Like her debut, Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s Alex G-produced new EP finds her struggling with abandoning the Baptist church she grew up in. The five songs are so intimate they feel like secrets.
Sarah Beth Tomberlin wrote hushed, trembling songs about leaving behind faith while working 45 hours a week at a Verizon store and living with her parents in rural Illinois; now, she’s been on Kimmel. She quarantined with Busy Phillips. She toured with the revered indie-rock singer-songwriter Alex G, then asked him to co-produce her new project, Projections, which she recorded in his Philadelphia apartment. It’s not quite fame that Tomberlin’s reached, but Projections arrives at a point where she has more exposure than before, when the stakes are higher. This EP feels like a gift: a package of intricate, mesmerizing tracks, so intimate they sound like secrets.
Like her debut At Weddings, the EP finds Tomberlin struggling with abandoning the Baptist church she grew up in. The most striking song from her past album showed her accepting that hurt was inevitable, that she wanted to stop fearing what she couldn’t control — “To be a woman is to be in pain,” she sang. Tomberlin is often a blunt writer, and Projections is very clear in its premise: she tries to reconcile queerness with her religious past, and to navigate relationships around a sense of impending loss. “It’s all sacrifice and violence/The history of love,” she coos on the opening track, “Hours.” “But remember when we stayed up/And took turns playing songs?” That mix of profundity — or attempted profundity — with the sweet, banal details of new love is woven throughout the project, and varies in its effectiveness. “When you go you take the sun/And all my flowers die,” she intones awkwardly on “Sin,” redeeming the melodrama with the cutting simplicity of the next line: “So I wait by the window and write some shit and hope that you reply.”
Projections gleams when it zooms in like that, unraveling Tomberlin’s internal monologue. She overthinks through much of these songs. Every rush of an instinct must be processed; every lurch towards love, examined. “The night you asked me to hold your keys/ I felt like you wanted me to leave,” she breathes at the start of “Floor.” She watches her lover sleep as the song continues, but can’t allow herself to enjoy the private comfort of the moment: “I felt the quiet/I tried to try it,” she sings, “But my mind was always running crazy loud.” She juxtaposes every passing tenderness with the religious condemnation she’s internalized. “I never felt ashamed in your embrace,” she sings on “Hours,” and you understand the negative space around that statement.
The production helps convey that sense that something sinister is looming, tangled in the background of every intimacy. Alex G’s hallmarks are here: the fuzz that swaddles each song, bandmate Molly Germer’s steady, loping violin. Each track is so richly textured that it blossoms beyond—or despite—Tomberlin’s stark writing. There is always a string plucked somewhere in the background, a bass wriggling under a chorus. Percussive flourishes help telegraph the triumph in the EP’s most upbeat moments—“I don’t mind sinning if it’s with you,” Tomberlin sings, and the ricochet of a drum pattern underscores the accomplishment in that statement. “Wasted” is a soundtrack for mutely punching a fist above your head when your phone glows with a text back from a crush.
There are only five songs on the EP, one of which is a cover of the lo-fi rock band Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Maybe because of that brevity, Projections offers fewer conclusions than at At Weddings. These tracks cut off just as Tomberlin’s decided she’ll try: to show a lover that she’s stronger now, to not require affirmations of affection. “I just wanna be clean,” she moans, six times in a row at the end of “Sin,” and we don’t learn whether she’s found that through her relationships, or if she’s rejected the yearning for purity altogether. But that’s the beauty in these songs, and the growth that gives them momentum — the shards of clarity that come just with accepting love, the power that comes with naming it.
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