“I feel strange,” Alex Sauser-Monnig sings on their new record, Alex, “but it’s just a natural reaction to a world coming apart at the seams.” In the six years since Dawnbraker, their debut as Daughter of Swords, the world’s only come more unglued; Alex is a frenetic coming-out party before the clock strikes midnight. Musically, the album recalls a decade-old strain of perky, chart-aspiring indie pop, the purview of bands like MisterWives or Oh Wonder—only these songs have far more on their mind. Alex applies the playful sound of early-2010s alt-pop to the more troubling realities of life as queer person in the mid-2020s, without feeling like escapism. Sauser-Monnig’s brief vignettes are little pockets of joy amid societal strife and systemic erasure.
Like Dawnbreaker, Alex was produced by Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso, this time joined by bandmate Amelia Meath (Meath and Sauser-Monnig also play together in Mountain Man). Unlike the more muted debut, Alex is upbeat and endearingly eager to please; anyone unwilling to use a goofy cartoon sound effect to allude to sex should steer clear. Those who have a soft spot for this kind of quirked-up indie pop will be handsomely rewarded. Sauser-Monnig devotes the opening tracks to the thrill of a new crush, filling “Talk to You” with handclaps and starting off “Hard On” like a bedroom-pop version of ’80s glam rock. “I got a hard on for loving you,” they croon. It’s a cheeky nod to gender dysphoria, but the way Sauser-Monnig’s songs address such awakenings feels more mischievous than didactic, like a child trying out a new curse word.
Underneath Alex’s cutesy presentation are some very real issues, and the album might verge on glib “hey look we’re bombing Iraq” territory if Sauser-Monnig didn’t handle the subject matter creatively. On the tongue-in-cheek garage rocker “Vacation,” their narrator plays millionaire for a day and discovers a life of luxury and top-shelf liquor that’s too good to resist: “Lying by the tennis court/You touch my thigh below my skort/And I’m gone.” They counter the Sheryl Crow-esque chorus of “Money Hits” with climate-apocalypse scenes of “running through the woods/While the water rises.” It’s probably the only song about late capitalism with a goofy staccato piano solo in the middle, and somehow it captures the cognitive dissonance in a way an outwardly mournful song cannot.
When the pace slows, there are a few moments of true rest: The unassuming “Willow” sounds like it might sway back and forth forever. At times the songs’ polish outweighs their complexity, like when “Morning in Madison” begins to resemble George Ezra’s cloying adult contemporary hit “Budapest.” But Sauser-Monnig usually earns the benefit of the doubt, even at their most saccharine. “Hello to the day/Coffee in the shade/Blues in the sun/Trying to have fun,” they sing on “Dance.” It’s simple stuff, but such is daily life in a crisis. On Alex, Sauser-Monnig certainly sounds like they’re having fun; they’re just not in denial about everything else.
