Marcel Winatschek

What Feist Keeps Back

Feist makes music that sounds like it’s telling you less than half of what it knows. Metals—her 2011 record—was where she stopped performing warmth and started performing something closer to exhaustion, and it was better for it. There’s always that quality in her voice: the sense that whatever the song is describing, she’s already on the other side of it, already survived it, already folded it into something quieter than grief. Bittersweet memories is almost too accurate a phrase for what listening to her actually feels like.