ROACH
Waking up and realizing your decisions have amounted to something.
Dear Rach,
Have you listened to Miya Folick’s album ROACH? You should! It is the kind of record you want to buy on vinyl so you can play it while lying on the floor staring at the ceiling in your basement, far away from your phone and everyone you know.
To me, it encapsulates the strange feeling of being in your late 20s or early 30s and realizing you have, seemingly overnight, accumulated a personal history of being who you are. You have lived quite a bit of life. Your life reflects a vast collection of decisions you personally made (continue to make!). You’ve survived a couple things, maybe survived yourself. Like a little roach.
Miya sounds in some moments like your friend who is unwell who you are worried about. In other places, she sounds like the person who is such a mess you wish you weren't friends with them at all. Mostly, she sounds like a normal 30-something processing said feeling of having accumulated a personal history of being who they are, and both accepting that and slowly trying to change for the better.
Musically, it feels a lot more straightforward than her shrill and experimental 2018 record Premonitions. There is still just enough edge. I guess you could call this indie rock? Pop rock? Electro pop? It’s kind of sparse, kind of synth-y, but pretty melodic all the way through. The songs are self indulgent but self aware, occasionally spilling over the top into too confessional or trite in a way I love.
The arc of the record is perfect. It starts with “Oh God,” where Miya bemoans having “spent [her] 20s not believing in anything.” She navigates several rocky relationships on “Get Out of My House” and “Nothing to See,” which include such iconic lyrics as “My mom was relieved when she heard I was through with you / But my heart still stops when I see a green Subaru.” She reflects on how similar she is to her parents and the unbearable weight of being a normal human woman in “Mommy” and “2007,” singing “Pacing around my apartment to keep my heart open…I don’t wanna be afraid, I wanna fucking live.” She moves on with what I would describe as survival bangers “Cockroach” and “Tetherball,” and then ends with a set of 4 songs that feel like she’s emotionally pulling herself out of a burning car wreck. The exclamation point on how to carry on is “Shortstop,” an admission that we are all flawed, want deeply, and why don't we all just go out and dance and it will be just fine? Or maybe it won't, but that's besides the point. We're going out tonight.
I recognize in her the quality of turning every mundane moment into an internal opera, elevating the fact that you left the party to go home and drink tea and watch SVU to a sweeping treatise on Who You Are. Sounds like…people we know.
This album is the perfect mix of hollow-chest anxiety, triumphant growth, and self loathing. Do I feel those things in my life right now? No, and that's exactly why I can afford to listen to this record and feel every feeling without it literally destroying me. Do I intensely recognize the feeling of being almost 30 and realizing my decisions have amounted to something, and knowing that that something is my one wild and precious life? Yes. This is the perfect record about growing up. A manifesto on reckoning with yourself. Turn it on the next time you're alone in the car and want to get a good cry in.
Stay Loose,
KA