✨ The Terrible 20s - An Advance Review ✨

“She’s pulled off the hard part: making the deeply personal really damn catchy…Ainsley Costello knows how to write a hook.”

About a year and a half ago, a publicist sent me EXLESS, an album from a young Nashville artist, and it caught me off guard, proof that somebody writing not for me can still get my attention. As I got more familiar with Ainsley Costello and her catalog, I found someone with an infectious personality, a sharp-eyed read on the music business that belies her years, and one hell of an energetic live show. Now she's back with her sophomore release, The Terrible 20s, and she's again pulled off the hard part: making the deeply personal really damn catchy, wrapping it in pop and power pop tunes bouncy enough that even this jaded listener's toes start tapping. There's no shortage of young artists mining their own lives for lyrics. The difference is that Ainsley Costello knows how to write a hook. 

What I love is that growing up, here, isn't only about romance. She writes about wanting to buy a house, friendships, hating her own body, the impossible expectations piled on young women, and refusing to spend her time helping boys become

men. Love and heartbreak are just two tiles in the vast mosaic of adulthood. By showing us those other tiles, too, what emerges is a portrait of a complex young woman working through it, feeling the tension between all of that and her ambitions as a songwriter, weighing every interaction with some boy against the time she needs for what she has in mind for her life. 

The title track will get stuck in your head, even for those of us whose 20s are a long way back in the rearview. "Anyone But You" could be a friendship anthem for besties everywhere, and "Poor Thing" and "Passion Project" are the other two I keep going back to.

If this is what The Terrible 20s sound like, I want to hear what she does with the rest of it.

Bijan Marashi, Host of Pop Rocks Radio