You would not expect most modern pop artists to include bagpipes, operatic influences and a guest verse from Grimes on the same album, but for Caroline Polachek, it is completely on brand.
Caroline Polachek started releasing music in 2008 as part of the indie rock band Chairlift and also made various solo projects under the names Ramona Lisa and CEP. She has released everything from instrumental songs based on sine waves to a song she worked on with Beyoncé. Her music released as Caroline Polachek, starting with her 2019 album “Pang,” sees her aptly marry these two worlds of experimentalism and pop production, most famously on her single “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” which boasts 10 million views on YouTube and inspired many TikToks recreating the dance from the music video, which is filmed in a set that nods to a cave in the depths of Hell.
The synthesis of disparate worlds defines Caroline Polachek’s new album “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You” (2023), a project exploring how desire manifests itself through emotional ups and downs. Polachek describes how coping with the chaos of the pandemic, during which she lost her father to COVID-19, inspired her to connect with how people have searched for comfort in responses to disasters throughout history. In an interview with The Guardian, Polachek said: “This state of migration and stress and mortality … is all so universal and has been the backdrop for so much art-making throughout all existence.”
Through the songs, Polachek taps into a sense of ancient, inherently human longing, a feeling that she treats with a spiritual reverence. Songs like “Butterfly Net” feature a melody and lyrics fit for a medieval folk song: “Earth went silent / London fell asleep … When you appeared to me / Perfect timing as new petals in November.” The video for the album’s single “Welcome to My Island” (2022) features Polachek singing in a cave surrounded by prehistoric paintings.
But, despite the album’s sense of profundity, Polachek comes across as self-aware rather than self-aggrandizing. Polachek leans into the campy gothic aesthetic of the album with song titles like “Hopedrunk Everasking.” For every archaic motif, there is a shockingly modern one. Mechanical, whirring synths and poppy baselines and lyrics of tattoos and sexting are as essential to the songs as organ riffs. Thematically, the album is more than simply an ode to desire as well; every expression of love is complicated by the fear of a loss.
Tying themes of disaster and desire together, the songs on the album can almost be separated into two categories: Half are anthems, and half are laments, though they are always in conversation with each other. The album starts off with the brash pop of “Welcome to My Island,” which Polachek said mocks the feeling of “being trapped in your own head” in commentary published on Apple Music. “Go forget the rules, forget your friends / Just you and your reflection,” Polachek sings in an escapism anthem that could be seen as empowered or desperate.
“Pretty In Possible,” a more subtle, upbeat track continues to follow a precarious search for joy, but this time the singer seeks freedom from her isolation.
“Down in the deep end I can't be left alone,” Polachek sings. The track “Sunset” sees Polachek falling in love, begging her love interest to “ride away” into the sunset with her.
Starting with “Crude Drawing Of An Angel,” the album turns mournful, describing drawing a picture of her love interest as they sleep, worried that they’ll leave her. A similar desperation is again expressed in the track “Butterfly Net” and “Hopedrunk Everasking,” pared down tracks that include Polachek’s soaring, eerie vocals sounding as if they’re reverberating off the walls of a cathedral. In “I Believe,” Polachek expresses the grief of losing a close friend, begging for them to “feel my embrace.”
Not every track on the album delivers the joyful release of its tight opening pop bangers, but listeners with patience to travel through the meandering hymn-like songs in the middle of the album will be rewarded with a sense of catharsis at the end.
The last songs of the album provide a bit of resolution, as the singer resolves to channel her desires in ways that bring her closer to others. “You are the big answer tonight,” she declares on “Smoke.” As Polachek said in an interview with Apple Music, the album opens with the “selfishness” of “Welcome to My Island” and ends with a sense of “selflessness” as a children’s choir eclipses Polachek’s vocals at the end of the album, singing “I never felt so close to you.”
