Sasha Alex Sloan – “And the Crowd Goes Mild”

First of all, Sasha Alex Sloan has won the award for Best Album Title, and I'd like to know where to send the trophy. I thought I'd already reached peak emotional investment with “Glitter,” but the title track has apparently shoved its way onto the podium, knocked over the floral arrangements, and claimed first place. Sasha has a remarkable talent for extracting the happy and sad from your body, holding them up for inspection, and then putting you on an emotional rotisserie until you're evenly devastated on all sides. It's a highly specialized skill, and I wish she'd stop being so good at it. Actually, no. Please continue.

Closing her fourth studio album, released via 10K Projects, the title track feels like Sasha's final word on the exhausting business of pretending to be someone people might like more. She writes a song she believes in, gets inside her own head, and releases something cheerier instead. Next thing you know, she's sweating through a performance of music that doesn't feel like hers, wearing a smile that probably deserves its own acting credit. Then comes the party, the fancy dress, the spray tan, the Botox, and the deeply relatable horror of looking in the mirror and wondering who authorized any of this. She's tried being the upbeat girl, the glamorous girl, the girl who knows what she's doing at a party. The audience response? A polite ripple of applause from somewhere near the refreshments.

What makes Sasha so good at this particular brand of sad-girl comedy is that she's perfectly willing to make herself the punchline without letting the feelings underneath become a joke. “I guess the moral of the story is to be myself,” she sings, arriving at a conclusion that sounds painfully obvious until you remember how much effort people spend trying to avoid it. The title is brilliant because the disappointment isn't some grand public humiliation. It's worse. It's indifference, delivered at room temperature. But there's something quietly triumphant about a song that admits all of this and still chooses to tell the truth. Sasha, wear the sweats. We'll take the songs exactly as they are.