Crucial Track for April 16, 2025
"Splash" by Nell Smith
This track took a turn. I was listening to Nell Smith's full album for Crucial Tracks (the blog) and loved the idiosyncratic nature of her songs. She can certainly write catchy indie pop songs, but mid album things get kind of weird: noisy, chaotic, weird instrumentation... but still catchy as hell. One of these songs had to be my track for the day!
So I started researching to learn her story. Apple Music usually has a decent bio so I started there... and saw she did a Nick Cave cover album with The Flaming Lips at 14! I vaguely remember hearing about that, but when I expanded the More link to show the rest of the bio, I read that *Anxious* is a posthumous album and she died at 17 in a car accident. Wow, what a talent we lost way too early.