Softer’s music sits around the listener like a fragile armor, a sonic cocoon wrought from dream-pop’s ghostly sighs and shoegaze’s distant roar. Sometimes it leans into one, sometimes the other, but more often, it’s forged as those two worlds collide in a beautiful, paradoxical dance — seamless, seductive, rooted in the chaos of contrast. The ethereal vocals drift like a gossamer veil, softening the jagged edges, while the ebb and flow of the growling walls of sound lift everything. The sound of these opposites attracting takes it beyond both ambient haze and stops well short of noise for noise’s sake.
Her voice is a masterclass in duality—one moment simmering in hazy high pitches, the next delivered with quiet confidence—stabbing at the darkness beneath the surface. The spoken word inclusions add just the right amount of dark descent for a song about depression, introspection, healing, and rebirth.
The echoes of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine are impossible to ignore, and Warpaint’s alluring dream-rock sound is indeed embedded deep within “Cry, Laugh’s” sonic fabric. But as much as it nods to the past, it rushes to usher in a bright new sonic future.
But that’s the thing, this is neither nostalgia nor prophecy — it just is what is. Music that’s always existed, hidden in the liminal spaces of the musical landscape and now rising anew. “Cry, Laugh” sits right on the cutting edge of that long, unbroken thread of beautiful outsider music – timeless, timely, and everything in between.
