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Apr 18, 2024 Web Exclusive By Daniel Gard’ner

Bnny’s Jessica Viscius has said that her new record, One Million Love Songs, is an album “about love after loss, getting older, and just trying to have fun with a broken heart.” Fiercely candid and sonically exhilarating, the record is a document of renewal and acceptance in the shadow of enduring pain.

Whereas Bnny’s debut, 2021’s Everything, was written in the aftermath of the death of her partner and the subsequent emotional fallout, One Million Love Songs finds Viscius in another phase, embracing new possibilities with an awareness that the pain of loss may never fully disappear. There is a bruised hope in these songs, a sense that Viscius has emerged from a life-changing event battered but wiser and embracing a liberating sense of abandon.

Hushed opener “Missing” seems to find Viscius embracing new love following her seismic loss (“when I’m with you/I almost forget/that he’s missing”). But things aren’t quite that simple; One Million Love Songs was written in the wake of a breakup, and in her deepening experience Viscius seems to have accepted the transient nature of romance. In fact, she practically states it outright; there’s a song on the record simply called “Nothing Lasts.” But it’s this acceptance that gives the album a charge, and simultaneously gives Viscius the space to examine her own destructive tendencies.

Viscius produced the record with Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Snail Mail) and the pair conjure an icy, almost creepy atmosphere with sheets of chilling guitar and the occasional synth warble, alternating close mic’d drums with subtle programmed beats to create a dark shroud that hovers around Viscius’ voice, an intoxicating murmur that even at its most outsize sounds like an evil whisper in your ear. It’s a potent combination that laces the record with an almost sinister intimacy and pervasive tension.

The nervy jangle of “Screaming, Dreaming” gives perhaps the most accurate snapshot of Viscius’ current state of mind. Over jittery guitars and a spacious, insistent beat she repeats a simple refrain that somehow encapsulates where she’s landed, and maybe where she’s headed: “dreaming/hoping/dreaming/hoping/screaming.” (www.bnnyband.com)

Author rating: 8/10