Bnny - Everything

You get the most concise sense of what ‘Everything’ boils down to in its closing moments. A sub-one-minute phone recording, still just entitled ‘Voice Note’, it’s as raw and rickety as you can get: a couple of lines of delicately strummed duet that crash back down to reality before they’ve barely begun (“I never had a dream like you / Dreams like these they don’t come true”). It concludes a debut steeped in heartbreak - half of the album was written before the death of singer Jess Viscius’ partner, half in its wake - but that regularly finds meditative beauty amongst the sadness. Though opener ‘Ambulance’ is as sparse and fragile as they come, when the instrumentation fleshes out on the likes of ‘So Wrong’, Jess channels a Mazzy Star-like cloud of catharsis. There are nods to The Velvet Underground’s knack for dreamy simplicity (‘Blind’), and times when Viscius peeks into Vivian Girls-adjacent, more garage territory (‘Take That Back’). For the most part, however, ‘Everything’ operates from within the particular fog of grief: fragile, tactile, tender. It’s a frequently gorgeous thing.