Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More (2024) Vinyl

Listeners may feel like they know where Kim Deal is coming from based on her work with the Breeders, Pixies, and Amps, and the outsized influence she's had on indie and pop music since the late '80s, but Nobody Loves You More reveals she can still surprise. Deal wrote and recorded her debut solo album over the course of a pivotal decade during which she departed from Pixies, reunited with the Breeders, and cared for -- and then grieved -- her parents. Not long after the album was finished, her dear friend and collaborator Steve Albini also died. Deal responds to all these changes by getting more overtly personal than ever before. On "Summerland," she strums a ukulele gifted to her by Albini as she croons about vacations with her parents in the Florida Keys as starry-eyed strings swell behind her. Sometimes, Deal blurs the intimate layers within these songs. "Are You Mine?," a stunning, country-tinged ballad, slides between a classic love song and a touching remembrance of her mother's dementia as gracefully as a pedal steel guitar. At other times, she's remarkably frank; "wish I was…young," she sings on "Wish I Was," though its honeyed chug sounds as winning at this point in her career as it would've 30 years prior. Deal is just as open about the freedom the changes within her life have afforded her on songs like the chiming Albini collaboration "A Good Time Pushed": "Now's the time for me to get what I want/And when I figure it out/Consider it got." On Nobody Loves You More, that means opening the album with a sultry, symphonic title track worthy of Dusty Springfield; reclaiming the beachy philosophizing of Jimmy Buffett on "Coast," perhaps the most self-deprecating song to be buoyed by mariachi horns; tearing it all down with the Who-like clamor of "Disobedience"; and fusing crunchy beats, a harmonica breakdown, and a wagging guitar hook into "Cannonball" levels of catchiness on the defiant "Crystal Breath." Like most of Deal's music, Nobody Loves You More is delightfully hard to pin down. That the album doesn't settle into just one emotional or musical groove is the perfect tribute to her legacy of always finding new ways to express herself -- and to her inimitable charm, which holds together every twist and turn. It may have taken her nearly 40 years to go solo, but it was well worth the wait: Nobody Loves You More is some of her finest music yet, and while any of these songs would've been a standout with one of her other projects, it's all the sweeter that they're hers alone.