Google “Self Love Club” and you will find a nauseating slew of results for self-help blogs, articles about yoga, proper nutrition, and the like. But tucked among them is something much better for your health: The Bandcamp page for the Austin, TX two-piece alternative shoegaze band known as Self Love Club.
The partnership of Nicole Parker and Chris Rosenthal celebrates self-love by calling their new EP Greatest Hits, which is usually what a record company calls a collection of songs from a big-name artist to milk more cash out of fans. However, the album name reflects Self Love Club’s self-awareness. They know their reach and their fledgling status in the indie scene, and yet they choose to call their four new songs their “greatest hits”, despite having released only two prior EPs.
Yet Self Love Club certainly delivered jams worthy of the new EP’s title. “Dreamless” opens the record with a roar of sound, swallowing your ears in guitars and speaking of the void, with Parker’s vocals tucked underneath and screams (from guest Dante) exploding during the chorus. The record flows right into “Far Away”, where Parker sings of feeling distant from herself as the shoegaze mastery continues to wash over you.
“Hours” has a romantic tinge to the lyrics, but the heaviness in the sound doesn’t dip until the EP’s final track, “Afraid”, an acoustic version of a song from the band’s 2024 EP Creep. The song’s focus on chronic anxiety and neurosis hits harder with the distortion, and pounding drums stripped away, and Parker’s echoing vocals front and center. While the version on Creep practices sonic battery, suggesting panic, the Greatest Hits acoustic version symbolizes a quiet kind of fear, one that feels more catatonic, helpless, and almost accepting.
Greatest Hits makes you forget that only two people make up Self Love Club, for the sound suggests something much bigger than the sum of its parts. It is the sound of a band that feels that one day they will have a proper “greatest hits” record, although true heads will remember them from when they were just starting out and released Greatest Hits way back when. Perhaps one of those true heads will be you. Listen to Self Love Club’s new EP as an act of love for yourself.
Written by Will Sisskind
