Before She Was Sirens

I had a crush on Laura Carbone before she ever made a record. She used to co-write a blog called The Fucking Fucks with a friend named Woxy, early 2000s, back when the internet was still a place where interesting people went to think out loud in public. That blog is a ghost now—not even a good archive—but the person behind it clearly had things to say.

The last time I caught her live was 2010, at Klub International in Berlin, when she was fronting a band called Deine Jugend. Loud, unruly, exactly what a Tuesday night in that room called for. Then five years passed and she came back alone, with a solo record called Sirens.

The single is Heavy Heavy and it earns the name. Melancholy treated not as an aesthetic pose but as actual weight—pop structure holding something genuinely dark together. It doesn’t sound like it’s reaching for radio, which isn’t a complaint; it’s the reason it works. Some of the best music I’ve heard lately has come from people who stopped calculating the audience and just made the thing.

There’s something satisfying about watching someone you knew from the margins of the early internet become the artist they were always going to be. The blog is gone. The band is gone. What’s left is better.