I Feel Everything
An almost unlistenable album.
Maggie Lindeman has put out some interesting work here and there over the years - always shallow, but sometimes catchy or angsty in the right ways. PARANOIA (2021), SUCKERPUNCH (2022), and HEADSPLIT (2024), while never close to being a really good record in themselves, they featured some occasionally cool tracks that were enough to bring me back to the records.
But I Feel Everything is a new low. While her previous three records have been uniformly alternative pop-rock, the “selling point” of I Feel Everything is it’s “sonic diversity”. While it is true that the album experimented with a wider variety of sonic production, this is one of the (many) factors that contributes to its downfall. In this case, the album is stripped of coherence. There is no theme whatsoever across the tracks - sonically nor lyrically. It feels like a compilation of singles that she wrote at different times in her career, with different producers, with a different goal in mind each time. Because of this, there is no flow to the album. The arbitrary song order resembles a rollercoaster with uncoordinated highs and lows, making for a truly uncomfortable listening experience.
Furthermore, the album’s production is weak overall. Sonically, tracks tend to fall into one of two categories: unpleasant or boring. When listening to the album top-to-bottom, I found it difficult to not press skip after reaching the half-way point. Lindeman seems to have thought that including too many songs (16, coming in at 46 minutes total) would cancel out the fact that not a single one is memorable. This is by far the biggest problem with the record. The instrumental production is dull, muddled, and unoriginal - just listen to i don’t belong here or i feel everything. one of the ones (the first pre-released single off the album) is by far the best track, with tight instrumentals and a cool music video. That being said, it is still overly-repetitive and lacks originality.
But even the sonic production is better than Lindeman’s vocal production on the album. While it has never been her strong-suit per se, her singing appears particularly weak on this album. She needs to mature her vocal skills and consider writing songs that don’t accentuate how young her voice sounds. Unfortunately, the writing on this album was among the worst I’ve encountered in a while, with highlights being suburbs (“Nauseous in the backseat of an Uber; Tryna sort through all my baggage but I’m back to back in traffic… Falling off the earth just because she couldn’t stand it; To feel like an imposter at the local pizza parlor”); let me burn (“I was yours but you weren’t mine. Did she have something that I don’t?”); or evil "(“While poison spills from your lips; 'Cause baby, your mouth is lethal; You're not sad, you're just evil). It is wild to remember that Lindeman considers this to be her rawest album yet.
In the past, Lindeman has enhanced her record through features (notably in her collaborations with Siiickbrain). The features on I Feel Everything, however, derail the project even further. Not only do Mexican rock trio The Warning, Julia Fox (who I still don’t understand), and Floridian surf-rock singer Max Fry make for an exceptionally odd slew of choices, none of them make a good impression. Not that any of these features are particularly talented in their own right, but Lindeman’s production further makes it even harder to showcase anything interesting. The features furthermore contribute to the genre disjunctions in the record, and it likely would have been better without them.
Lindeman has proclaimed I Feel Everything is her most “emotionally charged” album to date where she “leans all the way in”, plunging into “obsession, grief, rage, shame, detachment, and survival”. It is simply ironic that Maggie “feeling too much” translates into listeners feeling nothing at all.
