Hannah’s Encounters + a rant about the Taylor Swift album- October 2025

I put out a new song, called “Realign”! It’s a collaboration with Providence artist and dear friend Hey Rel, who heard an early version and immediately wrote a verse from the other perspective.

Paris Paloma - Good Boy

RIYL: Florence + The Machine, Hozier, hoping Woke will come back one day

I love when an artist I’ve believed in delivers; I saw it when Gigi Perez (who I wrote about in 2023) scored a massive hit with “Sailor Song”, and I’m seeing it again with Paloma’s epic, mature “Good Boy”. I’m a sucker for Springsteen-type epics and this beats Sam Fender at his own game. 

I felt like Cacaphony, while it had some gorgeously innovative production on songs like “My Mind (Now)” (which I wrote about last year), was still locked into this narrative of evil men and pure women. On “Good Boy”, she expands this analysis: she pokes fun at men ("losers!") subservient to the Andrew Tates of the world while also sympathizing with them, recognizing how their class positioning places them closer to women than the billionaires they aspire to become. This could be too much for a single song, and the chorus is very dense, but it doesn't matter when the song explodes toward the end, complete with Carrie K’s muscular drum fills and barking sound effects I hope real humans made. What I love is that Paloma sings along with the gruff male backing vocals at the end; she’s got a lot to learn, too.

Big Blind - Rugby

RIYL: Alvvays, Saint Sappho, scratchy guitar tones,

A couple of musician friends posted this track to their stories; I listened and immediately fell for the production, the mix of poppy melodies  (why am I thinking of OneRepublic’s Stop and Stare?). and heavy guitar tones. This is Arly Scott and Lauren Whyte’s debut single as Big Blind, which they produced with Ben Coleman. For a first single, it’s really impressive; The guitar countermelody. I love when the vocal distortion on “I’ve had enough” morphs into a guitar solo at 3:25, or when they drop out the first beat every four measures. I’m a sucker for any sort of “you’re in my bloodstream” imagery, and this is a beautiful song about being so close to someone you’re in their shoes, but you’re still not right for one another.

They remind me a lot of Saint Sappho, a duo I was going to write about late last year but never got around to it (sorry!) - a similar dreamy, thoughtful song you should definitely listen to as well because I love how the frontperson sings the word “now”.

Serena Clara - Big Bad Pearl

RIYL: TWST, Bjork, Ryn Weaver

I love unpredictable electro-pop like this, particularly with melodies this chaotic. The more I listen, the more I hear details like the 6/8 pad of the intro looping through the 4/4 beat or the knowingly ugly synths buried toward the end. All that, before the industrial outro finally centers the paranoia of doomscrolling is, but I like the twist (no pun intended, though TWST is remixing this song early next year) that even touching grass doesn’t help: “when I leave my room/often I’ll hurry back in case of a heart attack/One day I’ll go outside/without the constant feeling that something’s out to get me and if I breathe too loud I might DIE!” Claras’ EP EGOKIN is out in November with another great single “Pomegranate”, so be on the lookout.

Caroline Meade - Open House

RIYL: Big Thief, Skullcrusher

Note to musicians and publicists: if you want to get a music journalist/musician’s attention, send a personal email showing you've done your research about what they cover. More importantly, make your music good, which Meade did! Working with Matt Wolach (assistant to legendary mixer Spike Stent) and Eric Lagg (mastering), this is a very stripped-back set of breakup songs. What strikes me about this one is the out-of-tune piano in the background and the plinking synths, which I don’t normally hear in more straightforward folk and honestly reminds me of the Maria BC record at times? There’s a lot of classic very writerly wordplay here, which is honestly refreshing when so many artists – including one I’ll talk about at the end – are committed to cramming in as many syllables as possible: “hollow holiday plan/I'm loving a hologram" says enough on its own.

Venbee - New Body Parts

RIYL: Art School Girlfriend, PinkPantheress if she was depressed

“I don't enjoy sex 'cause I don't like my body” is another way to grab my attention, and the song only gets more intense from there. I love how stark it is; we get a four on the floor, a piano, some ambient synths, and Venbee. It’s a genuinely haunting song and while it’s definitely too intense and diaristic for some, the production stays with me as much as the lyrics.

Gordi - Instant Life

RIYL: this newsletter tbh

It’s Gordi co-producing with the National’s most frequent collaborator Peter Katis; the answer is none, none more Hannahbait. I wish it was a little longer!

Geese - Long Island City Here I Come

RIYL: being 20-something in New York in 2025

Is this album really New York? What even gives something that qualification? Like any other city or anywhere on Earth, there are so many people and so many experiences it resists definition. With Beatriz Artola’s mix, this album is wide open even with the occasional claustrophobic experimental moment; you could have told me it was an LA record and I'd believe you. I’ve lived here my whole life and I got as online as I did to get rid of the pressure of "Greatness". You could say I was getting killed by a pretty good - vaudeville cane drags me off stage.

I don't think I actually have a problem with Getting Killed (the album, I do in fact have a problem with most murder), as much as I resisted it on first listen. I'm just a little annoyed that the queer songwriters I've essentially made a pseudo-career out of highlighting are replaced by Cameron Winter-alikes, whose shtick is much harder to replicate than a Lenderman or, yes, a Bridgers. No one's going to do it better: when Winter says "Nobody knows where they're going except me", he's 100% right. Also, the bassist of Geese is trans, which I didn't know until the other day.

The line that made the entire album click for me is "You were there the day the music died, and/I'll be there the day it dies again." Music is indeed dying, because this city is famously impossible to live in unless you come from money and there's no incentive to support queer voices. I guess the Steve-Winwood-meets-James-Murphy-voice of Cameron Winter is what it takes to keep it alive; those piano chords sound like someone trying his hardest to hold up the world before he collapses. The more I listen, the more that chord progression honestly recalls another piano man from Long Island (BUT NOT LONG ISLAND CITY).

Just go read Grace Robins-Somerville's piece, which links life in New York to grief over the Gaza genocide. She says everything here better than me.

Taylor Swift - Wood 

RIYL: Men, Phallocentrism, Sabrina Carpenter 

I’ve come a long way from my Gaylor days. I am 28, and I have matured. I can safely say Taylor Swift’s sexuality is none of my business… or so I thought before I heard “Wood”, where she made her sexuality the entire world’s business. She says her lover “dickmatized” her. That word’s existed for a while.  Dickmatization is a thoroughly unpleasant concept; that someone’s penis can change you and you suddenly become submissive to them, feeling the feminism leave your body because the phallus is that powerful. Almost like this adherence to heterosexuality is… involuntary… compulsory even. 

But this is what Taylor wants and maybe who she’s always been: maybe this isn’t Taylor pivoting to tradwife, but all the wisdom was a defense until she found her boy on the football team. Except I don’t want to psychoanalyze her, as that’s what all this discourse is anyway — she is a mirrorball, after all. Is she MAGA? Is she satirical? Is her cancelled friend Blake Lively or a Trumpian Kelce associate? There’s no subtlety and yet the targets are still somehow unclear.

I was going to write a proper review of Showgirl, but I’d have to describe how almost every song on this album is just slightly, viscerally wrong. Everything is shaped like a pop song that might be likable - the mixes expand and contract in all the right ways, the vocal production is as on point as ever - yet the actual content is surreally absent. It’s the equivalent of receiving an e-card saying “Happy Birthday! Your Message Goes Here”; the Garfield minus Garfield of Taylor Swift albums. Okay, here’s one more; it’s like Disney’s 100th year anniversary film Wish, a movie that wanted to look like watercolor paintings but instead looked and felt static. Wish and Showgirl are collections of tropes and Easter eggs in search of a connecting thread. (Somehow, the lyrics are still worse in Wish.)

Then we get to “Wood”, which is Taylor Swift trying to be Sabrina Carpenter instead of Lana Del Rey. Carpenter alludes to her beaus on occasion, but Swift references Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast and the meme about the redwood tree in this ode to Kelce.  The specificity of Swift’s best music gets at something universal; the specificity of her worst music only gets at something specific. This song is about Travis Kelce’s penis. A song about sex would be fine; “False God” and “Dress” are genuinely sensual deep cuts. Most of her best songs about relationships center her own emotions and not the guy. This centers the guy, specifically one part of the guy, and it takes away her agency completely. 

The music doesn’t even make up for it. Her production used to be so much better; compare the funk guitar intro of “Style” to the lame tinniness of Wood’s Jackson 5 “homage”. Both Max Martin/Shellback! There are barely any synths and there’s not even the lush country production of Fearless and Spark Now. The live-band soft rock sound doesn’t sound live at all, like the album is its own sterile Taylor’s Version recreation. 

One thing I want to say about “Father Figure”, somehow one of the strongest tracks: the clean lyric “I’ll make a deal with the devil because my check’s bigger” is a much better line than the original “my dick’s bigger” (not to mention more accurate, considering she got her masters!). If she says her dick’s bigger than the Devil’s, it both feels like stolen valor from trans women and makes me wonder if she views her metaphorical dick as bigger than Travis’ literal one. Why are we still associating the penis with power anyway? It’s too sensitive for that. 

This was a rant about “Wood” but I'm linking "Ruin the Friendship," one of her all-time best story songs. She can write about high school heartbreak as much as she wants if it feels this good.