Transient Peak updates!

Hannah Jocelyn

09 Apr 2026 — 3 min read

Hello!

It’s been a minute. Full disclosure: I lost my sponsor for Beauty In The Breakdown, so I had to put that on hiatus, but hope to revive it in the future. If I'm able to get more paid subscribers, I'll bring the series back for sure.

In the meantime, I wrote a truckload of Pitchfork reviews, including a writeup of Lauren Auder’s beautiful Whole World as Vigil and a Saturday Review about "Golden" from K-Pop Demon Hunters. You can see all that on my Contributor page, which now has a nice lil bio!

I also worked on forthcoming music from NYC-based artist Girl Sam, London-based electronic musician Serena Clara, and Chicago-based fellow music writer Jack Riedy. I'm available for anything you need, whether it's mixing or writing your artist bios - would love to get in touch!

Oh, and I'm also releasing some new music soon!

My next song, "Bird Exploder", is out May 1st, with three other songs I had in the vault - including one reissued from my previous project, Fell From The Tree. (The title is a Song Exploder reference, but also a reference to the one bit from Shrek when Princess Fiona sings so loud a bird explodes.) You can pre-save it here, if you so desire.

It’s about a brief but intense lockdown friendship, the kind with 800-word emails and frenetic replying to each other's Instagram stories. Everyone lost their minds back then, especially me, who finally started HRT after several years in the closet and felt all these intense new emotions.

I was able to write about that time with a more mature perspective, while still giving this small month-long thing the epic scale it seemed to have six years ago.

That's the cover art up top, from Grace Krichbaum of the band Shallow Alcove.

As for the other songs:

“Sister”, which I made around 2023, is about the difficulties of maintaining close friendships (transference, projection) and namedrops Ethel Cain and Real Housewives. I actually interviewed Ethel Cain back in 2021, well before she blew up, making this the only time I've ever namedropped someone I interviewed in a song.
“I Missed Out” was made in like 2019, about losing college to the closet and my formative years to an online Tumblr relationship - the one I later wrote about in songs like “Doppelgängers” and “Board Up The Flood”. I previously released this as part of my old musical project Fell From The Tree, and it felt appropriate to re-release here.
“No Mourning (Day in Day Out)” is a demo about the fear of speaking up, made in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and the beginning of Israel’s retaliation. I was too scared to release it when I wrote it, and I made it really dreamy so no one could tell what it's about.

Heather Kirby beautifully mastered "Bird Exploder", with Heather Jones on "Sister", Ryan Morey on "I Missed Out", and myself (hehe) on "No Mourning" and the Bandcamp bonus tracks.

I have a pretty intense piece going up tomorrow about Nadav Lapid's insane movie Yes!,so I wanted to do a quick catchup beforehand :) Here are some music recs:

Star Moles - Spinning (RIYL: Charlotte Cornfield, Cameron Winter)