I have seen Queen of Jeans go through so many phases. When I first caught them live opening for Balance and Composure in 2017, they were a newer band with twangy and psychedelic guitars, and I was sold. The next time I saw them was in 2019, and it was my last show before the world shut down, and they’d switched members and fallen into their current iteration, and had a fresh full-length: a mix of modern shoegaze while still clinging to a nondescript vintage vibe, sometimes glittery like the 60s, and sometimes tough like the 90s. We flash to 2024 and Miriam and Matheson are married now and they’re still making bomb pop rock together. 

All Again leans more into the shoegaze facet of the Queen of Jeans gem and I think that’s why I like it so much. It plays through like nothing, seamless from back to front. It’s cohesive, it’s aesthetically pleasing, it’s produced by Will Yip. What more can we ask for? When I thought that they couldn’t improve on If you’re not afraid, I’m not afraid, they went and did just that. I think that this album is more easily digested, and it definitely has an element of whimsy that wasn’t present in the 2019 release. All Again is so sad, but it’s still meant to be blasted out the window on a road trip. The opening track, “All My Friends” starts slowly but builds up to a sweet sense of innocence and fervor that carries us through.

Tracks like “Horny Hangover” with lines like “Spent the better part of an hour / Trapped by the saddest lesbian / Crying it out on the dance floor” show that the band still has their don’t-take-it-too-seriously vibe, but the rest of the album shows us that it actually is that serious, because in other songs like “Enough To Go Around”, Miriam sings, “And you would know love / Were your flowers fit for its crown / But I could offer my own / Cause there’s enough to go around”. Miriam and friends really want us to believe in this as much as they do. 

The immediate stand-out tracks for me were “Books In Bed” and “Last to Try”. I’m a reader, and a song about escaping into other worlds to avoid your real-life problems really got to me. “Last to Try” is one of those songs that didn’t hit me right away, but once it played a couple of times I wanted to inject it into my veins. It’s so soft and unassuming, but then we hear “If the plane nosedives tonight / We’ll call it awful, say goodbye / You know I’d be the last one to try”. As someone who tries to hold onto everything whether it’s good or not I felt like of sucker-punched by it. The idea that being that person is okay and not something to change about yourself has really stuck with me. After taking in the album as a whole, the cover art being a couple in an embrace as the other is fading away into the background of the photo is nothing short of devastating.

This album may be biographical, it may be hypothetical, but it’s definitely a project that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about or listening to. This an album about seeing it through. From start to finish, All Again is a picture of the way we constantly put ourselves through things that we know won’t work, and how we try to keep a tight, white-knuckle grip on the things that did.

4/5

by Nadia Alves

Nadia Alves has been a music enthusiast since she can remember. Going to shows is her main pastime. The other is being upset when she can’t go to shows. This is her first official venture into writing about music. You can follow her on Twitter.