Photo by Aleiagh Hynds

If being all too real and putting the personal headfirst into a song gets you over with a crowd, great. That’s what resonates the most through Pictoria Vark’s emotive indie rockers. After being a helping hand in other people’s work, the band outlet of bassist extraordinaire Victoria Park got her own long overdue proper breakthrough doing just that with her listmaking 2022 debut album, The Parts I Dread. Yet, alongside heading to “San Diego”, ‘I Pushed It Down” — one of two new singles from her sophomore follow-up, Nothing Sticks — tackles what’s inside a little differently this time around. The listen finds her and her collaborators dressing those wonderful, complex thought bubbles up in something more debonaire than just rumbly guitars and cathartic vocal implosions, and in turn, there’s a kindness felt in being alone with those uncomfortable thoughts. “I pushed it down, I drank to the sound / Until I drowned,” she sings over an arrangement of cello, violin and viola. If it sounds like she’s allowing the heaviness wash through her, you’re not wrong. “And under the water, I’m thinking / ‘If I’m always gone, there’s nothing missing.’” Though we see her and hear her clearer than ever this way, this art of drowning in her emotions suits her well.

Pictoria Vark’s Nothing Sticks will be released March 21st on Get Better Records.