Something About Seagulls

Kate Nash hates seagulls. I don’t know when I learned this about her, but it’s lodged in my mind now alongside everything else she’s given me—alongside Foundations, which is a song about two people arguing in a kitchen and also a song about the exact moment you know something is over even if you’re the last to say it out loud. Alongside Nicest Thing, which has no structural right to hit as hard as it does, but does anyway, reliably, every time.

The gap before My Best Friend Is You felt long in the way gaps feel long when you’re paying attention. And then it arrived, and it felt immediately like a window left open on the first properly warm day—that combination of nostalgia and forward motion that belongs to May, to evenings with nowhere specific to be, to whatever version of yourself shows up when things are going slightly better than expected.

It’s brighter than her debut and somewhat more produced, which some people held against it. I don’t. The voice is the same: nasal, specifically London, conversational in a way that makes you feel like you’re overhearing something rather than being performed at. Do-Wah-Doo opens the whole thing with a kind of delirious confidence. Then there are quieter, sadder things buried underneath, less obvious, and those are the ones that surface weeks later without warning when you thought you’d finished with the album.

What she’s always done well is find the exact undignified texture of an emotion and refuse to sandpaper it into something more presentable. That quality is still here. The seagulls, presumably, can go to hell.