My first experience being inside of a car, where I KNEW it was more than just metal and 4 wheels, was inside my dad’s early-90s Jaguar XJ. My dad is a welder by trade and my mom was working for Macy’s at the time. We did not have a lot of money. Our socioeconomic status growing up was the shrug emoji. However, my Pops had what he called a “good year”, and found this used example of an automobile at a local mechanics shop in 1995. That was the most comfortable car I had at that point and, even to this day, will ever sit in.

As I waited for my mother to arrive to pick me up, I was lost in a repetitive thought cycle of the steps required to land an Ollie. Bend the knees. Pop the tail with back foot. Turn front foot to the side and drag it up to the nose. Level out. Bend. Pop. Turn. Drag. Again. And again. I was obsessed. I was reborn.

Tirzah’s Devotion has a strange ability (much like Frank Ocean’s whole discography) to tackle all of the messiness that comes with romance in a groovy but insightful and emotional way.

The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, our nearest interstellar neighbor, is Andromeda. At 2.5 million light years away, everything we see of it, even with the most powerful telescopes available, comes to us from a dead state, a permutation already reconfigured. Even though