Bleep

Swedish indie pop group Becky and the Birds returns to 4AD for a new LP entitled Only music makes me cry now. Produced, recorded, and performed entirely by Birds’ sole member Thea Gustafsson, the album functioned kind of like a self-actualisation process in the wake of a devastating break-up. Pulling from the freeform, more experimental music of her youth, Gustafsson weaves field recordings taken in London and Stockholm and other digital detritus into these searing and vivid collections of sound to both abstract and help shape the material. While shades of dreampop, folk, and R&B creep into frame, Only music makes me cry now is most striking in the way she plots out her own path somewhere between them all.