Petal - Magic Gone

The "confessional" album is sought after, but the human desire for secondhand absorption of the artist's personal turmoil allows empty posturing to slip through the net. Formless angst became an aesthetic, an affectation, because we let it; we made it profitable. Still, we know the real deal when we hear it. We treat such an album like a cipher through which the artist's psyche can be decoded.

Kiley Lotz would save you the trouble. She's been upfront about her struggle with mental illness which intensified in between Petal's debut Shame in 2015 and Magic Gone. The lyrics don't sugarcoat it and it's not a stretch to say you can hear it in her performance. In "Comfort", Lotz details in real time the point when she realised a long term relationship was over, and when she wails "I don't fucking care anymore!", you believe her. And yet Magic Gone never feels like a confrontational exercise, staring at you to see who blinks first, because Lotz's melodic acuity won't allow it. It's more downbeat than Shame, - never dirge-like in a way that would make a line such as "I wished the truck on the overpass would tumble down upon me" relentlessly morose, but never trivialising it either.