Nell Smith
Anxious
BELLA UNION
With anything posthumously released, you’re forced to confront death and how it fatally felled the artist at hand. You wonder aloud about its circumstance and mourn for all who were left behind. You feel bad if the artist was older, worse if they were young, snuffed out before their time, whatever their time was or could’ve been. So, the weird thing that happens with the music of Nell Smith—the debut album of Neil Smith, no less, recorded in full before the Brit-Canadian songwriter died in a car accident last fall at the age of 17—is that Anxious is as goofy, sinister, and sing-song-y as anything created by an artist who worked closely with The Flaming Lips at an impressionable age (Smith is the principle collaborator on the Lips’ Nick Cave–focused Where the Viaduct Looms project from 2021) could possibly be.
Produced by Penelope Isles’ Jack and Lily Wolter, Anxious is a nice title for a record from a breathy, bloopy, indie-pop teen looking to explore all of the poignant yet decidedly kidding parameters of psych-pop while certainly also glancing inward in the most ephemeral way. The speedy, ping-ponging “Boy in a Bubble” looks at her hero, Wayne Coyne, with awe and direct address, and the title track is a twinkly, echo-heavy, day-in-the-life story of mewing cats and afternoon strolls accompanied by strummy acoustic guitars, de-tuned synthesizers, and a cloudy descending chord bridge that Billie Eilish would eat FINNEAS for.
The “holding hands in July” romanticism of “Daisy Fields” is reminiscent, in spots, of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” as played on a Casio. The summer-to-fall foliage of “Billions of People” is starry and handsomely jazzy as it plonks along to the idea that in an overcrowded planet, Smith “chose” just one. It’s a sweet, small observation about a big cruel world that writers twice her age couldn’t come up with at twice their age. Which is actually the point of everything on Anxious, as all of it is smart, funny, coolly comported, quirkily experimental, yet perfectly in line with 21st century indie-pop—and valuable as a document of life, love, and obsession for any and every age.
