The Big Moon have spent twelve years building credibility the slow way — a Mercury nomination for their 2017 debut, decent chart positions, streaming millions on 2019's Your Light — while every album has quietly been about something harder than its sound suggested. Walking Like We Do processed contemporary womanhood; Here Is Everything processed new motherhood through Covid-induced sleep deprivation. Forever has a starker catalyst: in 2024, Juliette Jackson was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma, a destructive cyst in the middle ear requiring surgery, which cost her most of her hearing on one side. For a songwriter whose entire professional identity is built on sound, this is not a minor inconvenience. It's what Jackson herself calls 'pretty much existential.' The material she initially wrote in response was, by her own account, too miserable to release — which prompted one of the more interesting artistic decisions you'll encounter this year. Rather than process the trauma directly, Jackson invented 'a happy ending that didn't exist yet' and wrote toward it. The album you're listening to is that invented ending, made real. The pivot has historical company. New Order rebuilt themselves after Ian Curtis's death, moving from the bleak Movement to the euphoria of Power, Corruption and Lies. The Cure followed years of magnificent anguish with a mid-80s pop rush. Bon Iver went from the isolated grief of For Emma, Forever Ago to the lush celebration of Bon Iver, Bon Iver. What these moments share isn't escapism — it's the deliberate construction of joy as a survival mechanism, which gives the joy a specific weight that pure pleasure-seeking pop doesn't carry. Forever opens with Gravity, which clings to the simple act of picking up your child from nursery and somehow turns it into a rapturous pop song with shades of Blondie's Dreaming period. Three Things layers MGMT-style keyboard riffs and new wave sequencers under lyrics about youth and pop's ability to make life feel imminent. Fun summons Haim and early Madonna — specifically Holiday-era Madonna, which is an accurate comp and not a bad one — to imagine a brain that gets to go on holiday from itself. These are not complicated ideas. They are exactly the right ideas for this record. If there's a recurring lyrical preoccupation, it's transience — but relished rather than feared. F.O.R.E.V.E.R, the recent single, rides Fleetwood Mac production gloss and Soph Nathan's guitar twang to deliver a genuinely poetic image: 'Some day the ocean will include the drinks that we spill / And rain that used to be red wine will fall on this hill.' Can I Get a Reading Please asks, 'Life's not long, regret is though — can you tell me something I don't know?' Sounds edges into country territory and goes darker still — 'I'm going to lose something very dear to me, if not now eventually' — but the surrounding musical sunniness absorbs it. The album's emotional peak is You Remind Me That I'm Dying (And That It's Good to Be Alive), whose title may be the year's best bittersweet lyrical formulation and whose chorus delivers on the title's promise fully. It is, as the review plainly states, an absolute banger — a term that means something specific here. The song doesn't paper over the darkness; it makes the darkness load-bearing for the euphoria. That's the trick the whole album is attempting, and on this track it lands completely. Forever is the Big Moon's fourth album, their most coherent, and their most emotionally specific — which is worth noting given that previous albums also had strong central preoccupations. The cholesteatoma diagnosis isn't a marketing hook; it's the structural reason the album sounds the way it does. Jackson made a choice under pressure that most artists in that situation don't make, and the record is the evidence that the choice worked.
