MILLY
Your Own Becoming
DANGERBIRD
On Your Own Becoming—the haunted sophomore album from Los Angeles grungegaze group MILLY—we’re reminded that we all carry our own personal graveyards around with us. Whether it visits us in our dreams or lives on in undeleted phone numbers, we hold the past with us in a variety of ways. These 10 tracks balance morbid sentiments with pop melodies, eerie vocal tones, barbed guitar solos that feel antipruritic, and massive highway distortion. Through these sonic languages, MILLY explore the dissonance of remembering, how grief calcifies memories, and how the awareness of time’s passage can be grating.
On “At Odds,” vocalist Brendan Dyer holds space for rational thought to spar with dream logic and the ghosts in his contact list. “I’m calling all the numbers in my phone / Of people that are dead like I don’t know,” he sings, his voice oscillating between sharp anxiety and gentle melancholy. “I know this is impossible / For the dead’s life’s too loud.” Somewhere between Death Cab for Cutie and yeule, MILLY transform the heavy confusion of the living’s role as the only lifeline for the dead into a surrendering singalong. Like breaking into an abandoned house, “Bittersweet Mary” is even more unsettling and thrilling. The cataclysmic rhythms and electrical buildups in both songs highlight MILLY’s ultimate strength: transforming morose subjects into mysteries begging to be explored rather than cowering away from them.
Sometimes Dyer’s fixation with time can feel like it’s holding him back rather than bringing any new revelations. But it leads to the poignant closer “Nothing to Learn From,” where he declares “I’ve begun to feel time was never real.” Your Own Becoming feels like the process of accepting that there are existential boulders too old and too heavy to move. When Dyer sings the closing track’s title, it feels like a cathartic refusal to anticipate life’s lesson plan.
