Recommended Tracks: “Mr. Predictable,” “GRAVE,” “skinny”
Artists You Might Like: Jensen McRae, Lauren Spencer Smith, Ashley Kutcher
We all have a story. Maybe they’re in the form of a novel, a text or an Instagram story. Everyone’s story is different, and as a result, no matter how big your stories are, we all tell them differently. There’s an honesty that comes with telling your truth. Avery Anna has been telling hers for the last four years. It started out as a TikTok and has grown into what it is today. On her sophomore album, let go letters, Anna isn’t just telling her own story, but is taking a piece out of our stories and turning them into something that everyone can relate to. To start, Anna writes a letter to her fans, entitled “Love, Avery,” after she started encouraging people who attended her shows to write down what was weighing on them that they just wanted to let go. Now, after fans have been writing her letters for four years, the album is a letter back.
Nearly a year after releasing her first album filled with heartbreak, Breakup Over Breakfast, Anna shares the album opener for let go letters. The album tentatively begins as a piano ballad with “Mr. Predictable.” Between gaslighting, betrayal and broken promises, and the opening track is both an insult and a realization. It’s not until the latter that the rock sounds with heavy guitar sets in and a near lightbulb goes off. All that anger, pain and hurt is palpable. In the chorus, the 21-year-old singer repeats, “I knew it right from the start / You’d break my heart.” After being cheated on, Anna refuses to stay silent about the pain of her trauma on “GRAVE,” an emotional reckoning with abuse that continues this trail of broken promises and betrayal before ultimately telling her truth — loud and clear. But romantic relationships are not the only relationship that Anna faces on this album, as she confronts a biting, toxic friendship on “what are friends for?” Yet, the primary theme rings true: betrayal.
Anna continues this idea of fluctuating self-worth on the country-twang “Self Esteem 4 Sale” and “my mother lies (voice memo)” but in different contexts. On “Self Esteem 4 Sale,” Anna explores how social media and the public can drastically affect your self-worth, and how that kind of desperate approval can feel both addictive and hollow to the core. Meanwhile, on “my mother lies (voice memo),” a mother’s words can feel like a knife to the throat in the worst way. The person who’s supposed to give you that validation is merely taunting you and ultimately ruining the self-esteem you do have.
As we move toward the second half of the album, Anna digs her heels deeper into self-worth and the psychological damage that comes when your self-esteem is ruined, and it’s catastrophic: body image and ultimately, depression. Especially for women, how you feel about your body is often devastating — oftentimes as a result of social media. “skinny” sees Anna tackle society’s obsession with being thin and what having an eating disorder means when you want so badly to not not feel this way but it ultimately eats you up inside (“I’ve never been thinner, I’ve never been sicker”). This leads us to “depression” — along that captures what it’s like to hit emotional rock bottom. It’s numb, painful and isolating, and sometimes, the misunderstanding that often comes with mental illness, specifically depression. A song that deeply employs soft pop sounds, Anna’s brutally honest lyricism that cuts like a knife shines here, as she sings, “Slowly all the colors turn to gray / The devil’s come to play / And you’re doing your best just to fight it.” That is, before you mask the pain on “Giddy Up!”
The painful themes on this album do not stop there. On “cheerios,” Anna tells the story of a child’s experience growing up with an alcoholic and neglectful father, mentioning how it “wasn’t Coke in his Sonic cup,” and often had “face down in his Cheerios. The song confronts the idea that children with neglectful or abusive parents are forced to grow up too fast, captures the daily trauma and emotional weight of being a kid in a chaotic household. “I should’ve been a kid, but he robbed me” captures the ultimate agony in this song. When you grow up too fast, sometimes, life steers you in the wrong direction. Anna writes a letter to someone on the edge of destruction and pleads for Danny not to give up on life on the emotional guitar ballad, “danny, don’t,” singing, “But, Danny, don’t bite the bullet.”
In the album’s last moments, there’s a bittersweet silence that casts a shadow across the entire project. From the unchanging rhymes of nature on “there’s no you (voice memo),” one’s absence can color every moment until it’s gray, because you’re absolutely ruined and distraught. Forced to find that closure, Anna, who has spent the whole album acknowledging pain or hardship, “butterfly project,” gives us just that. The song is tender yet hopeful, and is about being there for someone through their hardest moments and encouraging them toward healing and freedom. From the pain, emotional struggles to thoughts of emotional destruction when you’re at your lowest, Anna comes to terms with painful toxicity in her listeners’ lives. Despite all the damage done, Anna finally forgives on “Wish You Well,” after her fans share in her emotional turmoil. Just as her fans found healing on let go letters, she found purpose and healing in their letters back — now this is her holding out a hand, just to burn those memories and move on.
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