Stephanie Burt

The music that showed me who I wanted to be, what I wanted from life, was the music that came out on Sarah Records.

‘The effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomisation, the disappearance of ... organised opposition,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. The resistance in the Twin Cities has not pushed ICE and CBP away yet, but it has turned a supposed projection of state power into a floundering tool of homicidal violence.

Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie charts, and critics’ chatter, from about 1989 to 1992. Mid-tempo, meditative, sometimes earsplittingly loud but emotionally subdued, shoegaze offered fuzzy, layered guitar lines with smoky, blurred timbres; tremolo bars, odd tunings and effects pedals; reverb-heavy, warbling vocals, sung by fey men and (less often) confident women. It was invented in Dublin and London by My Bloody Valentine on Isn’t Anything(1988) and Loveless (1991), and played beautifully by (among others) Ride, Swervedriver and Lush.

Girl Violence, the third album by King Princess, is my favourite pop record in a good year for pop. It’s all over the place sonically, a hungry scavenger for scraps of slow R&B, thumping rock choruses, indie guitar fuzz, doo-wop references, half-spoken bridges and half-shouted anthemic claims. It’s first-rate popcraft made to hold emotional chaos. And it has, through thirteen tracks, a single subject: how it feels to enter an abusive Sapphic romance or romantic friendship, how to live with it, how to leave, and why people stay.