Becky and the Birds - Only music makes me cry now

Pop

4AD

2024

Only music can make me cry now is the debut album from Sweden’s Becky and the Birds. It’s complicated, intimate hyperpop that’s packed with ideas and experiments, yet still feels restrained.

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Becky and the Birds’ debut Only music makes me cry now is a record that grabbed me from the first seconds. I’d read about it in Atwood Magazine but it didn’t bubble up on the playlist until a few days later, but when I heard the opening notes of “Star”, I was all in. Weird, fragile, breathless vocals, with tape hiss and a wandering keyboard:

It’s a complicated track – simple lyrics offset by a thousand layers of samples, evoking everything from glitchy electropop to heartfelt R&B. It’s indicative of what’s to come on the rest of this assured and deep debut album.

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Thea Gustafsson is the person behind Becky and the Birds (the name came from her desire for the freedom of anonymity). Only music makes me cry now was written during and after a breakup, and those confused and conflicting emotions permeate not just the lyrics, but the production itself.

From the Atwood Magazine article:

Gustafsson candidly describes Only Music Makes Me Cry Now as subconscious, sincere, and creative. “I find the title to be so true to how I felt when I finished the record and when I closed that chapter of my breakup story,” she says of the album’s name. “I was no longer crying over heartbreak, only music.”

There’s a gentle, complex moodiness that permeates this whole record. Every song is packed with ideas and experiments, from overdriven electric guitar to hyperprocessed vocal samples, to haunting choir accompaniment.

That said, somehow the production feels restrained and tempered. “When she holds me” must have a couple dozen different audio tracks in the mix with the acoustic guitar, but it still sounds stripped-down:

Every now and then something resembling a groove emerges. “I look at the choices i made” teases at becoming a banger but pulls back to atmospherics and depth, creating a fantastic tension:

Only music can make me cry now is a delicate and vulnerable, boundary-pushing record that demands a close listen, a major creative evolution from her prior release, 2020’s Trasslig. Thea Gustafsson isn’t anonymous anymore, and Becky and the Birds might be about to have a moment.