✦ songs you were told would ruin you

the song i cried over on a mountain in 2020. loud, bratty, completely unbothered. if you were raised to think music could damage you, this is the one that proves the damage was never coming from the speakers.

the one i renamed on my ipod so nobody would see who made it. it is a perfect song and it always was.

a girl on the phone with her mother, choosing the wrong life on purpose and being happy about it. the thread here is joy used as an argument.

made after everything. it isn't an anti-god record, it's a record that takes god away from the person who was using him.

rage in a very small voice. she's singing about what she watched happen in her house growing up, and the restraint is the point.

he says it flat out: the day he chose humanity over religion. a whole double album about breaking what your family handed you, in public, while it's still in progress. 'mother i sober' is the deeper cut and it will take something out of you.

church camp, the friend with the terrifying dad, the slow leak of belief. quiet and devastating and never once mean about it.

the big one. a girl leaves her father's church and the road has something worse waiting. if you take one thing from this list, take this.

the neon trees singer came out, then watched his church call people like him apostates, and made a whole record about walking away. glossy pop with the anger left in.

a love letter to the kids they were, growing up queer and mormon in utah before anyone let them say it out loud. tender, not bitter.

the answer to everything above it. a queer love song so light and happy that the thing you were warned about turns out to be a sunny afternoon.

the title is the instruction. choosing yourself as a discipline rather than a feeling.

the most underrated record here. survival told with grace instead of grit, which is somehow harder to sit with.

catholic imagery and appetite, refusing to apologize for either. the bridge between this list's quiet half and its loud half.

violin, hair, hometown, and who gets to decide what you look like. 'selfish soul' is about hair the way the essay is about music, a rule that shows up dressed as taste.

the ancestor to everything in the level 3 section. tiny voice, enormous horror, sugar and teeth in the same mouth.

trauma and control dressed up as a candy-colored horror show. cute on the surface, screaming underneath, and nobody gets to tell her which half is the real one.

what it costs to be somebody's idea of a woman, sung by someone using biblical imagery on purpose.

getting sober, breaking the cycle, staying gothic about it.

appalachian hymns turned into a weapon. this is what it sounds like when someone keeps the religion and points it back.

rejecting the god you were handed and building a different one out of spite. conceptually the sharpest record here.

arca building herself out of noise and refusing every box anyone handed her. the institution that gets broken here is the idea that you have to be one thing.