A Playlist for Sad Girl Summer
While many find summer to be a time of free-spirited adventures and friends, for others–including myself–it can also be tainted by its finite duration and pressure to make the most of every moment. As a now 21-year-old, summers also remind me that I am rapidly approaching a professional life that will completely take away my summer break going forward, once I presumably start a standard 9-5 job upon graduating college. Quite literally, this is my last summer break. While I have spent every summer of college working in full-time internships, these have merely been preparing me for what awaits me after college. Yet, despite these months being my last hoorah of summer breaks, I have spent the vast majority of my summer this year holed away in my family’s home in the most suburban suburbs of Massachusetts because my parents moved as soon as I started college. Any potential to make memories with my friends this last summer has been severely restricted since virtually all my friends live in Los Angeles, where my family moved from. As I write this, I am sitting in Logan Airport, preparing to make the grand venture out to the west coast to visit my friends who only see me on FaceTime for the rest of the year. Excitement would be an understatement for what I am feeling looking at the two weeks ahead of me. Yet, though my plane has not even departed, I cannot help but feel disheartened by how quickly these next two weeks will go by, the only two weeks I will have all year to see the people I spent my summer before college rejoicing my youth with.
All things considered, I am having a considerably Sad Girl Summer. While you might be years younger than me and are just now realizing you will run out of summer breaks, years older and laughing at my seemingly immature fears of entering the workplace, or my age and being concerned with entirely separate matters, there are infinite reasons why you could be having a Sad Girl Summer. Either way, I personally find music to be one of the best comforts during this time. The remedy is multi-dimensional. From midwest emo that reminds me what it felt like to look forward to where I am now to shoegaze to drift off in my own thoughts to, this Sad Girl Summer playlist fully encapsulates what I am feeling and maybe what you are feeling too.
I now find myself romanticizing past summers when my future at college was open and exciting before I started scouring LinkedIn every morning and polishing my resume and cover letter as if preparing them for battle. During these times, I gravitate toward ethereal, lo-fi, and fuzzy music that I can drift off in my mind to. From Teen Suicide to Pink Floyd, Have A Nice Life to Turnover, and beyond, the sounds I find myself nostalgically dreaming to are diverse.To me, they are the sounds that tell me that there is nothing wrong with finding comfort in my past memories when my future feels uncertain.
Perhaps it logically follows then that I also find myself revisiting a great deal of music I enjoyed during my less stressful summers, primarily the midwest emo, punk, and postcore I found myself enthralled with in my later high school years. Joyce Manor, Citizen, Movements, Modern Baseball, Surf Curse, The Front Bottoms, and Tigers Jaw find themselves here. It is also here that I find myself revisiting many of the local bands I spent my high school years seeing at local venues. My long-time favorites from this scene are Kuromy (previously Kuromi, we can thank Sanrio for the name change), Deth Coast, Jurassic Shark, hotbrothers, Justus Proffit, and Super Lunch. These songs remind me of all the nights I spent grabbing my friends by the arm and dragging them into the pit with me, cooling off dry Los Angeles air outside the venue, and getting home unreasonably late simply because we had nowhere else to be.
There are other songs on the playlist that are simply there because I have been listening to them on repeat lately, and though they might have no direct relation to summer, my future, or nostalgia, they just make me feel better. Some like “Faultline” by Girlpool feel like a bandage on my internalized fears of not being good enough, though for what exactly I am unsure at this point because the possibilities seem endless. Others, like “Flatlands” by Chelsea Wolfe, make me feel free in my own skin and remind me that though I am entering a more structured era of my life, I am ultimately still myself, just as full of life and potential and change as my younger self, though maybe just a little more jaded.
This playlist is for all the sad girls this summer and for summers to come, no matter your age–or your gender for that matter, it was just a catchy title–or why you’re sad because truth be told there are a lot of reasons to be sad in the world, and in the US, right now. I hope this playlist can be a comfort to all who need it.