Girls: "Heartbreaker"

Girls’ 2009 debut is the kind of album that’s not easily forgotten. I’ve been listening to Album consistently for about a year, and I never tire of its simmering, delicate ’50s-prom melodies and shoegaze like a slow motion explosion. Frontman Christopher Owens crafts intensely personal songs tinged with loss and longing. He writes plainly and purely, with no interest in smokescreens: Girls music videos feature his real friends and his real bedroom, and he’s spoken openly about the girls (and boys) who inspire his songs. “Heartbreaker,” from the band’s upcoming Broken Dreams Club EP, continues this trend: it’s striking in its honesty and purity of spirit.

“Heartbreaker” fits in best alongside Girls’ standard four-chord pop (think “Laura”) rather than their more playful (“Big Bad Mean Motherfucker”) or seriously mind-blowing tracks (“Hellhole Ratrace”). Owens and bandmate JR White fuse a fuzzy, sun-dappled guitar shimmer with a melancholy, minor key sound, but never let things get too heavy. “When I look in the mirror now / I’m not as young as I used to be,” Owens begins, muttering in his fragile child’s voice about being alone and ugly and watching TV. While Album consisted almost entirely of songs about seeking change and the semblance of a normal life, “Heartbreaker” finds Owens looking back, pining for a love he had and lost. As in “Ghost Mouth,” his protagonist listlessly wanders the house, afraid to go out and run into the girl who broke his heart. At first listen, “Heartbreaker” seems to be a love song, but like most of Owens’s songs, at its core it’s an exploration of self-loathing and second-guessing. “When I said that I loved you, honey,” he sings, “I knew that you would break my heart.”

Their songs usually work this “it’s not you, it’s me” sentiment from every angle, but that’s kind of what makes Girls so emotionally resonant. Owens has a slight Pinkerton (1996)-era Rivers Cuomo quality to him, in that he’s willing to expose his dissatisfaction with himself and his situation to a surprisingly honest degree. (Cuomo, incidentally, also suffered an unorthodox hippie childhood.) Owens has less anger and more resolve, but Pinkerton and Album both ruminate on our human desire to reach out and make a connection. Sometimes, as in the case of “Heartbreaker,” we get burned. It may sound trite, but it makes for some pretty beautiful music.