Hannah Jocelyn’s 2024 Portfolio

Hannah Jocelyn
6 min readMay 28, 2024

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A collection of reviews and interviews for Pitchfork, Billboard, The Singles Jukebox, and more. Subscribe to Transient Peak for more!

Transient Peak:

I Saw The TV Glow review: “The movie is best described as a surreal, tense psychological coming of age drama, one that gradually tricks an unsuspecting audience into watching a trans narrative. Beyond that, it’s a gorgeous character study of two lonely people finding themselves and possibly losing themselves in the art they consume. There’s a maturity I’m not used to seeing with art about young queer people, as Schoenbrun empathetically deals with big teen emotions without getting absorbed into them.”

Nothing Deep To Say #6: Maria BC And Engineer ODAE Break Down Their Intimate, Intense, Romantic Album Spike Field: “Made after BC’s move from Brooklyn to San Francisco, it’s this expansive, almost sweeping thing with lush instrumentation. There were Grouper comparisons, but Maria BC’s mezzo-soprano is proudly front-and-center in the mixes, and that voice is epicene in a way that reminded another music writer of 2000s indie rock band Copeland. Every time I was lulled into complacency, a new detail would shock me back. The first time I listened to the album, I was on the way back from a part-time job and literally jumped out of my bus seat when the live drums kicked in, to the chagrin of the passengers next to me.”

Pitchfork:

Coldplay — Moon Music:Even ‘Man in the Moon,’ from the deluxe version, gets away with its tinny Buggles rip by unashamedly doubling down on youth-group call-and-response silliness. That silliness puts Coldplay out of touch with a pop zeitgeist enamored by wit; it’s also made them bigger than almost any artist in the world.”

ANOHNI and the Johnsons — My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross:It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.”

Lucy Rose — This Ain’t The Way You Go Out: “On ‘Whatever You Want,’ Rose’s willingness to be awkwardly direct (“a miracle, a disaster, all in one foul swoop”) powers the song’s central question: What do idealistic phrases like ‘You can be whatever you want’ mean to someone struggling to move? Beneath the instrumental experimentation, there’s both grief and a sense of hope inspired by raising her child and by Rose’s own recovery. As she sings on the title track: “I blame myself for being so weak/But this brave body is still carrying me.”

Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: “HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas — certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.”

Stereogum:

Band To Watch: Fashion Club: “A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted and alien; even the quieter songs feature mangled vocals, pitch shifted in the margins of the mix.”

Transgender Dysphoria Blues Turns 10: “Few of those figures were famous enough for media coverage (The only one I knew was Dee Palmer, which I learned from a Music Choice factoid.) Few outlets knew how to deal with something that, culturally, was a punchline. Gradually, the pieces clicked: Laura Jane Grace was always writing about her identity, from the earliest EPs to the song that closed out White Crosses, ‘Bamboo Bones.’ Making art and transition are both inevitable — if you feel the urge to create or the urge to explore your identity, it will come out whether you want it to or not. Look at New Wave’s ‘The Ocean,’ where the second verse starts with ‘If I would have chosen, I would have been born a woman/ My mother once told me she would have named me Laura.’ All those weird digressions and cryptic phrases in her writing suddenly made a lot more sense, and in those cases were as literal as her political songs ever were.”

Xtra:

Eccentric folkies the Ophelias are poised to break big: Opener ‘Black Ribbon’ starts off typical enough for an Ophelias song, with lightly processed hi-hats, strummed electric guitar and Spencer Peppet’s traditionally stoic delivery. As Gutmann Fuentes’s violins creep in, Peppet’s detached facade starts to slip, revealing an uncertainty toward her new feelings. Her delivery doesn’t fully lose its cool until the song’s fiery climax, where she plainly states ‘I want you now,’ as the band sprawls out, her anxiety transmuted into desire. That vocal performance is a result of Lauber choosing the rawest, most expressive takes when editing, surprising Peppet: ‘I was like … is that weird? Are we keeping this? And [the band] went, ‘No, I love it!’ Anyone checking in from Almost will be startled; anyone who’s seen the band’s live show already knows how loud they can get.”

On her new album, Orla Gartland is her own hero: “Many writers tackle the topics of dysfunctional relationships, but few write about the more specific emotions of long-term partnership — and fewer still approach the subject with the same loopy glee as Gartland. On ‘Backseat Driver,’ she struggles with expressing her emotions to her partner, but it’s punctuated with bratty ‘la-la-las’ and neurotic silliness like ‘Guilt is like a bad apple, rotten to the core/ I couldn’t even tell you what the hell I even said that for.’

Medium:

The End of Gaylor:Yet for Gaylors, it doesn’t matter that MUNA exists, or Girl in Red, or Renee Rapp (or Tracy Chapman, or Norma Tanega, or…). It doesn’t matter that Boygenius is selling out Madison Square Garden. Most Gaylors have a working knowledge of queer musicians, but their first love was Taylor, and we can only hope Taylor has the capacity to love us back, platonically or otherwise.”

Billboard:

Not Just ‘Luck’: Why Queer Pop Star Chappell Roan Broke Through to the Hot 100, And Why It Matters: “The bridge depicts her ex in a loveless, empty marriage to a man, “nothing more than his wife.” At the end of the bridge, Roan roars “I told you so,” and it’s the rawest moment in anything she’s released so far. “Babe” comes into the world in the midst of both increasing acceptance of LGBTQ people and a severe anti-LGBTQ backlash; it’s hard to blame someone for being too scared to come out, and behind the lyrics about this “sexually explicit love affair,” Roan clearly knows it. She’s not gloating at that ex, she’s angry at the ex not taking the leap with her, while understanding how it feels to hide in the closet. After a series of frothy pop songs, embracing more complex emotions might have been the push she needed all along. She wouldn’t be the first person in recent years to hit it big by getting messy — there’s a reason she’s opening for Olivia Rodrigo, after all.”

The Singles Jukebox:

Camila Cabello ft. Playboi Carti — I LUV IT: “I Luv It” is a perfect example of once avant-garde sounds being absorbed into the mainstream — which is why people hate it — but the way all involved fail makes it much better than it otherwise would be. Everyone involved doesn’t know how to work outside the lines of pure pop, and it shows. We have a IV-I-V-ii chord progression, normally too melancholic for upbeat electronica, and we have a classic AABB chorus, only the AAs are iluvitiluvitiluvitiluvit and the BBs are Gucci Mane samples. Cabello is much more fun in this mode than crooning nicotine-Halloween-morphine “Never Be The Same” mode, and if she still comes across as try-hard, that adds to the song’s bizarre alchemy.

Ariana Grande — We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love): This is “Dancing On My Own (Ariana’s Version),” so the floor is pretty high. It’s honestly so close to being a masterpiece on the level of “Into You” but it’s undone by the Robyn-shaped elephant in the room and some truly bizarre chorus phrasing. “Pre-e-e-tend” is not that many syllables! The original isn’t perfect; the chorus has little to no impact because it’s nearly the same arrangement as the verse. And yet, this remake has its own issues: the backing vocals are so absurdly loud they overwhelm the synths and the actual lead vox (maybe an attempt at Dolby Atmos-style depth), and when the Aris disappear we’re just left with empty space — not negative space, empty space.

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Hannah Jocelyn
Hannah Jocelyn

Written by Hannah Jocelyn

Writer. Audio Engineer. Musician. Contributor to Pitchfork, Billboard, GRAMMY.com, and others.

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