Boys & Girls

Boys & Girls is a solid debut, really good but not earth-shifting, a record clearly (blessedly) recorded before anyone much cared who they were or weren’t, possibly even before they were entirely sure themselves.

The album is largely confessional— not in the singer/songwritery sense, but in that it’s riddled with admissions that probably wouldn’t have been made by any other means, words that feel lighter sung than spoken. Album opener and lead single “Hold On”, its central guitar riff ribboning and pooling like slow-poured honey, is the first of many tracks where it’s not entirely clear if Howard is singing to, about, or as herself, God, or some boy as she rips through the chorus: “Yeah, you got to wait/ But I don’t want to wait!” “I feel so homesick/ Where is my home?” Howard wonders on “Rise to the Sun” before the song dips into a coda of timorous guitar and crashing drums. On the shadowy, fingersnapped “Goin’ to the Party” she sings about running around town, getting wasted, and taking care of some drunk boy; when she woozily coos, “gotta take me back now, I’m still somebody’s daughter,” she sounds half-annoyed and half-comforted in that very particular way that comes from being young and restless and knowing there’s someone waiting up for you, but at least there’s someone waiting up for you.