Closer Than Your New Tattoo

Desire, I Want To Turn Into You is a Testament to the Joys of Longing

Caroline Polachek’s Pang (2019) showed us what the artist could offer up as she began releasing music under her real name. Exploring the adrenaline-spiking ache of unsustainable love, it touched on something “ultimately private . . . a kind of internal alarm that sounds when something has to change and it has to change fast.”¹ And it succeeded in this — it was grand and spacey and it hurt. It was an anxious album of private emotions and the pressure that builds up in this privacy. Her follow-up project, on the other hand, is not private at all. Celebrating the freedom of uncertainty and the pleasure of yearning for another, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (2023) stretches itself far past the reach of her previous release, and improves upon it in almost every way.

From its first moments, it is clear that Desire is not just Pang 2. The album’s opener “Welcome to my Island”² is a confident, summery tale of giving oneself over completely to another, driven by an 80s-inspired instrumental of synths, bouncy drums, and electric guitar that serve to exhibit Polachek’s outstanding vocal control and mastery of melisma.

As the runtime continues, you sense an intense longing pervading the entire album — a longing that looks out at its target, and back in at itself. It comes through in lyrics — on the joys of sexting and the pain of an empty bed and the stillness of waking up before your partner, just to watch them sleep. But it also comes through in the record’s sonic leitmotifs — vocables from the exuberant “Pretty In Possible”³ are foreshadowed in primitive form on the pop ballad “I Believe”⁴ and become vocal melodies in the self-assured “Smoke.”⁵ Grimes’ guest verse on “Fly To You”⁶ — a package of strings and church bells laid over percussion that sounds like something out of Sonic Adventures — is mimicked in the bagpipe solo on the djembe-driven renfaire love song “Blood And Butter.”⁷ It is highly self-referential, making it clear that the album Desire, like real desire, thinks about itself a lot.

Beyond the incredible vocal performances and ever-evolving instrumental tracks, what makes Desire really stand out as a pop record is Polachek’s skill as a lyricist. Rather than attempting to maintain a particular sonic style throughout, she sticks without faltering to her theme, taking us in wildly different directions but always leaving us with the weight of love and longing, and the freeing rush of leaping into faith.

Undergirded by a simple bass riff and a series of snaps, clicks, and whistles, the album’s first single (and perhaps best song) “Bunny Is A Rider”⁸ drops us into a lyrically stripped-back fantasy of searching and self-discovery in the face of desire:

“Dirty like it’s Earth Day
Tryna wet that palette
Can you cut that check?
Crush that wreck?
Run out empty on ’em?
AWOL on a Thursday
Tryna go ask Alice
Tryna catch that rabbit

But I’m so non-physical
I do, I do, feel like the lady
I do, I do, fireworks blazing
I do, I do, heart is unbreaking
I do, I do, but don’t drop my name”

“Sunset”⁹ and “Crude Drawing Of An Angel”¹⁰ come next and exemplify the ex-Charilift singer’s range. Foregrounding Spanish guitar and simple bass-and-clap patterns, “Sunset” sees her riding complex melodies and swinging pitch so dramatically as to almost become dizzying. The song shines in depicting the juvenile optimism of romantic opportunity:

“So no regrets
‘Cause you’re my sunset, fiery red
Forever fearless
And in your arms, a warm horizon
Don’t look back
Let’s ride away, let’s ride away”

while “Crude Drawing” swings hard in the other direction, offering a slow and sensual ode to kenostic love:

“Draw your blood, draw your breath
Skip the whites of your eyes ’til you wake up and watch me
Draw your wings from your back
I’ll not be shy, no I’ll not be gentle with you“

Where Desire struggles is in doing so much at times that it inadvertently makes some songs feel like weaker versions of other songs on this same album. Even the tracks I consider to be the album’s worst — “Butterfly Net”¹¹ and “Hopedrunk Everasking”¹² — are really only a letdown because “Billions”¹³ and “Crude Drawing” do what they are trying to do, but better. It adds unnecessary weight to a tracklist that, apart from some repetitive non-lexical vocables and third-quarter track change-ups, has been trimmed of almost all fat.

Desire has slow songs and fast songs and poppy songs and dramatic songs, but what it ultimately has is songs that make you yearn. They are clearly personal for Polacheck, but they’re also open enough that you see yourself in the empty spaces. I know how corny it feels to admit that “what I want is / To walk beside you / Needing nothing / But the sun that’s in our eyes,” but I also know the freedom that comes with admitting it. I’ve felt the nausea of being unmoored in a relationship, and the relief of having someone “[whose} patience is a magic kind of medicine / ‘Cause every spiral brings [you] back into [their] arms again.” It is a pain, but one different than that expressed in Pang — less like losing a tooth than sucking air through a cavity. The possibility expressed here hurts, and I love it.