“I want the fireworks/I want the chemistry,” Katie Gavin announced on MUNA’s “What I Want,” “That’s what I want/There’s nothing wrong/With what I want.” The track thrums with unapologetic hedonism, positioning Gavin’s hunger—for shots and drugs, to “dance in the middle of a gay bar,” for a cute stranger’s attention—as righteous. Compare that, then, to “I Want It All,” the opening track of Gavin’s new record, What a Relief. While its title might sound similarly desirous, the song carves a subtler, gentler path: Over gently finger-picked guitar, Gavin yearns softly for grace and compassion in a relationship, for a lover who promises to “forgive me/I’m not sure for what yet.”
This shift in tone characterizes What a Relief, Gavin’s debut as a solo artist. The record isn’t a full departure from MUNA—Gavin has promised that this does not signal a breakup for the trio—but instead comprises songs that Gavin wrote over a series of years and presented to her bandmates, who decided they didn’t quite fit into MUNA’s sound. “MUNA has become so ambitious, so the songs have to be scalable to a certain size,” Gavin has said. The songs on What a Relief, then, represent Gavin’s songwriting scaled down, replacing the band’s festival-sized choruses with down-to-earth lyrics and folksy production touches. While it doesn’t reach the soaring highs of Gavin’s work with MUNA, What a Relief offers introspective self-portraits whose sound calls back to Gavin’s youth and stories rich with the kind of empathy that’s only gained over time.
Gavin drew inspiration for What a Relief from a sound she calls “Lilith Fair-core,” and there are echoes of women singer-songwriters of the late ’90s and early ’00s throughout the record: her lilting voice on “Aftertaste” echoes Alanis Morissette; the slinky swagger of “Sanitized” conjures Fiona Apple or Tori Amos; the mandolin and fiddle on “Inconsolable,” played by Sean and Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek, calls back to the Chicks. The album’s not entirely a throwback; Gavin has a distinctive voice, and her songs are grounded in the present. But the DNA of her childhood favorites are evident in her songcraft, like seeing a picture of your mom when she was your age and realizing how similar you look.
Motherhood itself is the subject of one of What a Relief’s most affecting songs, “The Baton,” about women’s intergenerational trauma. That topic might sound stuffy or morose, but Gavin’s take is spritely, a bluegrass-tinged ode to the possibility of healing across generations. “Inconsolable,” too, takes on the subject of inherited shortcomings: “We’re from a long line of people/We’d describe as inconsolable,” Gavin sings. Even when her songs take on change across a shorter time frame—the loss of a pet (“Sweet Abby Girl”) or of a romantic relationship (“Sparrow”)—Gavin considers them with a sense of cultivated perspective, writing not from the scalding heart of emotion but from a slightly calmer, wiser distance. On “As Good As It Gets,” she admits that a romance might be healthiest when it doesn’t feel like an emotional rollercoaster, even if that means some thrill has worn off. (It helps that the song is a duet with Mitski, the first artist on speed dial when you want a line like “I want you to disappoint me” to sound devastatingly romantic.)
The song that gives the album its title epitomizes this quiet belief that a little time and a little space heals nearly all wounds. On “Keep Walking,” Gavin looks back on a breakup and realizes she isn’t blameless: “What a relief,” she sings, “To know that some of this was my fault/I am not a victim after all.” It’s easy, after a relationship falls apart, to believe we are only the aggrieved or the aggressor. Instead of attempting to make a gray area appear black and white, Gavin finds her messy culpability reassuring. “If I ever see you on the street,” she tells her ex, “I’ll just keep walking.” It’s not an explosive kiss-off or a plea for reconnection. It’s a promise that’s subtler but perhaps ultimately more freeing: simply to stay in motion.
