Wales, the Anglo-Saxon name for England’s first colony, loosely translates to the “place of the others.” When the world refers to you as a foreigner on your own land, it’s difficult not to adopt this lens. This identity crisis is the ontological dilemma of the Welsh. It’s the reason that the term hiraeth—an ache for a home you’ve never experienced and can’t return to—originated from this coastal region. quinnie, the New Jersey indie-folk singer, excavates this feeling—more gnawing than homesickness and more haunting than nostalgia—on her debut album Flounder.
A song about gentle men and pleasurable oral sex, “Touch Tank,” garnered her an audience on TikTok in 2022, but the 21-year-old tackles contemporary discourse without making it feel like you’re scrolling through social media. Opener “Man” calls out abusers who co-opt femininity to disarm their victims: “No amount of nail polish could paint you a good man.” Even when she includes terms like “soft boy” and “iPod Touch,” Jake Weinberg’s cinematically homespun production means that the medieval acoustics and twinkling pianos sound timeless. Wind chimes, running water, and sounds of children playing paint scenes of youthful summers spent sneaking out bedroom windows for a stolen moment of tenderness. Disney movies teach you to wait for Prince Charming. Time exposes the men you date as dickheads disguised in Prince Charming cosplay. quinnie doesn’t lean on shock value, psychiatry, or somber pianos to carry the emotional weight. Moments of snark ease you into brutal truths: “You stole more of me than I’d care to admit.”
Abusive relationships are disorienting. They can make you unrecognizable to yourself—a stranger in your own body. When quinnie wants to remember that old self who eagerly pursued love, she taps the rewind button on her cassette player between songs. “I can’t fucking wait till the day that I finally get to kiss you,” she sings on “itch,” yearning for a romantic connection to give her life meaning again. The rush is short-lived, like attention spans trained on dating apps engineered to resemble video games: “Would I die satisfied knowing that it could always get better than this?” It’s nearly impossible to surrender to the all-encompassing flame while third-degree scabs linger.
Listening to quinnie cuss feels like watching a toddler walk for the first time. You get the sense that rage is an emotion that’s been denied, which could explain why she delivers somber lines in a gossamer falsetto that almost reaches a twangy yodel. In the rock-inflected “Get What You Get,” her voice is almost smothered by deafening drums. The drums, like her unpleasant emotions that have been pushed down for so long, demand your attention. Popular music and media are admittedly a bit oversaturated with healing-your-inner-child discourse at the moment. With its nostalgic summer camp energy in songs like “Popcorn and Juice” and “Itch,” Flounder does risk entering Camp Rock soundtrack territory. Still, her lyrics are rich with vivid imagery: “An artifact of human existence/Is fossilized inside of me.”