There's a version of Superfan's story that buries the music: open mic kid catches Julian Casablancas's eye, opens for the Strokes in Colorado at 18, moves to New York at the precise moment everyone's moving to New York. The version worth telling is simpler — Kali Flanagan can write a melody that shifts meaning on the third listen without adding a single note. My Piledriver Heart runs on constraint. Drop-tuned acoustic guitars Flanagan calls 'acousticellos' narrow the tonal range down to something almost chamber-folk. Within that box, the album finds real space: roomy drums and distortion push tracks like In the Gold Room and Keeping Your Smile toward noise without committing to it. It's a useful tension — intimate enough to feel confessional, rough enough to avoid preciousness. The cello work by Omeed Almassi (who has also played with Bar Italia) is the album's structural secret. It doesn't decorate — it mirrors. The strings mimicking an unfurling guitar line at the climax of Miss W Jones is the kind of arrangement choice that sounds inevitable after you hear it and counterintuitive before. The bassy, Nick Drake-adjacent outro on Ode to Hum (I Want It to Rise) belongs to a different tradition, and Flanagan wears it without strain. What Flanagan does that the Elliott Smith comparison mostly captures — and partly misses — is resist resolution. You think you've landed on what a moment means, and then it shifts, not through clever recontextualization but through the accumulation of small melodic choices that don't settle. Coming-of-age music usually retrospectively tidies the mess. This one doesn't. The album is clearly a debut in the good sense: the parts are slightly bigger than the whole, and you can hear Flanagan still calibrating the range. But the calibration itself is interesting. The buzz around this record isn't wrong, and it isn't manufactured — it's the sound of a very young artist already aware of what they're doing.
