Catwyrms
ISSUE #64
Meow.
Bon Iver will be releasing the fifth album of their two-decade career this Friday. The elation this gives me is hard to overstate. Judging by the singles, it’ll be a masterpiece, for me—one that speaks to those silent floods that make up a private life. In truth, so far he has made four of my dearest albums on planet Earth.
As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously, but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia,
March is, generally speaking, when a lot of the year’s best music starts coming out of the woodwork. Think last year: Cindy Lee, Adrienne Lenker, Vampire Weekend, Challengers score (okay, technically April). Think Scaring the Hoes the year before that. The story of music in the 2020s is the story of March.
Places where the land ends are pure—you can hear water like that a mile away. Oceans are perfect, even radical, in their isolation. You could swim out into the sea as far as you like, if what you wanted was to drown, yet this desire to be free is forever compelling.