Natural Disaster

About

Bethany Cosentino delivered her debut solo album <i>Natural Disaster</i> and the climate cooperated. “This is the hottest summer I can ever remember,” she declares on the title track, a refrain that hits especially close to home during a season of record-breaking temperatures everywhere. It’s also a fitting introduction to a collection of songs about facing down an uncertain future, which for Cosentino includes questioning her attitude toward love, motherhood, and her newfound solo career. Earlier this year, the singer-songwriter announced that Best Coast, the indie-pop duo she formed in 2009 with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno, would be going on an indefinite hiatu. The decision presumably demanded some soul-searching. “Growing up is easy when you’re 17,” she sings on “Easy,” a standout piano ballad, “but now I’m 35 and I don’t quite know what it mean.” Most of <i>Natural Disaster</i> was written during the pandemic, but Cosentino never sounds like she’s catastrophizing. The doomscrolling gets mixed with some <i>sha la la</i>. Fans of Best Coast already know her knack for disguising existential despair within the palm-tree breeze of her native California. Over the course of the band’s four lo-fi, reverb-heavy album, she wrote about getting high (2010 debut <i>Crazy for You</i>), getting sober (2020’s <i>Always Tomorrow</i>), and being pleasantly depressed regardle. Still, she might have needed to get a little distance from her sunbaked reputation, hence ditching Los Angeles for Nashville to record with producer Butch Walker (Taylor Swift, Weezer). .

via Apple Music

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