Daughters by Jennifer Walton

For fans of Caroline, Roxy Radclyffe, Ethel Cain, contemporary post rock, and pure simulacra of an American shopping mall, Daughters by Jennifer Walton exposes the absurdity of our mundane surroundings in the face of distant, gnawing tragedy. Recounting an international tour which interrupted the speaker from taking care of a critically ill family member, each song juxtaposes the absurd, bureaucratic, and procedural problems in front of us every day with an unwinnable battle in an unreachable location. The result weaves into and out of hyperpop-adjacent spurts of energy and pensive moments of melancholia, pulsing with an organic flow of energy reminiscent of Walton’s work on the new Caroline record. As flashing ads and failing institutions dominate our immediate attention, genuine personal loss moves us to laugh off such ephemeral nonsense. As we kneel powerless to a system built to eradicate our humanity, our minds wander to those things not even the greatest society could provide for us, liberating us from this immediate prison only to send us to one much more existential and permanent.