Desire can be volatile, excruciating, wonderful, and cruel—but above all, it keeps us going. We want and want and want until we die, these small hopes urging us across the vast expanse of our lives. Caroline Polachek—pop auteur, emotional philosopher, hopeless romantic—makes a muse of this tangled, pervasive force on her virtuosic new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She knows too well that falling in love suffuses you with possibility, makes a boring world briefly beautiful. And so, as a nod to desire’s transformational power, her album’s cover displays her on all fours on the grimy subway, lunging forward with a ravenous look in her eyes. On one end of the car is the rat race; on the other end, sand—a mirage of paradise.
Polachek spent much of her career as one half of the indie-pop band Chairlift in the maddening, formative city of New York, and more recently has split her time between Los Angeles and London. In 2020, she decamped to the idylls of the Mediterranean—blaring ’70s and ’80s Italo-pop out of a beat-up station wagon with her boyfriend in Rome and staying at the base of Mount Etna in Sicily, marveling at the “faceless, tectonic, chaotic energy coming up from below.” Inspired by these excursions, the album takes us to breathtaking places, all palm trees and crystalline water, deep red sunsets and smoke-covered volcanoes. On the ecstatic “Welcome to My Island,” Polachek is Calypso greeting a shipwrecked Odysseus, waving us to her oasis. She channels a yearning as deep blue as the ocean and howls like a wolf to the moon.
While Polachek was constantly in transit on her 2019 album Pang—descending with a parachute, passing through a door to another door—Desire is grounded in a more real sense of place. Even on songs with few locational details, you can feel the climate: An elusive woman lives out an escapist fantasy on “Bunny Is a Rider,” not checking her email because she’s “AWOL on a Thursday.” Satellites can’t find her because she’s somewhere in the jungle: Hear the muggy, tropical bassline, the faint bird chirps, the static that resembles the rustle of fronds. “Crude Drawing of an Angel” is staged below the Earth’s surface amid dripping stalactites, with jagged breaths creeping up from behind. Polachek’s voice slices through the dank atmosphere like a blade: “Forsake me/Here on the ground/All or nothing,” she pleads, begging for mercy from a lover whom she knows will disappear.
Perhaps the “crude angel” is painter Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the “angel of history” who, in one famous account, looks with horror upon the cumulative wreckage of civilization, the damage wrought in the name of glory and beauty. Polachek is not just a swooning lover, but an aesthete and philosopher attuned to contemporary extremes, conceptualizing Desire during a period of grand instability. During the pandemic her father died of COVID-related complications, and she saw cruelty all around her as she contended with the cyclical nature of disease, the fragility of the supply chain, and the rancor of social media morality. “I started thinking about how to re-harmonize myself, and my music, with the reality that there is a destructive side to everything,” she said. On the flamenco-inspired “Sunset,” Polachek dramatizes the pressure of new love against the backdrop of a destitute society, a collapsed infrastructure of care: “So many stories we were told about a safety net/But when I look for it, it’s just a hand that’s holding mine.”