominatrix persona, Petra. Over the past few years, people would approach me and ask me if I was her, but because I made my character so much younger than I was, it was easy for me to deny it.

That’s got to be complicated, that makes sense. 
Yeah, so for the past twelve years or so, I was under the impression that we had created something that I personally thought was hilarious, but nobody thought was funny at all. Because the comments were so negative, I just assumed that if anyone linked the two, it would be like 2008 youtube all over again, that my work accounts would be spammed with all of this shit. Why would I allow any of that to permeate this persona that I’ve crafted for work- a persona that’s supposed to be this, like, all-powerful woman? 

I assumed that coming forward would be really bad for business. I was expecting to have to lock down social media until everything blew over. Towards the end of December 2020, there had been this sort of mystery surrounding Tara and Raven, this sort of internet manhunt trying to find out who we were. I was worried that if I didn’t out myself, that somebody would dox me in ways that were really damaging to me, but they wouldn’t have known what they were doing, because they were so caught up in that excitement and wanted to get that pat on the back. So, I came out as a preventative measure. I had no idea that I would be this well received, I had no idea that people liked the videos, that they thought I was funny. 

For the past twelve years I thought I’d created something that I thought was really funny, but nobody else thought was funny, and they hated it so much that they thought I should kill myself because of it! To be met with all of this positivity and interest and be told that people have liked my videos for years and they’ve thought I was funny for years, that’s such a weird mindfuck.

I think what’s so endearing- I hadn’t seen the other videos before, what always got me about the New Years’ video- you almost can’t tell if it’s a joke or not, and I’ve always enjoyed it because we were like that. We were all like that at one point, and then we started to get embarrassed. I’m glad they’re still up, they’re nice to look back on.
That’s really good to hear, I never thought that people found them so relatable. It’s been really cool to hear stuff about this, and to hear that people really related to my characters who were based on me, and who I used to be. It’s comforting.

In a lot of those videos you two address those people in character when you refer to “the haters.” Did it help the two of you navigate it, was it helpful to laugh at it, or was it just part of the script? 
Truthfully, we were doing it because I was trying to incite some sort of flame war. I was trying to troll these people back! I wanted the videos to go viral, I even put them on 4Chan and I was like, “Hey, get a load of these guys, how embarrassing! Look at these nerds, trying to pretend that they’re goth!” The people who we addressed [in the videos] were real people. This was before the comments started to leave the damage that they did, I’d see them and I’d go “Tara, we gotta reply, we gotta make them even more mad, this is what we gotta say…” 

One of my favorites is the rickroll video, you really can’t get more 2008 than that. Whose idea was it to make that video?
4Chan was very upset about the Ashley Tisdale cover. 4Chan was super pissed about the Ashley Tisdale cover. I went to Tara and I said, “Look, this is a big deal on the internet right now, we gotta do it, just trust me,” and so we did. I definitely don’t understand how people saw that and still thought our videos were real. 

What’s a trend from the 2000s that you love and would want to come back? 
This is what I want: I want the original hot topic back. I want Hot Topic to be scary again, I want the old font, I want it to look like a cave when you enter, the old Hot Topic smell. I want parents to still be afraid of Hot Topic. Did you ever write on your jeans in Sharpie, or was that just me?

I wrote on my shoes in Sharpie a lot. 
I wrote on my shoes and my jeans in sharpie, but- truthfully, I want the old Hot Topic back. 

True or false: Have you ever written fan fiction?
No, I have never written fan fiction. 

Damn. 
That was something that I just...I never did. 

You know, that’s probably...that’s good. Good for you. 

You can keep this one PG-13, but: What’s the funniest or strangest thing someone has said to you within the context of work?
I’m so desensitized to my job that I forget that a lot of things are shocking to people. With the video I made at the beginning of the month, I just ended it with “Yeah, I’m a professional dominatrix” because they’d flooded my work accounts already, it was old news. I forgot that it’s a very exciting thing to a lot of people. I got so many comments after releasing that like, “What the fuck did she just say in the last second of the video?!” I thought they were excited about the old footage I was going to release, but they were really excited about my work….I forget that things that are funny to me are super shocking to other people. 

Someone I have an arrangement with, he’s this punk dude, and I know that punks and people who are really into music are very proud of their tastes in music, they’re very proud of the fact that they have a good taste in music, and I know these things because I am one of those people. I once wrote in candle wax, “I <3 KID ROCK” on his back. It took up his whole back, and I took a bunch of pictures, and he died, it was so fucking funny. He was like, “How could you?!” 

See, that’s funny! That sort of leads into my next question: Do you think there’s any connection between who you were as a young person making those videos and the work you do now, in terms of creativity and being able to laugh at yourself? 
Yes and no. There are similarities, that mostly stem from having a psychological understanding of people, and being able to improvise. The New Years’ Eve video was probably the one that was the least improvised. For the most part, things were improvised, and we knew we could do really ridiculous shit and not break character. 

Because of the trolling, there was the psychology of knowing how to get under people’s skin. With being a dominatrix, for example: everything is so individualized, you have to be good at honing in on those things really quickly, you have to get inside their head. Like with trolling people, you have to pick up really quickly on where they’re coming from, and even if you think you know, you might not actually know. You just have to have that awareness of other people and where other people’s thoughts come from. There’s definitely some crossover between the two personas. I definitely love laughing at people and cracking dumb jokes. Using comedy to mindfuck people is great. 

You mentioned on Instagram that you want to do more comedy writing. What are some of your ideas? Do you want to make more videos, or try something different? Do you even know? 
I really don’t know at this point, because again, this whole reception has been so unexpected. I came out two weeks ago, and I really wasn’t expecting any of this at all! I was going into it with the expectation of things going poorly, I would retreat into my online hermit cave and wait for it to blow over. For so long, I’ve subconsciously not given myself permission to explore these interests. The YouTube comments definitely had a lot to do with it, but as I got older, the stigma that came with being a sex worker got in the way. 

I signed up for improv classes in 2016 and dropped out because all of these questions came up. what happens if someone recognizes me....it raised all of these weird questions that I didn’t have an answer for. People still lose their jobs for this stuff, you know? “It doesn’t matter how funny I am because I’m not presentable.” I never gave myself permission, but now I’m realizing that maybe I can make this work. 

All of that has been very liberating, and I’m very privileged that I can say that, because most of the time, that is not the case for sex workers. People would ask me what I would do instead, and now all of a sudden I’m getting permission from all of these people that I can do that now. I want to try everything! I’ve got so many things that I want to explore now. 

I feel like nowadays people are more receptive to the weird. Eric Andre gets naked every single time he performs. He gets naked, and that’s his thing, that’s what he does. 
Yeah! Yeah, and that’s really exciting. 

Do you think that, between navigating youtube and your work, is there sort of a spot for girls to be weird online? Are there any positives at all? 
Yeah, and like I said earlier, there will always be people who are going to be dicks. I’m very protective of young people, it does bother me that young women, young people period can still be subjected to so much cruelty. I think that things are changing- even if there is still that cruelty, women and nonbinary, queer folks, people who aren’t straight, white cis males, will be subjected to much more scrutiny online, but I think that things have changed a lot since 2007, and that there is more of a place for people to be weird. 

At 27 years old, Robin Green is still emo, wants to know if her Meez are doing okay, and may or may not have pictures of Gerard Way saved on her phone. You can find her in Bellingham, Washington, and on Twitter at robinelizabth. 

Delta Sleep – Spring Island | Album Review

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Growing up in Sacramento, California, I had a lot of friends in high school who were really into math rock. For some reason, there’s always been a vibrant scene there, and to this day, I still don’t really know why. My buddies were all into bands like Dance Gavin Dance, Tera Melos, and Hella. I was still deep into my Riffs Only Phase (think Metallica, Mastodon, Queens of the Stone Age), so, to me, this all sounded like repetitive noise. I just didn’t get the appeal. I felt like my dudes were too concerned with time signatures and looping pedals when they should be emphasizing the emotional side of virtuosity.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I found some math rock that felt made for me. I stumbled onto Battles while listening to my campus radio station (shout-out KSMC). The DJ played “Atlas,” and I was floored. My perspective shifted as I realized that math rock bands are still rock bands, but bands that like to do their rocking in a, well… mathy way. Real deep eighteen-year-old thoughts, I know, but are you gonna look at me and tell me that I'm wrong? Battles allowed me to dive back into the genre with a new appreciation and understanding of what I did and didn't like. I found that bands who tend to craft noodly riffs based on repetition weren’t really my thing, and what I was really looking for were bands making big choruses.

For me, Delta Sleep are the latter of these two points of view. You’re just as likely to see the Brighton cosiners on the bill for ArcTanGent as you are The Fest. The band’s approach to math rock is imbued with splashes of big tent indie, emo, and even some post-rock. Their new album Spring Island places a heavy emphasis on the bombastic indie rock portion of Delta Sleep’s DNA. These are songs meant to be shouted at the top of your lungs in the midst of a bunch of other sweaty people. 

Lead single, “The Detail,” utilizes tried and true start-stops to build up to a massive post-rock catharsis. “Planet Fantastic” is a charming and gentle ballad of sorts that ends with the band cutting out while a chorus of friends sings the refrain one last time, presumably circled around the mic, arms interlocked over each other’s shoulders. “The Softest Touch” features a midsection that belies the song’s title. My personal favorite, “Old Soul,” is a rowdy banger that features a bending guitar line reminiscent of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” 

Lyrically, much of Spring Island is concerned with anxiety and dread sparked by climate change. On “Spun,” frontperson Devin Yüceil sings about his fears for the natural world and how the seeming inability to do anything about them is driving him mad. Meanwhile, “Forest Fire” shrouds a love song with the terror of fire season, and “The Softest Touch” laments that global warming will melt the polar ice caps while we’re all convincing ourselves that we are making a difference. The group demonstrates Yüceil’s justified paranoia with a precise frenzy that a band can only be achieved through years of collaboration.

Spring Island is an impressive achievement. It’s intelligent, but it’s not soulless. It’s technical, but it also rips. I’m thankful that my friends never stopped preaching the gospel of math rock because I would not have found Delta Sleep without them.

Connor lives in San Francisco with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. Connor is a student at San Francisco State University and is working toward becoming a community college professor. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is obsessing over coffee and sandwiches.

Follow him on Twitter or Instagram.

Snarls – What About Flowers? | EP Review

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When I was in high school, my favourite album was Say Anything’s ...Is A Real Boy.

This is relevant, I promise.

After years of being obsessed with the pop-punk albums of Sum41, Treble Charger, and Avril Lavigne (did I mention how Canadian I am?) ...Is A Real Boy introduced me to the more sonically inventive and emotionally challenging world of 2000s emo. My favourite lyric was, “I’ve got these last twelve bucks to spend on you. You can take me anywhere your sick mind wants to.” I spent hours figuring out how to download, edit and assign that passage as the ringtone on my red Motorola KRZR.

Snarls’ new EP What About Flowers? is filled with these Ringtonable Moments™. It’s not hard to imagine my high school self swooning over lyrics like “I used to think that you were an angel. Only when you said the words that meant everything” and “Know the world doesn’t care if you feel alone. Into the flames we fucking go.” The band has found a way to tap into the beautiful earnestness of these emotions. It’s not the naivety of high school I relive when I listen to What About Flowers?, but rather the all-encompassing totality of feeling FEELINGS. 

It’s a beautiful sentiment and a delicate tightrope to walk. Luckily for us, the listeners, Snarls is the tightest they've ever been on this EP. Snarls’ debut album, Burst, was also super tight, but there’s something more happening here; it’s clear the band has spent the intervening year and a half honing their craft. Vocalist Chlo White describes it best when she says, “We’re in the ‘pressed flowers’ phase of our band, Burst was taking a fistful of glitter and throwing it, but this EP was more intentional.”

And this intentionality shows! Everything from the guitar solos to the drum fills to how the bass locks in with the vocals on lead single “Fixed Gear” feels deliberate and tells its own story. I could go on about White’s vocal performance both on this EP and Burst for days, but I think it’s easier that I share this notes app screenshot from my second listen through:

 
 

Even with this more intentional approach to songwriting on this EP, What About Flowers? isn’t without those signature bursts of glitter. While the first two tracks end with stuttering feedback and the sound of guitar delay settling, something interesting starts happening halfway through. Delay trails, echoed vocals, and synth textures are sprinkled into the back and foreground in a way that creates their own spacey crescendos and percussion. It all builds toward the lullaby-like finale on “If Only” and a gorgeous piano line that feels incredibly hopeful after the song’s exploration of heartbreak and isolation.

This is a lovingly crafted EP that perfectly showcases the talent and depth of a fantastic young band. I spent a long time trying to think of a perfect metaphor to accompany it. A thread of yarn unspooling, opening a present, a single heart-shaped kite in the sky. Something simple like that. But I think it’s this: What About Flowers? is the feeling of falling asleep on the bus on your way back to college after going home for thanksgiving for the first time since moving away. Is this *very* specific to my experience? Sure. But just about everything about this album, down to the collaboration with producer Chris Walla, feels like it was specifically tailored to make me feel nostalgic so just let me have this.

It’s been a difficult year. I mean, globally? Sure, yeah, I think that goes without saying. Without including too many details (and at the risk of turning this small portion of Swim Into The Sound into my diary, thank you, Taylor), it’s been an adjustment period. Dramatic shifts in work, relationships, and my living situation have brought me back to those days of the overwhelming emotions captured here by Snarls. That perennial Fall Feeling of knowing that spring and summer will bring beautiful new growth, but only after you’ve had to shed everything and plant yourself for the Winter. The interim of death and rebirth.

What about flowers indeed.

Cailen Alcorn Pygott is a writer, musician, and general sadsack from Halifax, Nova Scotia. His band No, It’s Fine. also releases their album I Promise. today. Tell him how cool you think that is on Twitter @noitsfinereally and on Instagram @_no_its_fine_.