On her sophomore album, 2022's , crafts hi-definition guitar and synth rock that's both wildly anthemic and candidly intimate. She first displayed this dynamic sound on 2019's , an album that deftly walked the line between punky, lo-fi guitar rockers and acoustic folk songs, all imbued with her distinct point of view as a queer songwriter. finds taking her sound to the next level, pushing the amped electric riffs and Day-Glo synths to the fore while retaining all of the diaristic lyrics and openhearted confessions that made so affecting. Cuts like "Loose Cannon Club" and "Echo Park Vampire" are thrillingly hooky, straddling the line between early-'80s and -era . Conversely, tracks like "Monday Feeling," "Typhoid Mary," and "Florida" are pulsing, electronic-inflected productions centered on themes of loneliness and feeling ill at ease with yourself. Friskier, yet no less profound, is "Eve Polastri's Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate," a driving post-punk anthem in which transforms the main character from the acclaimed spy drama Killing Eve into a metaphor for romantic longing and the complexity of finding love, queer or otherwise. Elsewhere, she explores the often toxic and distorting effects that social media can have on our body image on "Mirror Mirror" and ruminates on a particularly bad breakup on "Naked Minimum." With manages to evoke the iconic indie rock that artists like perfected in the '90s, but makes it distinctly her own. Amazingly, all of these songs feel specific to her feminist, LGBTQ-oriented perspective, yet never seem anything but universally relatable in the way the best pop songs often are. ~ Matt Collar