“Do I dare say I’m proud of this record?” Sasha Alex Sloan asks. “It feels scary to say that out loud.”
Chatting with Consequence over the phone, the singer-songwriter seems to hold an extremely tentative optimism around the release of her forthcoming full-length album, I Blame The World (available Friday, May 13th via RCA Records). It’s a quality worth noting, especially when she recently described I Blame the World as a “non-hopeful” album.
“I couldn’t write about anything else,” she says, referring to the fork in the road many creatives arrived at throughout the pandemic and in the months of piecing the arts industry back together since: lean into hopeful escapism, or embrace realism. Sloan chose the latter.
To her point, the eleven-track collection is remarkably cohesive and largely centered on the anxiety and chaos of the past few years, along with the epiphanies that come with processing these experiences. Singles “I Blame the World” and “New Normal” offered an accurate window into the rest of the record for expectant listeners, while “Adult,” available with a new music video today, May 11th, includes a touch of the humor she wanted to convey as well.
Lyrics like “It finally hurts being hungover/ But it’s still not worse than being sober” are balanced with “No one ever told me growing up gets kind of lonely,” managing to capture the humor and heart of existing as a young person right now in equal measure.