You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

It tends to be singer-songwriterly, but some of it isn’t. It often sounds like its singers are musical fans, or at least think of modern musicals as a normal part of pop music. It’s alternative in the sense of not existing as function of the mainstream adult/commercial music apparatus. One of its pervasive lyrical themes is the idea of thinking of yourself as a character: as a villain or hero, as a protagonist or not a main character, as someone whose story will be told, as someone who thinks about their decisions as if their story might one day be told. It’s native to social media, because of course it is, but not allegiant to any specific brand. Its artists’ self-written Spotify bios usually go something like ‘hi. idk. maybe tomorrow I will delete this.’ And maybe they will, but until then we are allowed to witness the scene that has formed around their ambivalence. Melanie Martinez’s Pity Party is its immediate precursor, and Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour is its pop crossover, but MOTHICA’s plaintively harrowing ‘forever fifteen’ is its definition, to me: fighting depression as if not at all sure of victory, but victorious by definition of the song’s narrative perspective; made out of small musical parts but vast emotional depth; kid and not-kid selves looking at each other across a table strewn with pieces of a life.