ALBUM REVIEWS
Jazmin Bean first garnered attention as a teenager online, sharing horrorcore glam looks that shocked the beauty community. Their wide-ranging influences — from Hello Kitty and Kawaii to Aswang, a legendary creature in Filipino folklore — would eventually seep into the music they started making, which draws on futuristic pop and dark heavy metal sounds. In 2019, the now 21-year-old introduced this distinctive style on their debut EP ‘Worldwide Torture,’ a collection that was characterised by its wilful experimentation.
When NME first met the north London-born artist at Reading Festival in 2021, they promised that their debut LP would be a “very personal” album; in the time since, Bean has overcome substance abuse as well as a period in rehab towards the end of 2022. The resulting record sees them shed the bratty, blood-soaked character of their makeup artist years, and instead open up about their identity and personal relationships.
The title track details the power found in taking opportunities and being more ruthless in life. Here, Bean goes from singing about having a “tail” between their legs to screaming a powerful hook atop thrashing guitars: “You can’t stop me / And I’ll get anything I want.” They continue to detail their journey as the song progresses, while offering insight into their life as a non-binary artist: “Maybe I’ll never find out if I’m a boy or girl.”
Bean continues to lean into these huge, powerful sounds across ‘Traumatic Livelihood’, allowing the arrangements to amp up the emotional impact of each song. Their theatrical vocal delivery is on full display throughout ‘Shit Show’, while ‘Favourite Toy’ is a more upbeat moment, despite its weighty themes of manipulation and deceit. The majority of the tracks are embellished with violin runs and unexpected changes in rhythms.
Standout ‘Black Dress’ summarises everything Bean has been through in recent years, while also expressing a desire to move on from the past and rise “out of the mud.” By sharing their truth with listeners, Bean offers a new, more open-hearted side to their artistry. ‘Traumatic Livelihood’ may contain glimmers of the gritty sound they made their name on, but above all else, it feels like an honest step forward.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Listening to Karin Ann’s debut album ‘Through the Telescope’, you’d be forgiven for not realising that the Slovakian singer-songwriter is just 21-years-old. There is a knowing darkness to this music, which brims with observations earned through experience and the mystique of an author with many stories to tell.
“All his skin eaten by worms / Nothing left there / A pile of bones”, Ann sings on ‘Pile of Bones’. For all its macabre imagery – a through line across the album’s 14 tracks – the song is delivered like a fairytale, with Ann’s soft, ethereal vocals floating like wisps of smoke around its beating heart.
Her singing voice is light, calling to mind the ease and indie droll of Faye Webster and Frankie Cosmos. It all feeds into the album’s curious mix of light and dark, as Ann sings through honeyed whispers of deep emotional strife, from losing faith to leaving childhood behind too early, embedding these dark secrets in twinkling melodies and delicate guitar strings. “The band keeps playing while I continue to cry”, she sings softly on dollhouse-like track ‘The Band Keeps Playing’. “Maybe they won’t see that my dress keeps tearing / And it’s swallowing me”.
Ann’s songwriting is at its strongest when it goes for specifics. There’s queer love song ‘Olivia’, ‘A Song for the Moon’ – a love letter to the darker sides of herself – or ‘My Best Work of Art’, the album’s lovely closer that chronicles Ann’s reclamation of her own identity through the lens of painting and brushstrokes.
After a tough few years fighting illness and cutting her teeth in music, Ann delivers a confident and unflinching debut album. ‘Through The Telescope’ weaves her personal struggles into beautiful, potent songwriting, which she gives space to breathe amidst lush vocals and rich, but never overblown instrumentation. Dancing deftly across folk, rock, country and pop, and spanning emotional landscapes from lovestruck to melancholy, this is a most precocious debut.
