It’s 2024, and the time for trans rage is nigh. Enter Laura Jane Grace. Since coming out a dozen years ago in Rolling Stone, followed by 2014’s blistering Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace has affirmed her place as a clarion of righteous anger, unwilling to tamp down a voice she can use against the world’s ills. On Hole in My Head, her second solo album, Grace wields this voice with precision-blade intensity, able to rage, mourn, and find respite in equal measure.
In a tidy 26 minutes, Hole in My Head weaves through the stripped-down style Grace explored on 2020’s Stay Alive and louder songs more akin to her work with Against Me!. None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each. The title track opens the record with a statement of purpose that nods to the singer’s facial feminization surgery, refusing to numb the world’s intensity as she yelps, “You could learn to feel less/That would be a real bore.” On “Dysphoria Hoodie,” Grace retreats into her most beloved protective armor, a worn-out sweatshirt that’s been around for decades. Though the song includes some of the album’s clunkier lyrics (“When it says Adidas on my chest/All day long I dream of sex”), Grace and her guitar amplify one another, sounding as strident as anything she could make with a band.
Where Stay Alive spoke to lockdown-induced isolation, these songs capture an enthusiastic, head-nodding euphoria that represents some of the most playful music Grace has ever made. “Birds Talk Too” rides a mid-tempo garage-rock groove as a stoned Grace imagines feathered friends “just having a good laugh” and jokes, “They don’t play Red Hot Chili Peppers in places like this!” The blown-out guitars on “Punk Rock in Basements” invite her to relive the ego-dissolving experience of being surrounded by a sweaty crowd: “Don’t it make you wonder if you’re following or leading?” she asks.
Hole in My Head is hardly a protest record. At its most easygoing, you hear Grace quieting the dysphoria and building the cozy hermit’s nest she conjures on “Tacos & Toast,” an acoustic ode to sipping coffee, getting high, and leaving unwanted baggage behind. But in today’s climate, Grace and other high-visibility trans people always draw the spotlight. There’s a responsibility there, one that Grace deftly cradles on “Cuffing Season,” the album’s centerpiece. An acoustic guitar rubber-bands around her voice, the chords tensing and then loosening. That voice, one that she’s refused to soften after coming out, always running the risk of transphobic backlash, rises and falls around some of her finest lyrics. “I wanna ghost ride the whip dysphoric and disassociated,” she snaps, bitterness in each note. By the time she sings, “You don’t have to like the truth to know it’s worth the cost,” the stakes are obvious: Whatever hell we might be hurtling toward, far worse is the misery of denying our responsibility to this life.
