Almost halfway through Life Of The Record’s 2023 podcast on the making of Pixies’ 1988 album Surfer Rosa, the late, great recording engineer Steve Albini heaps an extended bit of praise on the band’s bassist Kim Deal—who, of course, formed her own project, the Breeders, in 1989:
“There’s nobody I admire in music more than Kim. The records that she’s made with The Breeders, I think … each one is distinctive and unique and absolutely masterful at executing the sound in her head. She is the most relentless in pursuit of a very specific sound or idea of anyone I’ve ever worked with. She does not care if it takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to exorcise the demon of this sound in her head, but once she’s got it, she recognizes it instantly and the case is closed.”
Albini worked with Deal many times over the past three decades, but you don’t have to have spent hours and hours with her inside a recording studio to hear exactly what he’s talking about. It radiates from everything she has released, from the Breeders’ seminal 1990 debut, Pod, to her brilliant one-off album as the Amps in 1995, to the series of singles she put out under her own name in 2013. These works aren’t all perfect, but they’re something better: utterly distinctive music made by a reliably unorthodox songwriter seemingly implacable in her pursuit of a singular sound.
It should surprise no one, then, that her first-ever solo full-length Nobody Loves You More is both unmistakably Kim Deal and also a fresh evolution of Kim Deal’s sound. All of her integral elements are here: tenderness intertwined with tartness; spacious room tone; thumps and whooshes and bug-zapper guitars; familiar feelings conveyed through strange combinations of words. And then there is her voice—still a fusion of charm, attitude, a choir of angels and fine-grit sandpaper, just as it has been all along.
Every song on Nobody Loves You More could be a Breeders song, but some more than others. “Disobedience,” for example, is an astringent stomper that would fit comfortably on the band’s best-known album, 1993’s Last Splash, while the sparkling, skyward “Come Running” feels like a spiritual cousin to the back half of 2018’s All Nerve. And “Wish I Was” is exactly the kind of effervescent pop song Deal has perfected over the years, right down to the slightly off-kilter expressions of feeling: “How I aspire you / The look and the lie of you,” she sings breathily over a propulsive bass line. “I see the sun on your hair.”
More often, though, these songs capture Deal in her native mode: exploring new ideas and trying new things. The title track, which begins the record, blossoms into exquisite beauty thanks first to a string section, and then a startlingly vibrant horn section. (Horns also augment the pleasant bob of “Coast,” probably the catchiest song on the album.) On “Crystal Breath,” she leans into prickly post-punk guitar lines and what sounds like mechanized beats. And the album’s most rugged track, “Big Ben Beat,” is a mini-maelstrom of strings, synths and fuzzy noise as Deal aggressively spits out non-sequiturs: “Bursting bodies / Headbang ponytails / Battle childish giants / Talking to the wall.”
In 2019 and 2020, Deal lost both her parents, whom she lived with and cared for. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic rearranged our world, bringing fear, isolation and death to the forefront of our collective existence. And then in May of this year, Albini, her longtime collaborator and friend, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 61, but not before engineering eight of the 11 tracks on Nobody Loves You More. One of those is the album’s most affecting song, a sweet, gently swaying lullabye called “Are You Mine?” with lyrics that echo Deal’s mother’s words to her daughter in her final months: “Are you mine? Are you my baby? I have no time for nothin’ but love.” The other is the final track, a full-bodied rocker called “A Good Time Pushed” that begins with Deal singing these lines:
Part of me wants
To follow you off of this world
You quit the noise
Put it behind us
They’ll never find us
Tucked into a body of work that’s ageless and ever-evolving, the thread of loss and grief that runs through Nobody Loves You More is a good reminder that Kim Deal is not, in fact, immortal, even if her music makes it feel like she is.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.
