Don't worry y'all. Caroline Polachek says it's just “Smoke”.

Caroline Polachek released her fourth studio album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You on Valentine’s Day. But now 2 months later, we have a music video for a song off of the album.

Record labels. Music acts. More of this please. More music videos and digital single releases for songs off of albums post release. It works and serves a purpose. Especially if the song choice and the music video is good.

“Smoke” has done more for me than any of the singles Caroline has released over the past year. I was not big on “Bunny Is a Rider” or “Billions”. I really liked “Sunset”. But “Smoke” really grabbed me, because it has this bigness to it, which none of the other singles had, and it’s what I wanted from Caroline at this point. And it also reminds me a little of Pang, which I’ll talk more about after the jump. “Smoke” is also 90s as hell, tapping into that the same mid-period of the decade that Maggie Rogers did with “That’s Where I Am”. And she, like Caroline also said ‘Fuck a bra’ and served nipples in a music video.

I’ve listened to Desire, I Want to Turn Into You a couple of times and it’s not really clicking with me the same way that Pang did. I’m chalking it up to Pang releasing at a time in my life where the subject matter of the songs were really speaking to how I felt about a number of things at that time. And it also dropped right as the pandemic was escalating, when I was starting feel a little out of it and a bit lost. But I’ll give Desire, I Want to Turn Into You another chance at some point. Maybe a little later in the year during the Summer. Because it does feel like a carefree Summer kinda album. So maybe I’ll connect a little better with it then.