Tummy Ache

There is an almost physical enthusiasm to how this song is built — the guitars are trebly and close, the drums hit harder than the recording budget probably should have allowed, and the whole thing moves with the specific energy of someone who has just figured something out and can't stop talking about it. Diet Cig operate in the key of young adulthood's messy specificity: the feelings here are not romantic in any polished sense but rather bodily, immediate, embarrassingly real in the way that feelings are before you've had enough time to reframe them. The vocals sit right at the front, conversational and slightly breathless, the vocal equivalent of finishing someone's sentence before they're done saying it. The lyrical subject is the peculiar nausea of caring too much about something you suspect you shouldn't, the stomach-level anxiety of wanting and not quite having the language for what you want. What makes it work is that it doesn't try to resolve that tension — it holds it, makes it the point, finds something close to joy in the accuracy of the description. This is music for summer with no particular plan, for being twenty-something and overwhelmed and occasionally fine with that. It belongs in a basement or a small club, somewhere slightly too warm, in the company of people you've just met.