Medicine

There's a medicinal bitterness to this track that the title earns completely. It opens with distorted, almost corroded guitar that sounds like static trying to become music, and the production throughout maintains that quality — something processed and slightly wrong, beautiful in the way that scar tissue is beautiful. The tempo is slow but not gentle; it has the heaviness of something inescapable rather than the softness of something peaceful. Tonra's voice here takes on a harder edge than usual, a controlled flatness that reads as emotional exhaustion rather than detachment — she's singing about using another person as an anesthetic, and her delivery embodies the numbness she's describing. Lyrically, the song sits in morally uncomfortable territory: the acknowledgment that one person is inflicting pain while simultaneously being relieved of their own. The band's production choices here are more rock-influenced than their acoustic work, the guitar distortion lending a physicality to what could otherwise have been a delicate confessional. In the lineage of British indie-folk, this track stands slightly apart, more willing to be ugly, to let the feedback bleed. It surfaced during a period when the "sad girl" aesthetic was being critically examined, and this song both embodied and complicated that label — it wasn't passive sadness but something more active and self-implicating. Reach for this when you need to acknowledge something you've been doing that you aren't proud of.