A God-awful Small Affair

  So... I still exist. Truth be told: I've gotten so rusty with writing and formatting anything in a blog capacity that - coupled with the fact I'm now using a Chromebook instead of Windows - everything feels completely alien and impossible to use to me. On a personal level, 2025 has been... really difficult. Various health issues with my mum, all of my cats have now passed away, and a growing unease with my own health has all snowballed into a bit of a tough time. I'm persisting and doing everything I can, and one of the many things I've cut out of my life to allow time to unwind where possible was, unfortunately, writing! I've written many times about my insecurities with writing and comparing myself to established music sites and their journalism and whilst a big chunk of that was dissatisfaction with what reporting has become, a lot of it is also just personal uncertainty and a lack of conviction. Some days I will assert that a particular album is gorgeous, into...

The very moment that our eyes and ears stumbled across the video for Water Me - which I am assuming is your same introduction to FKA Twigs that I had - there was the immediate connection in our heads that this bug-eyed girl was going to be pretty big. The problem with such eye-watering, word-of-mouth debut videos from alt-pop artists is that, more often than not, they turn out to be pretty contrived gimmicks . With LP1 , the creatively titled debut from Tahliah Barnett, that's thankfully not the case. Whilst she's not without controversy in her personal life , the first full-length glimpse into her talents and direction expose no such flaws and bullshit. A favourable and kind comparison would be that same feeling I got listening to my first Grimes album ( Visions - I've still yet to trace further back in that particular history): right down to the bewitching little intro of 'Preface'. That shaky, angelic voice will go on to flesh out the album in more b...