Frances Chang writes with the self-awareness of a kid who spends way too much time on her phone, but she sings like a much older and wearier soul. The Brooklyn artist’s albums and songs have a tossed-off, first-thought-best-thought quality; titles like “Rate My Aura,” “i quit cigs,” and support your local nihilist could all easily pass as Hinge prompts. Look deeper, though, and you’ll find an artist desperately searching for a sense of self. Previous albums, like 2024’s Psychedelic Anxiety, wove themselves around knotted guitar lines and chintzy electronic twiddles that mirrored Chang’s passing thoughts, her whispery voice guiding us through her introspective internal geography. Her latest album, this time for RVNG Intl., strips her music down to its barest form, yielding a more graceful and open incarnation in the process.
Primarily written on a century-old baby grand, been thinking bout confession drifts along on a lounge singer’s lilt. Chang cradles her plainspoken chords as if they were old Bacharach ballads; on “Is affect real?,” she glides across a rich bed of strings while admitting, “Sometimes I want to wear/A head of light blonde hair/I don’t care if that’s unfair/Or makes me ordinary.” She shyly plinks her keys as the album implores you to join its foggy morning stroll and consider whatever it is in this world you’re still looking for. Chang maintains this wandering pace as she flits from sound to sound. “Marry” shuffles over fuzzy drum machines and an autumnal, Peanuts-y piano instrumental before the interruption of a phone call wherein Chang and her friend discuss a hookup from the previous night; the call ends with Chang asking her friend if she can accompany her to pick up some Plan B. As they gossip over whether the guy was a weirdo or not, you can sense the artist working out her feelings in real time.
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These songs pour from the same sonic teapot as many other postmodern baroque-pop balladers, evoking Tirzah, Eliana Glass, and RVNG luminary Julia Holter in equal measure. Chang may not yet approach the conceptual or compositional scope of those artists, but where she stands out is in the intimacy she brings to her music—her plainspoken voice remains quiet and collected as she dips smoothly into a sweet falsetto and back again on tracks like “No avatar,” as though we were peeking in on her as she hums to herself at home. Her arrangements are similarly bare, dipping into digital stock sounds on the guitar-noodling “Job’s tears,” while cheap, weeping strings infuse “Bad zen” and “Auratones of Desire” with childlike innocence. There’s little room for gauze or reverb here; every tone comes with clearly defined edges, hanging unadorned in space in a way that can be both distancing and raw at once.
Chang always seems to be on the verge of discovering something. As album high point “I can feel the waves” slowly moseys along, she searches to understand her partner’s thoughts, suddenly landing on an idea that stops everything: “You never really know someone/Never be inside their skin/Nor would you really wanna be.” From there, she finds a new groove to wander through, drum machines and glassy strings asking new questions prompted by her revelation. The album’s greatest strength and weakness are the same thing: It fully commits to its very specific melancholy without puncturing the surface, remaining out of reach even at her most vulnerable. If that can leave the record feeling a bit one-note, it’s still a lovely mood to simmer in, hinting at all the places her music could go, and all the people she could be.
