On placeholder, the second album from Meg Duffy’s Hand Habits, the singer/songwriter orbits a stinging absence, ruminating on the ephemeral nature of emotional attachment. Characters pass through placeholder like silhouettes on the horizon; as Duffy watches them go, these songs weave narratives around the space they leave behind. What’s a love story with only half the cast? A plaintive consideration of the ways people shape each other, even in disappearance.
Alongside Big Thief and recent Deerhunter albums, Hand Habits are part of a strong contingent of contemporary acts staging queer stories against a wistful Americana backdrop. A guitarist in Kevin Morby’s band and a recent collaborator to William Tyler, Duffy hails from Los Angeles via upstate New York. For placeholder, Duffy returned to more rural lands, recording with producer Brad Cook at Justin Vernon’s Wisconsin studio. Duffy navigates the ambiguity of non-normative relationships against distant wails of slide guitar and sprays of open acoustic chords. “I start worrying/That you don’t know me anymore,” they sing over brushed drums and staccato bass. “Jessica/I forget/You shattered my reality.” The emptiness left by a faded relationship is like the emptiness of a desert plain: Both paralyze with their expanse.
Duffy’s unfailingly pleasant melodies smooth over the existential terror of their lyrics. On “can’t calm down,” they posit anxiety as familial inheritance: “What if I can’t calm down/And I don’t have that in my bloodline?” The song’s speaker can’t find peace, but the instrumentation offers it in abundance. A strummed guitar overlaps with a fingerpicked one, shaping a steady, soothing rhythm, as if Duffy were trying to play away their stress. They sound calm but insist they aren’t calm, carrying a minuscule but heavy granule of uncertainty like an invisible cross.
That anxiety swirls through placeholder, and Duffy seeks to counter it at every step—with pleasing melodies, soft guitars, and gentle vocals. They shoulder loss and dissonance with former loved ones and try to muscle on toward forgiveness. Even as they sing repeatedly about fires scorching the landscape, they sound as if nothing could fracture their sense of calm. “What’s the use if you’re not trying to forgive?” they ask at one point. A line like that suggests an impending flash of bared teeth, for the anger that presages acceptance. Yet placeholder rarely stirs from its placid foundation. Duffy’s voice never cracks, and this insistence on quiet benevolence starts to wear thin.
Still, amid more abstract verses, Duffy plants images of startling clarity. “Your heart beats hard/Like the pounding of the sparrow/On the window that faces the yard,” they sing on “yr heart [reprise],” a re-recording of a 2017 single. The original put the crisp vocals high in the mix; in this incarnation, Duffy’s voice diffuses gently across a sound field of blurred piano and strings. The soft glow here opens up the recording, making the song, already one of Duffy’s best, even more inviting.
This musical approachability belies a persistent bitterness, like Duffy were trying to keep cool while being eaten up inside. Wanting to seem OK while secretly falling apart is a tricky dance that placeholder deftly captures. But hearing about a riot is not the same as listening to one. Duffy excels at mapping resolution, which might make you want to hear about the conflict.
