No Below

The guitars here arrive distorted and slightly abrasive, channeling the angular energy of 1990s alternative rock — Pavement's slouch, Sleater-Kinney's intensity — but filtered through a songwriting sensibility that is sharper and more emotionally precise than pure nostalgia would allow. The rhythm section punches hard, the production deliberately rough around the edges without sacrificing melodic clarity. Sadie Dupuis writes lyrics that operate on multiple registers at once: surface-level they document interpersonal collapse, but underneath they're excavating questions about complicity, about how much of what breaks us we invited in. Her voice navigates this material with a sardonic edge that softens at unexpected moments into something genuinely wounded. Speedy Ortiz were part of a mid-2010s indie rock revival that valued difficulty and intelligence over accessibility, finding their audience among people who wanted music that demanded something back from them. The song has the quality of something written under pressure, where the only way through the feeling was to find the exact right words for it. You reach for it when you're angry and sad in equal measure, when you need the catharsis of volume but also the precision of language — not background music, but something to argue back at.