There is a special ache that sets in after any big ending. It doesn’t need to be a breakup; it could be a death, moving out of an apartment, or settling in for bedtime at the end of an especially perfect day. Throughout their seven-year career, Chicago soft rockers Bnny have sat in this wounded sadness like a frog on a pond. Their second album, One Million Love Songs, finds power in it, using rough-hewn layers of guitar to break open singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ teary-eyed world.
Viscius’ grief-struck 2021 debut, Everything, excavated some of her pain following the 2017 death of her partner, the musician Trey Gruber. (Viscius is also a former graphic designer for Pitchfork.) It was slow and frostbitten, with Viscius’ voice interrupting cold silences like dust, but One Million Love Songs furnishes the abandoned house with a more delirious form of acceptance. Constant disappointment is okay, or at least tolerable, because it proves you’re alive. “I’m just born blue,” Viscius sings on the anthemic “Crazy, Baby,” dripping with Angel Olsen’s melted ice cream inflection.
Bnny’s sorrow flows from a breakup, this time. Wednesday producer Alex Farrar helps make it brighter with little rhinestone details, like the heartbeat thump of the drums on “Get It Right” that propels Viscius’ promise that “I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying.” “Good Stuff” sparkles like a ruby slipper, spinning out into a Sheryl Crow chorus: “I’m hanging on/To the sunshine,” Viscius sings with abandon, like she turned up the car radio, “I’m hanging on/To my big love.”
But, unlike comparable breakup music—“burn it down and pack it into a lipstick tube” albums like Jagged Little Pill or, more recently, Sour—One Million Love Songs is never indignant. It doesn’t imagine keying anyone’s pickup truck. Bnny’s music feels more like surrendering to the “million” disappointing outcomes of love, the introverted antithesis to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs: the urgent need to acknowledge that you could end up alone. The firefly blink of the acoustic closing track, “No One,” makes this abundantly clear. “Burned some bridges/And burned some doors/Now no one loves me anymore,” sings Viscius, resigned. So, what should you do—lash out? No, you savor the mystery.
Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. Lines like “trying to walk straight/But I’m stumbling/Trying to forget you/But I’m struggling” feel more like getting lost in RhymeZone than in Viscius’ otherwise lovely garden. But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours. There’s power in reclaiming unhappiness, allowing it to become a piece of your heart instead of a weight on your back.
