LONER

Caroline Rose started out as an acoustic Americana songwriter, with two records built mostly from songs written on the road in a van in 2012. LONER, released by New West Records on 23 February 2018, is where that ended. The cover has Rose in a red tracksuit, sweatband and towel, holding a lighter up to a mouthful of cigarettes, and the songs behind it run through synth-pop, surf rock and rockabilly with the sarcasm turned up. Rose told The Nation that the genre’s lack of diversity was a big reason for leaving it: “As a queer artist, I didn’t feel fully OK discussing my sexuality.”

First, Rose set out to get better at the technical side, learning software and synthesizers well enough to turn played parts into warped electronic sounds, as NPR’s Jewly Hight reported. By Rose’s account to Rolling Stone, the album was shelved at one point and almost didn’t come out, until another record company bought out the old deal; New West announced the signing in December 2017. Rose wrote and arranged every song and co-produced with Paul Butler of the English band the Bees, who had worked with Michael Kiwanuka and St. Paul & the Broken Bones. It was tracked at Panoramic Studio in Bolinas, California, and in the two producers’ own studios, then mixed by Andrew Sarlo at The Garden in Brooklyn. The credits split most of the playing between them: Rose on guitar, keys, bass, synth bass, samplers and drum programming, Butler on synths, percussion and programmed drums. The press release set the brief as “as much inspired by Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears as it was late-’70s punk”.

“Jeannie Becomes a Mom” is Rose’s own favourite on the record. It was written entirely on an OP-1, a small digital synthesizer, programmed drums included, and grew out of a friend’s accidental pregnancy before turning into Rose’s own anxiety about running out of time. Jeannie lives in the suburbs outside Topeka, Kansas, and the vocal slips into baby talk. “Getting to Me” goes the other way. Rose wrote it in an apartment in Vermont during a long lonely stretch, after too many dinners spent watching a waiter clear away the second place setting; in the end Rose just sat at the counter, where the other single people sit. Rob Moose plays the plucked violin and viola, and shares the string arrangement credit with Rose.

“Soul No. 5” went through five versions, hence the title, plus a nod to “Mambo No. 5”. The early ones felt too earnest to Rose, and Butler’s advice in the studio was to “just take the piss out of it”. The joke gets sharper on “Smile! AKA Schizodrift Jam 1 AKA Bikini Intro”, 49 seconds of pitch-shifted voices, mostly Rose’s and Butler’s plus robot voices he found online, all telling Rose to smile. It runs straight into “Bikini”, which Rose called a “riot grrl feminist surf punk anthem” about the standard women are held to in the entertainment industry. “Cry!” sets bass synths against Brett Lanier’s pedal steel. Rose pictured a demented prom queen and wrote it as an argument with themself about cracking under pressure.

Critics were close to unanimous, and Metacritic’s average sits at 83. Pitchfork’s Calum Marsh gave it 7.6 and argued that Rose’s dry humour is what carries songs about misogyny, self-doubt and death. Paste’s Ben Salmon gave it 7.9 and picked “Cry!” as probably the best song, and Under the Radar went to 8.5. The doubts were about range. Loud and Quiet found the shift “cartoonishly bubblegum” in places, naming “Money” and “Soul No. 5”, and Sputnikmusic’s reviewer granted it is not the most cohesive record. NPR later put “Jeannie Becomes a Mom” at No. 15 among its 100 best songs of 2018.

Those doubts point at the design. Rose told AXS the aim was to make the whole album seem like Rose, which is why it jumps between styles, and told Rolling Stone that satire is a way of translating anger or pain. Here the jokes carry the weight: the catchiest songs are about loneliness, harassment and dread, and the song NPR heard as candy-coated is about time passing Jeannie by. Not every genre exercise lands, but 11 songs in under 35 minutes leave no room for filler. Rose followed it with Superstar in 2020, and in October 2026 with Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, the first release on their own label, SUCK records.