Bug, by Annie Blackman

Bug by Annie Blackman, released 28 April 2023 1. Ash 2. The Well 3. Altitude 4. Need Me 5. Bug We like to think of diaries as windows into the psyche, but just as often, a diary is a trap. There’s a danger in seeing those padlocked pages as static or inert—experiences pinned down like butterflies under glass, offering faint clues into what were once restless, fluttering things. But a frozen insect only ever tells one kind of story, and a diary only ever gives you one angle; they can disfigure memory as much as they preserve it. As a songwriter, Brooklyn, NY’s Annie Blackman has always been keenly aware of that tension. Her lyrics might enfold multiple perspectives and narrative asides, or double back and counteract themselves, leaving specific interpretation up to the listener. Through comedy, self-criticism, and meta-reflection, Blackman lends dimension to memories of whirlwind crushes and deflated dreams. Born and raised in Montclair, NJ, Blackman learned how to play guitar at age 12 and began penning original songs as a teen. In high school, she self-recorded and self-released Blue Green, an ambitious collection of heartfelt chord progressions and tender themes. She spent her college years at Kenyon College in the flatlands of central Ohio. There, she self-released Laundry Room Songs in her freshman year and leaned into TikTok, amassing a loyal following of like-minded fans. Her experiences throughout those formative years, the inherent awkwardness of early adulthood, and post-grad life back in NY informed what would eventually become her debut album, 2022’s All of It. Called “witty and tongue in cheek” by Uproxx, with FLOOD praising her songs “spun from the raw emotional tendons of real-life scenes,” All of It cemented Blackman as a purveyor of bite-sized time capsules put to the beat of engaging indie folk. Blackman’s new EP, Bug, is the rarest sort of diary, a collection of songs that privileges what’s messy and true over any perfect image of the past. This is part of what makes her such an expert chronicler of what you might call the “situationship”—the romantic posture that’s neither here nor there, that refuses to be pinned down. She headed into a proper recording studio for the first time ever, working with engineer and mixer Allen Tate of San Fermin at his Better Company Studios in Brooklyn, NY. Joined by drummer Zac Coe and produced with longtime collaborator and guitarist/bassist Evan Rasch (Skullcrusher, Runnner), these stories find Blackman more or less where All of It left off—a no less clear-eyed a look at post-college anxiety, but its scale is smaller, tethered more to whispered conversations in Brooklyn bedrooms than the wide, unknowable horizon. She lingers on overclocked AC units, tangled top sheets, bugs in pre-war bathtubs. “Ash,” a vivid take on a bad date with “one hell of an introvert,” ends with an address to an entirely different listener: “My asbestos-cut confessional/Out loud to you at last,” Blackman sings, turning an admission into a confrontation, and further complicating an already fraught dynamic. The delicate finger-picking of an acoustic guitar dances alongside a woebegone slide, vacillating between folk and pop. On “The Well,” she plays with that same drama in the rise and fall of her vocals, the gently tumbling drums that shadow this tale of confused longing. “​​The hook, “the well only fills on its own” refers to the fact that I can only be actually happy if it’s coming from within me, not some outside force or person,” Blackman says of the song’s theme. For Annie Blackman, the idea of the bug represents “a play within a play within a scene”—another nod to those frames within frames, a gesture of distance and dimension. “I’m not your girlfriend/But I’m a lot of little things,” she sings on the title track, channeling the observational power of Katy Kirby and the plaintive, fairytale fantasies of early Taylor Swift. The EP’s climax arrives as Blackman closes with a repeated question to a lover, at once soft and urgent, earthbound and ecstatic: “What would you do to me/If you could do anything to me?” It adds up to something that’s as transportive as anything Blackman has ever written, the experience of captured memories at their richest and most alive.