#016

I probably could've called that DCA was a fellow midwestern kid. I totally didn't. But I probably could've. At the risk of pigeonholing myself forever or facing the horror of being perceived, I really can't express just how much of my shit this album is. Weird, electro, guitar-driven angst, melancholy and nostalgia; pop callbacks, digital sounds from all over the place, verbatim Avril Lavigne interpolations, splashes of midwest emo and pop punk. Suffocatingly simple, sweet and threatening to spill into immature at times, but also deeply wounded and like untangling a bramble thorn of someone else's trauma. Really affecting experience! Sure, there's rote lovesick jealousy and the universally felt fear of going to school, but there's also these clusters of noise, interference and speech samples that evokes pain, regret and the inability to let go. There's also this really slick moment in the closing track where DCA refers to himself both with his childhood nickname and his real name and it plays each one in the opposite channel. At first I thought he was glitching or reversing the audio but then I realized what was going on and... ugh, love it, love it, love it.

I want more people around my age who are making Y2k/00's evocative art to dig into this more. I think there's only so much of myself I wanna put on the internet anymore, and it has to be even harder to do it as an artist, but I will bare this— your childhood experiences and especially your trauma shape you more than you will ever realize. I've grappled with this a lot over the last couple years, and to see stuff like this come out that's just so unapologetically upfront is extremely satisfying. I think a lot of hyperpop, "electroclash," and genre transcending artists like to bend the pop sound to its breaking point to portray emotional wounds or something horrible that threatens to overtake them, but SID THE KID's emo-pop, descending-into-144p-quality take on it really resonates with me.

favorite tracks: shed head, behind the lockers with hunter, re4il1ze, go!, good buy my old life, i hope my dog missed me

also the video for go! is really, really fucking cool and borderline terrifying