Blue Reminder, the fifth Hand Habits album, traffics in co-existing extremes—in compartmentalized disasters and brief, vanishing optimism. Throughout its runtime, Meg Duffy explores how love and fear are always intertwined, and how you can’t fully experience one without the other. Many of the songs were born out of Duffy falling in love and fully stepping into their gender identity at the same time that gay and trans people are living through unprecedented state-backed hostility. Allowing yourself the capacity to feel love while you’re actively being persecuted against is its own paradox; to have love is to simultaneously hold a fear of losing it.
In a Substack post announcing singles “Dead Rat” and “Jasmine Blossoms,” Duffy addressed these contradictions head-on: “It’s been challenging to feel excited about sharing new music in such an ever-evolving hellscape, as human rights are stripped away and we witness literal genocide on the same device I use to tell you about my songs and shows,” they wrote. “It’s not lost on me that many of you, like me, have little capacity for taking in new music or buying records. My only hope is, as always, my art can bring you a short intermission to the unfolding sorrow of the world we live in. Music does help me find a little joy, most of the time, and my wish is it helps you do that too. I think it’s important that we do try.” Blue Reminder finds Duffy looking at the emotional spectrum more realistically and with more grace. The bad will always be there (hence “reminder”), but the goal is to look beyond it. It’s a deliberate choice to insist on joy in a system designed to keep you fearful and threatened.
Aside from their solo endeavors, Duffy is a prolific session musician and touring guitarist, now in year five of their tenure in the Perfume Genius band. They kept collaboration at the core of Blue Reminder, focusing more on the process than the outcome. That meant recording live, chasing improvisational tangents, and letting that person-to-person buzz carry between tracks. Duffy’s guitar remains central, arguably even more so than records like the poppier Fun House and the atmospheric placeholder. Across the 12 songs, they flex their craft in ways that feel sharpened by a collaborative, looser approach to writing and recording (look no further than the winding riffs on “Bluebird of Happiness”) with their fellow Perfume Genius bandmates Greg Uhlmann, Alan Wyffels, and Tim Carr.
Blue Reminder is cohesive in a way that feels so unintentionally natural, the live recording process coating every song in warmth and comfort. “Dead Rat” holds a kind of Vince Guaraldi coziness, its twinges and echoes feeling like something unearthed rather than constructed. And that sense of discovery permeates: the opening ocean sweeps and high-pitched arpeggios on “Nubble” transport you to some sort of intergalactic beach, while the bird sounds on “Quiet Summer” feel like sunlight breaking through your childhood bedroom window. Even as the settings shift, everything exists in the same world, with many songs building off what came before them: “Jasmine Blossoms” spawns out of the “Dead Rat” melody, while the gravelly “Way It Goes” slips so seamlessly into the instrumental “(Forgiveness)” that I still don’t quite know where one song ends and the other begins.
Duffy’s delicate use of woodwinds and synths reinforces this throughline, with the title track epitomizing the balance. Starting with just acoustics, vocals, and an Elliott Smith-like piano ballad, the song slowly layers in horn tones, slide guitar, and flute, unfolding into slow-burn cinema. That shift underscores how much of Blue Reminder’s power lies in arrangement and composition, but the track also crystallizes the album’s central tension, one Duffy doubles down on lyrically. “Light in the blue of your eyes is the blue that reminds me: I’m afraid of losing you,” they sing plainly about the way love and fear are stitched into them.
Blue Reminder insists that joy and sorrow are inseparable, and the challenge is choosing where to place your attention—on the weight of fear or the comfort of connection. Duffy’s songwriting is as concise and effective as ever, a perfect balance of lyrical and literal. On Americana rocker “Wheel of Change,” they’re bluntly straightforward; the chorus, “Don’t take it away just yet, I need it now more than ever,” speaks to how admitting a need is itself an act of vulnerability. The opener “More Today” captures the strain of holding both pain and tenderness at once: “I know every word you say is tearing me apart, but not in a bad way.”
Elsewhere, the balance tips towards acceptance on “Way It Goes,” an affirmation that moving through the bad is often the only way to reach the good (“But maybe that was just what you needed to do and I don’t blame you”). Each song moves through phases, mirroring how confronting, processing, and pushing against pain is tied to finding a sense of catharsis. “Beauty 62,” a bright and swinging mid-album love song that’s buzzy and disorienting, is built from electric guitar bends and flighty synth blares. A crisp, pulsing drum kit carries through Duffy’s surging chorus, where high-pitched, twinkly synths fall down a scale that matches the sighs in their vocal delivery. The hook, “So what’s what we do with all of this beauty now,” feels like a cloud-parting moment, or a glimpse of what happens when you let the light and love in and momentarily forget about the rest.
But it’s “Jasmine Blossoms” that lingers the longest. It takes the framework of Joni Mitchell’s “California” (if “California” had been written for The Hissing of Summer Lawns instead of Blue) and filters it through jazzy saxophone phrasings, intricate guitars, and funk-adjacent grooves that conceal brief pockets of existential dread. “Too much darkness, they kill innocent men. I heard it on the radio and I pray for the children” lands with the same world-weary relevance as Mitchell’s “Sitting in a park in Paris, France, reading the news and it sure looks bad. They won’t give peace a chance, that was just a dream some of us had.” Blue Reminder’s duality is best captured by “Try to find a little joy, harmonize your pain,” because the most powerful and human thing we can do, Duffy argues, is live inside contradictions. They’re never going away.
