Time moves slowly in a small town, so slowly that sometimes its passage is marked only by the changes in season and the rotation of the crops, eventually blurring into hazy memories of high school football games and first kisses, autumn bonfires and parades. Years upon years of dusty normalcy accumulate with the stillness of fresh snow, a lifetime spent in hibernation dreaming of the springtime of youth when life was vibrant and endless possibilities lay just beyond the county line. Nyssa exists in this space. A bold, vibrant voice that simultaneously celebrates and rebels against the realities of small-town existence with the kind of widescreen presentation that reaches for the sky with two feet firmly planted on the ground.
Girls Like Me is a collection of stories that find Nyssa inhabiting a rogues’ gallery of personas inspired by cinema, literature, and real life. Each of the album’s ten tracks expertly weaves sordid tales of love and ambition through the eyes of underdogs and overachievers with a Spielberg level of authenticity that feels primed for sepia tinted celluloid. These skillful ballads already place Nyssa in the orbit of working-class heroes like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty while maintaining a uniquely theatrical quality and a jagged synth-punk edge. Her toolbox of cultural touchpoints makes Girls Like Me instantly accessible and powerfully relatable across the board, markedly feminine but existing outside of gender and genre in a manner that allows anyone to insert themselves into the stories. The album is escapist and voyeuristic, intimate without being too specific, and reveals as much about Nyssa as a person as it does about the listener.
Opening track “Hey Jackie” immediately sets the mood with a sparse synth riff and the foreboding opening line “start this story with a dead girl, that’s what makes it just like the others” recalls the haunting opening moments of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer’s high school photo fading into her cold, blue corpse wrapped in plastic. Nyssa nixes the supernatural shenanigans David Lynch so liberally applied to his prime-time masterpiece, but employs many of the same world-building techniques to craft her own tales of small town drama as sweethearts and bad boys intertwine and bounce against one another, tugging against the gravitational pull of becoming just another “one trick pony in a one horse town.”
A recurring theme on Girls Like Me is that of leaving home and returning a changed person. The shock of coming home after years away to find “everyone pregnant, my oh my” or moving home after “those hard, broke city years” to begin a new chapter of a slower, more measured existence. These jaded homecomings stand alongside wide-eyed youthful enthusiasm and a yearning for adventure; the contrast between the two is one of most compelling aspects of Nyssa’s storytelling. A wild desire to break free but permanently tethered to the people and places that populate the past and an inevitable realization that “it’s not hard to love you, try as you might to change my mind.”
The first half of the album revels in that sort of denim jacket and rusty Camaro melodrama, but on the b-side things start to open a bit, both stylistically and conceptually. “The Swans” tells the tale of a disillusioned bride distracted by the beauty and freedom of a group of the large white birds before abandoning herself to reckless revelry in celebration of the first day of the end of her life. “I Don’t Wanna Live On The Moon (Without U)” is a sudden burst of fun, upbeat and vampy as a pampered teenage protagonist contemplates suicide out of boredom but fears the loneliness of an eternity without the one they love. Nyssa even gets political on “Full Of Love,” where a sex-addicted lothario claims an inability to repress carnal urges doesn’t change the affections felt for their significant other in a manner that’s almost sympathetic until a final revelation of falsehood: the track closes out with a ripping guitar solo and a sample that rises out the feedback to become suddenly clear, the voice of Donald Trump expressing vile apathy in a curt “I don’t care.”
Debut albums, like the places we’re all from, set artists on a trajectory that defines the entirety of their output. Regardless of how many turns, shifts, reboots, and reinventions made along the way there is always that one starting point. It can either be an anchor that holds one back, or a north star that guides the way home even in the blackest night. Girls Like Me is a fine starting point for an ongoing story that remains to be written.
‘Girls Like Me’ is available now via Fuzzed And Buzzed. Follow Nyssa on Instagram and stream the album on Spotify.
