The first time I listened to Smiling Broadly’s “for a moment I saw myself as inexorably beautiful,” I was frustrated. Throughout the album’s playtime, I could barely hear the lyrics over the crunchy guitars. More than once, I was jump scared by a sudden scream, blast beat, or punch of the bass. Worst of all, when the album finished, I was left sobbing for a half hour, unsure of what exactly brought on this emotional roller coaster.
I then proceeded to listen to the album 3 times a day for the next 3 months.
I was determined to understand how this album had dug so deep under my skin. Naturally, the first thing I did was look up the lyrics. Problem is, there is no documentation of the lyrics anywhere. Normally this wouldn’t be the biggest issue, I could just listen and figure them out. But Smiling Broadly knows my tricks and has the vocals pushed to the back of the mix. You want to hear the lyrics? HA! Good luck with the scraps you can pick up here and there, scraps you will be sure to second-guess on your next listen.
Knowing that the lyrics were a dead end, I decided to hone in on the compositions. However, while the songs sometimes followed familiar forms, the stories they told always clashed against the expected narratives of a pop-rock album. “close” and “fake blood recipe” alternate between softly spoken anxiety and punk inspired screams. “120% get it together” starts as a loving pop-rock anthem only to hard shift into aggressive electronica with ThorHighHeels feature. “offering” just throws out the hole pop-rock basis of the album for a comfortingly spooky vibe that I’d expect from a homage to mid-2000s PS2 horror.
As you listen, you begin to realize that Smiling Broadly is not aiming to tell stories using familiar frameworks. Rather, she approaches with a puzzle-box of meaning. The more you dig in, the more you realize that some things will remain forever out of your grasp. This is true for all art, but “inexorably beautiful” revels in it. The songs themselves are purposefully left just out of our reach.
I’m reminded of Lily Alexandre talking about the buried meanings in transgender and queer art: a form aiming to protect itself from hostile outside forces while still speaking to those in the know. This isn’t to say that Smiling Broadly is transgender: I genuinely don’t know anything about her identity beyond the “she/her” in her Bandcamp profile. I’m also not interested in digging so deep into a stranger’s personal life to find out. Instead, I’m struck by how Smiling Broadly has tapped into a deeply held trans anxiety: we all want to be seen for who we are, and we all know how horrifyingly dangerous that is.
I’ve been to many underground shows and performance art pieces, put on outside the cis-hetero-normative gaze, even in the most “accepting” of times. They saw the danger and chose to hide themselves away. I’ve watched many openly trans artists face backlash and censorship under an increasingly aggressive wave of fascism. They saw the danger and chose to face it head on. “inexorably beautiful” is simultaneously desperate to connect with you out in the open, and scared of what will happen once it does. The album wants you to find it, but it only wants you to hear it if you are truly there to listen.
What is there to find if you give it a listen? A beautiful cacophony of heartache, hopelessness, exasperation, joy, comfort, and catharsis in the midst of great uncertainty. The blast beats, quiet confessions, and screams of desperation in “fake blood recipe” ignited memories of my struggle with mood swings and anxiety. The juxtaposition of the lyrics “I’d like to lift your hands up to my neck and let you squeeze indiscriminately” with the title “your touch freaks me out >_<” made me laugh at the extremes of my own desires paired with my timid demeanor. “120% get it together” ignited a sapphic yearning in me with a barely heard “holding your hand on the train” accompanied by a delightful use of glockenspiel.
I don’t know that these takeaways are what I will always carry with me. “inexorably beautiful” and its commitment to obscurity have made it an ever-changing artwork. Every time I gaze upon it, it shifts just a little bit. Each newly heard lyric or melodic line remind me that I will never witness all of it at once. And yet, in all the chaos, I have had one takeaway stick with me since my very first listen: if this ever-shifting mess of distortion, softly spoken lines, chip-tunes, and screams of agony can be “inexorably beautiful,” I can be beautiful too.